[TO BE CONTINUED.]
[ How My Camera Caught a Bank Robber.]
BY ELTON J. BUCKLEY.
Lester Drake’s detective camera first created the idea of photography in my mind. Before that, I hadn’t the slightest inclination toward the art whatever, but when Lester purchased his neat little leather-covered box, and went around merely pressing a button, and getting dozens of pictures by no other means, I immediately decided that I, too, must have a camera.
Lester’s was not an expensive one. His father had found it in one of the photographic establishments in Philadelphia, and being of a slightly scientific turn of mind himself, had purchased it and brought it home to Lester. The latter fitted up a corner of the cellar as a dark-room, and straightway launched himself as an amateur photographer.
Lester’s first attempts, revealed by the chemical development, were surprisingly good, and inspired a strong feeling of envy in the breasts of those of his comrades whose fathers were blind to the oft-repeated advantages and delights of amateur picture-taking. Even more exasperating, he straightway became the idol of all the girls at school, whose zeal in posing for him was only equaled by the grotesqueness of some of their postures.
I brooded long and deep over this unpleasant condition of affairs, and finally arrived at the conclusion that I would have a camera like Lester at any cost.
Lester was kind enough to initiate me into the mysteries of his dark-room, and to allow me to examine the interior of his camera