"He
didn't know as he should be took to any dagarrier's, after all! Tide
and wind both serve f'r a fa'r sail home," said he, "and I'm a-goin'."

"Not till we've been to a tobacconist's," said I, "anyway."

I purchased a quantity of smoking tobacco. With this parcel peeping
enticingly from my pocket, and with persuasive argument that I could
never again leave the Basin without his likeness, as aid to Mrs.
Kobbe's tears, we at last seduced him up the stairs of the studio to
the long-anticipated ordeal.

Now if young Mrs. Kobbe had had the discretion to keep silence! But "I
wish, pa," said she, made bodeful by the agonized and even villanous
aspect of the captain's usually stoical features, "'t you could look
just as you did when major said he was goin' to take us up to dinner!"

"Good Lord! woman, how can I tell how I looked then? I didn't see
myself, did I?"

"You looked so--so happy!" moaned Mrs. Kobbe, "and your face was all
break--breaking out into a smile, and you didn't have that
suf--sufferin' kinder look 't you've got now."

"I think, myself, sir," said the bland photographer--"ah! let me
arrange your hair a little, just this side--or this?--which side?--ah!
so--that a little less severe expression--we all have our trials, I
know, but----"

"I hain't!" said the captain ferociously. "I hain't got a darn thing
t' worry me. 'F my woman wants me ter have to git a boat an' row out
for the 'Lizy Rodgers' on high tide, an' not git home till sun-up, I
don't care. What ye screwin' my head into--hey?"

"Merely a head-rest, sir; merely an assistance toward composing
the--ah--features."

"I can compose my feetur's without any darn nihilism machine back on
me," said the captain; which he straightway did in a manner that froze
the operator's veins.

"Has nothing pleasant occurred to you recently, sir. No--ah?"

"O Cap'n Kobbe," exclaimed his wife, with desperate fated mirth, "think
o' how you shot the buoy this mornin' 'stead of a coot!"

The photographer, observing Mrs. Kobbe's face rather than his victim's,
and seizing this as probably the opportune moment, transferred the
captain's features to his camera.

We waited for the result. After some time our artist approached us
with mincing steps and a hand thrust in his breast-pocket as if for
possible recourse to defence.

In the type before us, even the gloom and wrath of the captain's
countenance were lost sight of in the final skittish and disastrou