Pocket took observations from the edge of his chair. The room was full of walnut trivialities that looked aggressively obsolete in the sunshine that filled it and flooded a green little garden at the back of the house. Dr. Baumgartner had pulled up a blind and opened a window, and he stood looking out in thought while Pocket hurriedly completed his optical round. A set of walnut chairs were dreadfully upholstered in faded tapestry; but a deep, worn one looked comfortable enough, and a still more redeeming feature was the semi-grand piano. There were books, too, and in the far corner by the bow-window a glass door leading into a conservatory as minute as Pocket’s study at school, and filled with geraniums. On the walls hung a series of battle engravings, one representing a bloody advance over ridged fields in murderously close formation, others the storming of heights and villages. Baumgartner met his visitor’s eyes with the faint cold smile that scarcely softened the hoary harshness of his visage. “I was present at some of those engagements,” said he. “They were not worse than disarming a man who has just fired a revolver in his sleep!” He flung his cloak upon one of the walnut chairs, and Pocket heard the pistol inside it rattle against the back; but his attention was distracted before he had time to resent the forgotten fact of its forcible confiscation. Under his cloak the doctor had been carrying all this time, slung by a strap which the boy had noticed across his chest, a stereoscopic camera without a case. Pocket exclaimed upon it with the instructed interest of a keen photographer. “Do you take photographs?” asked Baumgartner, a reciprocal note in his unemotional voice. “Rather!” cried the schoolboy, with considerable enthusiasm. “It’s the only thing I have to do instead of playing games. But I haven’t got an instantaneous camera like that. I only wish I had!” And he looked with longing eyes at the substantial oblong of wood and black morocco, and duplicate lenses like a pair of spectacles, which the doctor had set between them on one of the fussy little walnut tables. CHAPTER V. THE GLASS EYE Dr. Baumgartner produced a seasoned meerschaum, carved in the likeness of a most ferocious face, and put a pinch of dark tobacco through the turban into the bowl. “You see,” said he, “I must have my smoke like you! I can’t do without it either, though what is your misfortune is my own fault. So you are also a photographer!” he added, as the fumes of a mixture containing latakia spiced the morning air. “I am only a beginner,” responded Pocket, “but a very keen one.” “You don’t merely press the button and let them do the rest?” suggested the doctor, smiling less coldly under the influence of his pipe. “Rather not! I develop, print, tone, and all the rest of it; that’s half the fun.” “Plates or films?” inquired Baumgartner, with an approving nod. “Only plates, I’m afraid; you see, the apparatus is an old one of my father’s.”