And honest Pocket was beginning to blush for it, when the other made a gesture more eloquent and far more foreign than his speech. “It’s none the worse for that,” said he. “So far we have much in common, for I always use plates myself. But what we put upon our plates, there’s the difference, eh?” “I should imagine so,” said Pocket, smiling. Dr. Baumgartner was smiling too, and still less coldly than before, but yet darkly to himself, and at the boy rather than with him. “You take portraits of your friends, perhaps?” “Yes; often.” “In the body, I presume?” Pocket looked nonplussed. “You only take them in the flesh?” “Of course.” “Exactly! I take the spirit,” said the doctor; “that’s the difference.” Pocket watched the now wonderfully genial countenance of Baumgartner follow the brutal features of the meerschaum Turk through a melting cloud of smoke. The boy had been taken aback. But his bewilderment was of briefer duration than might have been the case with a less ardent photographer; for he took a technical interest in his hobby, and read the photographic year-books, nearly as ravenously as _Wisden’s Almanacke_. “I see,” he said, lukewarmly. “You go in for psychic photography.” “Psychic,” said Baumgartner; for the public schoolboy, one regrets to report, had pronounced the word to rhyme with sly-chick. The doctor added, with more disdain: “And you don’t believe in it?” “I didn’t say so.” “But you looked and sounded it!” “I don’t set myself up as a believer or unbeliever,” said the boy, always at his ease on a subject that attracted him. “But I do say I don’t believe in the sort of thing I read somewhere last holidays. It was in a review of a book on that sort of photography. The chap seemed to have said you could get a negative of a spirit without exposing the plate at all; hide away your plate, never mind your lens, only conjure up your spirit and see what happens. I’ll swear nothing ever happened like that! There may be ghosts, you may see them, and so may the camera, but not without focusing and exposing like you’ve got to do with ordinary flesh and blood!” The youth had gone further and flown higher than he meant, under the stimulus of an encouragement impossible to have foreseen. And the doctor had come to his feet, waving eloquently with his pipe; his grey face beamed warmly; his eyes were lances tipped with fire. “Well said, my young fellow!” cried he. “I agree with every syllable you have spoken.” “It’s a question of photography, not of spiritualism,” concluded Pocket, rounding off his argument in high excitement. “I agree, I agree! All that is rubbish, pure moonshine; and you see it even at your age! But there’s much more in it than that; you must see the rest as well, since you see so far so clearly.” The boy blushed with pleasure, determined to see as far as anybody. “You admit there may be such things as ghosts, as you call them?” he was asked as by an equal. “Certainly, sir.”