ext
visit there is clamorous demand for "picter, picter." A famous French
physician said that his dread of the world to come lay in his
expectation that the souls he met would reproach him for not having
cured a certain obstinate malady that he had much repute in dealing
with; so the travelling amateur in photography sometimes feels his
conscience heavy under a load of promised pictures that he has forgotten
or has been unable to make. He feels that his native friends whom he
shall meet in the world to come will assuredly greet him with "where's
my picture?" The burden increases all the time, and the Indian never
forgets. It avails nothing even to explain that the exposure was a
failure. A picture was promised; no picture has been given; that is as
far as the native gets. And the making of extra prints, in the cases
where it is possible to make them, is itself quite a tax upon time and
material.

Just as it is true that to be well informed on any subject a man must
read a great deal and be content not to have use for a great deal that
he reads, so to secure good photographs of spots and scenes of note as
he travels, he must make many negatives and be content to destroy many.
The records of a second visit in better weather or at a more favourable
season will supersede an earlier; typical groups more casual ones. The
standard that he exacts of himself rises and work he was content with
contents him no more. Sometimes one is tempted to think that the main
difference between an unsuccessful and a successful amateur photographer
is that the former hoards all his negatives while the latter
relentlessly burns those which do not come up to the mark--if not at
once, yet assuredly by and by. So the surprise that one feels at many of
the illustrations in modern books of arctic travel is not that the
travellers made such poor photographs but that they kept them and used
them; for there can be no question that poor photographs are worse than
none at all.

CHAPTER XIII

THE NORTHERN LIGHTS

THE Northern Lights are a very common phenomenon of interior Alaska,
much more common than in the very high latitudes around the North Pole,
for it has been pretty well determined that there is an auroral pole,
just as there is a magnetic pole and a pole of cold, none of which
coincides with the geographical Pole itself. All the arctic explorers
seem agreed that north of the 80th parallel these appearances are less
in frequency and b