SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY.

IT must have been nearly three years ago, as nearly as we can remember, just about the time Monfort and Hill got to photographing ghosts, that a tall, pale man, with piercing black eyes and long hair, came to Burlington and opened a photograph gallery. He was a spirit photographer, and when his sitters received their pictures, for which they were expected to pay very roundly, lo, the spirit faces of dear ones who had gone before clustered around the face of the party whose photograph had been taken from life. There were plenty of people in the learned city of Burlington who were as fond of believing in supernatural things as are the outside barbarians. So, credulous men and women thronged to the spirit artist’s studio, the spirits came up to be photographed around their mortal friends by squads and platoons, and worldly dross, in the shape of a fluctuating and irredeemable currency, poured into the artist’s coffers, and he was happy. Among others who went to his studio, was a sad-eyed young man who is a genius. He never used to get home till two o’clock in the morning, because he was down in his office, he told the folks, burning the midnight oil, and committing the yearnings of a restless and ambitious genius to paper. He was supposed to be writing a book of poems, and, consequently, the fair ones who were privileged to enter the circle of his dreamy acquaintance, doted on him. When he went to have his photograph taken, the dearest girl in the world, the one who tells him what nice hands he has, and who rubs his head when his long hours of lonely study make it ache all the next day, accompanied him. He told her on the way down that he expected when his counterfeit presented itself on the albumenized card, the spirit faces of Byron, and Hood, and Macaulay, and Shakespeare, and Tom Moore, and Shelley would rise and cluster around him. She gasped hysterically, and, looking proudly at him, said she believed they would too, and wouldn’t it be nice? But he only sighed gloomily, as genius always sighs, and they entered the studio.

While the young man was posing himself the Professor told him that those who were nearest and dearest to him in his lonely hours would gather around him and kiss the clustering curls on his marble brow, and that no earthly power could keep them out of the camera. The young lady reiterated her opinion in regard to the “niceness” of such an arrangement, the young man put on a look of genius and gazed into the camera with the air of a man who is wondering where he can borrow three dollars; the artist dived under the cloth and in due time he stepped to the front with the picture and exhibited it to the poet and the adoring girl.

Spirits?

One or two of them. Right in the center was the young poet, gazing dreamily out into vacancy. And the spirits who cheered him in his lonely hours of study, and assisted him in the conflagration of the midnight oil, gathered around him, and never stirred or faded, not even when the poet ejaculated, “Oh lying horrors!” nor yet when the young girl shrieked and fell fainting with her hair caught in that forked thing the artist stands behind the subject to hold his head steady. For on the right of the poet there stood a spirit with a long slim neck whose name appeared to be “Whisky Cocktail,” and on the left there was a short, squatty spirit who was announced as just plain “Gin,” and then, clustering all around the young poet’s head, like an aureola, were “Straights,” whatever they are, “Grasshopper Punch,” “Log Cabin Cocktail,” “Old Tamarack,” “Eye Openers,” “Appetizers,” “Night Caps,” “Can’t Quits,” “Corpse Revivers,” “Coffin Nails,” “Indian Cocktails,” “Mountain Dew,” “Benzine,” “The New Drink,” “Fly Poison,” “What Killed Dad,” “The Same,” “Fast Freight,” “Bran’an Wa’r,” “Sherri’neg,” “Sudden Death,” “Crusade Drops,” “Commissary No. 3,” “Old Crow,” “Tangleleg,” “Forty Rod,” “Grim Death,” “Jimson Juice,” “Chain Lightning,” “Twelfth Resolution,” “That’s on Me,” “Temperance Tract,” “Quinine,” and several other spirits who were too far in the back ground to show their cards very distinctly.

The young man didn’t take another sitting, and he has since spent more time trying to convince “her” that this spirit photography is the greatest humbug that ever deluded a credulous people, than he ever spent with the spirits who share his lonely hours of midnight toil.