I had a birthday last week. When I woke up in the morning I found right by the side of my bed a mahogany box, with a round hole on one side of it and a ground-glass door on the other side. I thought it was a new kind of rat-trap; and so I got out of bed and got a piece of cheese, and set the trap in the garret, which is about half full of rats. But it turned out that the box wasn\'t a rat-trap. Mr. Travers gave it to me, and when he came to dinner he explained that it was a camera for taking photographs, and that it would improve my mind tremendously if I would learn to use it.

I soon found out that there isn\'t anything much better than a camera, except, of course, a big dog, which I can\'t have, because mother says a dog tracks dirt all over the house, and father says a dog is dangerous, and Sue says a dog jumps all over you and tears your dresses a great good-for-nothing ugly beast. It\'s very hard to be kept apart from dogs; but our parents always know what is best for us, though we may not see it at the time; and I don\'t believe[Pg 216] father really knows how it feels when your trousers are thin and you haven\'t any boots on, so it stings your legs every time.

But I was going to write about the camera. You take photographs with the camera—people and things. There\'s a lens on one end of it, and when you point it at anything, you see a picture of it upside down on the little glass door at the back of the camera. Then you put a dry plate, which is a piece of glass with chemicals on it, in the camera, and then you take it out and put it in some more chemicals, the right name of which is a developer, and then you see a picture on the dry plate, only it is right side up, and not like the one on the ground-glass door.

It\'s the best fun in the world taking pictures; and I can\'t see that it improves your mind a bit—at least not enough to worry you. You have to practise a great deal before you can take a picture, and everybody who knows anything about it tells you to do something different. There are five men in our town who take photographs, and each one tells me to use a different kind of dry plate and a different kind of developer, and that all the other men may mean well, and they hope they do, but people ought not to tell a boy to use bad plates and poor developers; and don\'t you pay any attention to them, Jimmy, but do as I tell you.

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I\'ve got so now that I make beautiful pictures. I took a photograph of Sue the other day, and another of old Deacon Brewster, and you can tell which is which just as easy as anything, if you look at them in the right way, and remember that Deacon Brewster, being a man, is smoking a pipe, and that, of course, a picture of Su............