FOR some days after Grace's camera arrived there were many customers
and commercial travellers who had to wait for hours to see the one
person with whom they preferred to transact business in the store, for
a camera is procrastination's most formidable rival in the character
of a thief of time. Grace made "snap-shots" at almost everything, and
John Henry Bustpodder, the most enterprising of Philip's competitors,
took great satisfaction in disseminating the statement that he reckoned
the new store-keeper's wife was running to seed, for she'd been seen
chasing a whirlwind and trying to shoot it with a black box.
But the Somerton customers regarded the general subject from a
different standpoint, for Grace surprised some of them with pictures
taken, without their knowledge, of themselves in their wagons, or in
front of their houses, or on the way to church. They were not of high
quality; but as the best the natives had previously seen were some
dreadful tintypes perpetrated annually by a man who frequented county
fairs, they were doubly satisfactory, for she would not accept pay
for them. She surprised herself, also, sometimes beyond expression,
by some of her failures, which were quite as dreadful as anything she
had dreamed after almost stepping on snakes--people without heads, or
with hands larger than their bodies, or with other faces superimposed
upon their own. She also made the full quantity and variety of other
blunders peculiar to amateurs, and she stained her finger-tips so
deeply that Philip pretended to suspect her of the cigarette habit; but
she persisted until she succeeded in getting some pictures which she
was not ashamed to send to her aunt and to some of her acquaintances in
the city.
Caleb, who endeavored to master everything mechanical and technical
that came within his view, took so great interest in the camera, even
begging permission to see the developing process, that Philip one day
said to him:--
"Caleb, if your interest in that plaything continues, I shan't
be surprised if some day I hear you advance the theory that even
photography is a means of grace," and Caleb cheerily replied:--
"Like enough, for anythin's a means o' grace, if you know how to use it
right."
"Even snakes?" Grace asked, with a smile that was checked by a shudder.
"Of course. The principal use o' snakes, so far as I can see, is to
scare lots o' people almost to death, once in a while, an' a good scare
is the only way o' makin' some people see the error o' their ways."
"H'm!" said Philip. "That's rather rough on my wife, eh?"
"Oh, no," said Caleb. "Some folks--mentionin' no names, an' hopin'
no offence'll be took, as I once read somewhere--some folks are so
all-fired nice, an' good, an' lucky, an' pretty much everythin' else
that's right, that I do believe they need to be scared 'most to death
once in a while, just to remind 'em how much they've got to be thankful
for, an' how sweet it is to live."