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fear I would get my picture taken again, my wife rushed out exclaiming, "Oh, joy! Oh, joy! John, I have developed two pictures!"
[Illustration: "Oh, joy! John, I have developed two pictures"]
I wish you could have seen the expression on Peaches' face.
In order to develop the films a picturesque assortment of drugs and chemicals have to be used.
Well, my wife had used them.
A silent little stream of wood alcohol was trickling down over her left ear into her Psyche knot, and on the end of her nose about six grains of bichloride of potash was sending out signals of distress to some spirits of turpentine which was burning on the top of her right eyebrow.
Something dark and lingering like iodine had given her chin the double cross and her apron looked like the remnants of a porous plaster.
Her right hand had red, white, green, purple and magenta marks all over it, and her left hand looked like the Fourth of July.
"John!" she yelled; "here it is! My goodness, I am so excited! See what a fine picture of you I took!"
She handed me the picture, but all I could see was a wood-shed with the door wide open.
"A good picture of the woodshed," I said; "but whose woodshed is it?"
"A wood-shed!" exclaimed my wife; "why, that is your face, John. And where you think the door is open is only your mouth!"
I looked crestfallen and then I looked at the picture again, but my better nature asserted itself and I made no attempt to strike this defenceless woman.
Then she handed me another picture and said, "John, here is one I took of you and little Peaches!"
Little Peaches is the name of our baby.
We call her Little Peaches because that's what she is.
I looked at the picture and then I said to big Peaches, "All I can see is Theodore, our colored gardener, walking across lots with a sack of flour on his back!"
"John, you are so stupid," said my wife. "How can you expect to see what it is when you are holding the picture upside down?"
I turned the picture around, and then I was quite agreeably surprised.
"It's immense!" I shouted. "It's the real thing, all right! Why this is aces! I suppose it is called 'Moonlight On Lake Champlain?' Did this one come with the camera or did you draw it from memory?"
"The idea of such a thing," my wife snapped; "can't you see that you're holding the picture the wrong way. Turn it around and you will see yourself and Little Peaches!"
I gave the thing another turn. "Gee whiz!" I said, "now I have it! Oh, the limit! You wished to surprise me with a picture of the sunset at Governor's Island. How lovely it is. See, over here in this corner there's a bunch of soldiers listening to what's cooking for supper, and over here is the smoke from the gun that sets the sun--I like it!"
Then my wife grabbed the picture out of my hands and burst into speech.
When the exercises were over I inquired casually, "Where, my dear, where are the other 21,219 pictures you snapped to-day?"
"Only these two came out good because, don't you see, I'm an amateur yet," was her come back.
Then she looked lovingly at the result of her days work and began to peel some bicarbonate of magnesia off her knuckles with the nut cracker.
"Only two out of 21,219--I think you ought to call it a long shot instead of a snap shot," I whispered, after I had dodged behind a tree on the lawn.
She went in the house without saying a word and I took out my pocketbook and looked at it wistfully.

JOHN HENRY ON THE GRIP
Say, did you ever spar a few hot rounds with a real attack of grip?
When it comes right down to a case of being a Bad Boy the grip has every other disease slapped to a sit-down.
I had the grip some weeks ago and ever since my system has felt like eight cents worth of cheese.
The medicine sharps tell us that the grip is caused by a little germ which emigrated to this country originally from Russia.
If that's the case I'm glad the Japs put the boots to the Czar. I wish they would go after him again and kick his crown off.
I'll bet even money that the father of the first grip germ must have been a bombshell and his mother was some relation to one of Kuropatkin's retreats.
It's dollars to pretzels that the grip germ is the busiest idea that was ever chased by a doctor.
Nobody knows just how or when the grip germs break into the system, but once they get a foothold in the epiglottis nothing can remove them except inward applications of dynamite.
The grip germ hates the idea of race