oid as "flims," and was just now most
eloquently indignant that, although he had broken utterly with the
Northern Commercial Company and refused to trade with them at all, the
supply of "flims" he had received from the mail-order house were
labelled "N. C." "Them blamed monopolists has cornered the flims," he
exclaimed, and was hardly persuaded that the letters signified
"non-curling" and did not darkly hint at a conspiracy in restraint of
trade.

He produced and displayed a number of pieces of apparatus of a generally
useless kind which he had ordered on the strength of their much
advertising, and he observed sententiously, "We _armatures_ get badly
imposed upon." Here were patent gimcrack printing devices, although he
had scarce anything worth printing; all sorts of atrocious fancy borders
with which he sought in vain to embellish out-of-focus under-exposures;
orthochromatic filters and colour screens with which he was eliminating
undesirable rays, although the chief thing his negatives lacked was
light of any kind. His soiled and stained development trays were
scattered about a large table amidst dirty cups and saucers and plates
and dishes, while at the other end of the table, surmounting a pile of
thumbed and greasy magazines and newspapers, lay the monstrous
mail-order catalogue with pencilled indications of further apparatus to
be purchased.

But his zeal and enthusiasm and resolute riding of his hobby were very
attractive. If he ever gets out of his head the notion that success
depends upon apparatus he will doubtless become a photographer of sorts.
Enthusiasm of any kind other than mining and "mushing" enthusiasm is so
rare in this land that it is welcome even when it seems wasted. He had
recently discovered the wax match in his catalogue, and as a parting
gift he presented me with a box of "them there wax _vespers_ which beats
the sulphur match all to thunder."

[Sidenote: THE SULPHUR MATCH]

But they do not. Nothing in this country can take the place of the
old-fashioned sulphur match, long since banished from civilised
communities, and the sulphur match is the only match a man upon the
trail will employ. Manufactured from blocks of wood without complete
severance, so that the ends of the matches are still held together at
the bottom in one solid mass, it is easy to strip one off at need and
strike it upon the block. A block of a hundred such matches will take up
much less space than fifty of any other k