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One drenching afternoon he talked tennis to me for three hours on end, referring to Renshaw, so far as I kept count, four thousand nine hundred and thirteen times. After tea he drew his chair to the window beside me, and commenced–

“Have you ever noticed how Renshaw–“

I said–

“Suppose someone took a gun–someone who could aim very straight–and went out and shot Renshaw till he was quite dead, would you tennis players drop him and talk about somebody else?”

“Oh, but who would shoot Renshaw?” he said indignantly.

“Never mind,” I said, “supposing someone did?”

“Well, then, there would be his brother,” he replied.

I had forgotten that.

“Well, we won’t argue about how many of them there are,” I said. “Suppose someone killed the lot, should we hear less of Renshaw?”

“Never,” he replied emphatically. “Renshaw will always be a name wherever tennis is spoken of.”

I dread to think what the result might have been had his answer been other than it was.

The next year he dropped tennis completely and became an ardent amateur photographer, whereupon all his friends implored him to return to tennis, and sought to interest him in talk about services and returns and volleys, and in anecdotes concerning Renshaw. But he would not heed them.

Whatever he saw, wherever he went, he took. He took his friends, and made them his enemies. He took babies, and brought despair to fond mothers’ hearts. He took young wives, and cast a shadow on the home. Once there was a young man who loved not wisely, so his friends thought, but the more they talked against her the more he clung to her. Then a happy idea occurred to the father. He got Begglely to photograph her in seven different positions.

When her lover saw the first, he said–

“What an awful looking thing! Who did it?”

When Begglely showed him the second, he said–

“But, my dear fellow, it’s not a bit like her. You’ve made her look an ugly old woman.”

At the third he said–

“Whatever have you done to her feet? They can’t be that size, you know. It isn’t in nature!”

At the fourth he exclaimed–

“But, heavens, man! Look at the shape you’ve made her. Where on earth did you get the idea from?”

At the first glimpse of the fifth he staggered.

“Great Scott!” he cried with a shudder, “what a ghastly expression you’ve got into it! It isn’t human!”

Begglely was growing offended, but the father, who was standing by, came to his defence.

“It’s nothing to do with Begglely,” exclaimed the old gentleman suavely. “It can’t be his fault. What is a photographer? Simply an instrument in the hands of science. He arranges his apparatus, and whatever is in front of it comes into it.”

“No,” continued the old gentleman, laying a constrained hand upon Begglely, who was about to resume the exhibition, “don’t–don’t show him the other two.”

I was sorry for the poor girl, for I believe she really cared for the youngster; and as for her looks, they were quite up to the average. But some evil sprite seemed to have got into Begglely’s camera. It seized upon defects with the unerring instinct of a born critic, and dilated upon them to the obscuration of all virtues. A man with a pimple became a pimple with a man as background. People with strongly marked features became merely adjuncts to their own noses. One man in the neighbourhood had, undetected, worn a wig for fourteen years. Begglely’s camera discovered the fraud in an instant, and so completely exposed it that the man’s friends wondered afterwards how the fact ever could have escaped them. The thing seemed to take a pleasure in showing humanity at its very worst. Babies usually came out with an expression of low cunning. Most young girls had to take their choice of appearing either as simpering idiots or embryo vixens. To mild old ladies it generally gave a look of aggressive cynicism. Our vicar, as excellent an old gentleman as ever breathed, Begglely presented to us as a beetle-browed savage of a peculiarly low type of intellect; while upon the leading solicitor of the town he bestowed an expression of such thinly-veiled hypocrisy that few who saw the photograph cared ever again to trust him with their affairs.