the card-portrait. The last is the cheapest, the most portable, requires
no machine to look at it with, can be seen by several persons at the same
time,--in short, has all the popular elements. Many care little for the
wonders of the world brought before their eyes by the stereoscope; all
love to see the faces of their friends. Jonathan does not think a great
deal of the Venus of Milo, but falls into raptures over a card-portrait of
his Jerusha. So far from finding fault with him, we rejoice rather that
his affections and those of average mortality are better developed than
their taste; and lost as we sometimes are in contemplation of the shadowy
masks of ugliness which hang in the frames of the photographers, as the
skins of beasts are stretched upon tanners' fences, we still feel
grateful, when we remember the days of itinerant portrait-painters, that
the indignities of Nature are no longer intensified by the outrages of
Art.

The sitters who throng the photographer's establishment are a curious
study. They are of all ages, from the babe in arms to the old wrinkled
patriarchs and dames whose smiles have as many furrows as an ancient elm
has rings that count its summers. The sun is a Rembrandt in his way, and
loves to track all the lines in these old splintered faces. A photograph
of one of them is like one of those fossilized sea-beaches where the
raindrops have left their marks, and the shellfish the grooves in which
they crawled, and the wading birds the divergent lines of their
foot-prints,--tears, cares, griefs, once vanishing as impressions from the
sand, now fixed as the vestiges in the sand-stone.

Attitudes, dresses, features, hands, feet, betray the social grade of the
candidates for portraiture. The picture tells no lie about them. There is
no use in their putting on airs; the make-believe gentleman and lady
cannot look like the genuine article. Mediocrity shows itself for what it