A photographic intimacy between two persons who never saw each other’s faces (that is, in Nature’s original positive, the principal use of which, after all, is to furnish negatives from which portraits may be taken) is a new form of friendship.  After an introduction by means of a few views of scenery or other impersonal objects, with a letter or two of explanation, the artist sends his own presentment, not in the stiff shape of a purchased carte de visite, but as seen in his own study or parlor, surrounded by the domestic accidents which so add to the individuality of the student or the artist.  You see him at his desk or table with his books and stereoscopes round him; you notice the lamp by which he reads,—­the objects lying about; you guess his condition, whether married or single; you divine his tastes, apart from that which he has in common with yourself.  By-and-by, as he warms towards you, he sends you the picture of what lies next to his heart,—­a lovely boy, for instance, such as laughs upon us in the delicious portrait on which we are now looking, or an old homestead, fragrant with all the roses of his dead summers, caught in one of Nature’s loving moments, with the sunshine gilding it like the light of his own memory.  And so these shadows have made him with his outer and his inner life a reality for you; and but for his voice, which you have never heard, you know him better than hundreds who call him by name, as they meet him year after year, and reckon him among their familiar acquaintances.

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To all these friends of ours, those whom we have named, and not less those whom we have silently remembered, we send our grateful acknowledgments.  They have never allowed the interest we have long taken in the miraculous art of photography to slacken.  Though not one of them may learn anything from this simple account we have given, they will perhaps allow that it has a certain value for less instructed readers, in consequence of its numerous and rich omissions of much which, however valuable, is not at first indispensable.

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THE WRAITH OF ODIN.

    The guests were loud, the ale was strong,
    King Olaf feasted late and long;
    The hoary Scalds together sang;
    O’erhead the smoky rafters rang. 
      Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

    The door swung wide, with creak and din;
    A blast of cold night-air came in,
    And on the threshold shivering stood
    An aged man, with cloak and hood. 
      Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

    The King exclaimed, “O graybeard pale,
    Come warm thee with this cup of ale.” 
    The foaming draught the old man quaffed,
    The noisy guests looked on and laughed. 
      Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.

    Then spake the King:  “Be not afraid;
    Sit here by me.”  The guest obeyed,
    And, seated at the table, told
    Tales of the sea, and Sagas old. 
      Dead rides Sir Morten of Fogelsang.