Summer Photographing.

I carried my camera with me to almost all the many places I visited this summer, and took about one hundred and fifty photographs altogether. At Newport I took an instantaneous photograph of a tennis game. I tried to include the server who delivered the ball with great speed by rather a peculiar motion. I set up my tripod in the midst of the usual crowd of admiring spectators, and pointed it with great care so as to include, as I thought, my "subject." But as is often the case, a little care is worse than none. I had arranged everything to include the server as the (of course) served from one court but I took the picture while she was serving from the other. On developing the plate, I found the striker out with both hands on his knees, ready for the ball which was to come from an invisible server. Such accidents are common. I once tried to take a horse and sulky, but got only the horse's nose. It is just like shooting at birds on the wing; the novice is most likely to shoot ahead and so either misses the bird altogether or hits it in the head and kills it at once.

A student that I once knew went down South last winter, and at one of the hotels where he was staying, wanted to change some plates from one box to another. This must be done in the dark, there was no closet in the hotel room and so the bright idea occurred to him of spreading out an extra blanket and a rubber water-proof on the bed, and then crawling beneath the bedclothes to shift his plates. The landlady whose suspicion had been roused by the strange actions and apparatus of the photographer, happened to come into the room during this operation, and seeing two legs sticking out of the bed where the head ought to be. seized a piece of rope and calling for help, tied the unlucky man securely to the bed by winding the rope around both. Ever after this there has been a doubt in the landlady's mind about the sanity of my friend, and in his, about the strength of her mind. But it is quite needless to say that he is now more careful in his choice of dark rooms.

I have been amusing myself the last few days by making transparencies with the prettiest of my negatives. They are very useful as Christmas presents, being cheap and very interesting, if given to people who know the places photographed.

CAMERA.