kly 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. "Yo