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 is worth, no matter what temporary name it may have acquired.  Ill-temper cannot hide itself under the simper of assumed amiability.  The querulousness of incompetent complaining natures confesses itself almost as much as in the tones of the voice.  The anxiety which strives to smooth its forehead cannot get rid of the telltale furrow.  The weakness which belongs to the infirm of purpose and vacuous of thought is hardly to be disguised, even though the moustache is allowed to hide the centre of expression.

All parts of a face doubtless have their fixed relations to each other and to the character of the person to whom the face belongs.  But there is one feature, and especially one part of that feature, which more than any other facial sign reveals the nature of the individual.  The feature is the mouth, and the portion of it referred to is the corner.  A circle of half an inch radius, having its centre at the junction of the two lips will include the chief focus of expression.