house. His recent experiences in photographing Mr. Cleveland at the White House and Major McKinley at Canton, have been equally convincing that if one wishes to make a real portrait it is wiser to study the subject where he is most at home. It is not only the habitual mask of a face which must be conquered. Many people suffer from what is called "camera fear." In front of the machine they become, in spite of themselves, rigid and lifeless. In taking photographs Mr. Cox aims to Cox believes that this peculiar feeling is make as many as six negatives. A combest conquered by taking the subject in his plete series of his pictures runs the gamut own home or place of work. There he of a man's soul from the moment of smilnaturally wears a lighter mask and falls more readily into characteristic attitudes. Many of Mr. Cox's happiest results have been obtained by studying his subjects in their own homes. Thus the fine portrait of Richardson was taken in the architect's ing ease to the one of anguish. Not that he always succeeds in completing the series; he rarely fails, however, to get several characteristic pictures. What could be more characteristic, fuller of sweetness and truth than his portrait of Whitman? He has given us in it what must remain the typical portrait of Whitman-a portrait which is the foundation of Johnson's great etching, which George Barnard, the sculptor, declares has been his inspiration, and at the sight of which Duse cried out, when it was shown to her, "But it is his soul! How can one photograph a soul?" It is not to be supposed that all of Cox's sitters yield themselves unresistingly to his unusual procedure. Trained to pose to a camera, many are inclined to resent the artist's effort to interest them and make them forget the object of their visit. There are others who insist that, unless a face is lighted in a certain way, the result cannot be satisfactory-slaves of a theory, they fail to see that this is a revolutionist regardless of conventions, whose only aim is to get the fine thing he sees. Another difficulty with which Mr. Cox struggles is the almost universal notion that a portrait should be something decorative. Many a woman who goes to him makes a really characteristic picture impossible by her elaborate preparations. Nothing could be more fatal to the Cox idea. Chiffons are as inappropriate in one of his portraits as trefoils on a Grecian façade. Where a woman dresses especially for her picture all that Cox can get is, as he says, her clothes.' Where the decorative is entirely eschewed, it follows that the subject must have individuality for the picture to be of value. Cox rejoices in the decided character, and shrinks with dismay from a neutral one; there is nothing for him to get hold of. The people who have sat to him have been a rare lot; in the past twenty years he has photographed Walt Whitman, Richardson, General Sherman, C. A. Dana, Melchers, Howells, Hunt, Beecher, E. E. Hale, Duse, and hosts of others. In most of the cases the portraits he has made will remain the standard ones of their several subjects. The Cox portrait, however, appeals pri marily to the discerning mind and the artist's eye. Ordinarily it clashes too hard with the conventional idea of a photograph. The unusual is to many the unmeaning. It is this fact that comes in frequently to depress and discourage the artist. Often he hesitates to seize with his camera what he sees in a face, because conscious that it will not be understood. He shrinks from putting before subjects something which means a great deal to him but will mean nothing to them. The real reward in his work lies in his ability to produce that which is an inspiration to those who, like himself, are seeking independently to do sincere, truthful work, rich in a value of its own. HEN the great wars of the Spanish Succession had been brought to an end by the Treaty of Utrecht, the vast number of privateers which had been fitted out by the contending parties found their occupation gone. Some took to the more peaceful but less lucrative ways of ordinary commerce, others were absorbed into the fishing fleets, and a few of the more reckless hoisted the Jolly Rodger at the mizzen and the bloody flag at the main, declaring a private war upon their own account against the whole human race. With mixed crews, recruited from every nation, they scoured the seas, disappearing occasionally to careen in some lonely inlet, or putting in for a debauch at some outlying port, where they dazzled the inhabitants by their lavishness and horrified them by their brutalities. On the Coromandel Coast, at Madagascar, in the African waters, and above all in the West Indian and American seas, the pirates were a constant menace. With an insolent luxury they would regulate their depredations by the comfort of the seasons, harrying New England in the summer and dropping south again to the tropical islands in the winter. They were the more to be dreaded because they had none of that discipline and restraint which made their predecessors, the Buccaneers, both formidable and respectable. These Ishmaels of the sea rendered an account to no man, and treated their prisoners according to the drunken whim of the mo ment. Flashes of grotesque generosity alternated with longer stretches of inconceivable ferocity, and the skipper who fell into their hands might find himself dismissed with his cargo, or might sit at his cabin table with his own nose and his lips served up with pepper and salt in front of him. It took a stout seaman in those days to ply his calling in the Caribbean Gulf. Such a man was Captain John Scarrow, of the ship "Morning Star," and yet he breathed a long sigh of relief when he heard the splash of the falling anchor and swung at his moorings within a hundred yards of the guns of the citadel of Basseterre. St. Kitts was his final port of call, and early next morning his bowsprit. would be pointed for Old England. He had had enough of those robber-haunted seas. Ever since he had left Maracaibo upon the Main, with his full lading of sugar and red pepper, he had winced at every topsail which glimmered over the violet edge of the tropical sea. He had coasted up the Windward Islands, touching here and there and assailed continually by stories of villainy and outrage. Captain Sharkey, of the 20-gun pirate barque "Happy Delivery,' had passed down the coast, and had littered it with gutted vessels and with murdered men. Dreadful anecdotes were current of his grim pleasantries and of his inflexible ferocity. From the Bahamas to the Main his coal-black barque, with the ambiguous name, had been freighted with death, and many things which are worse than death. Copyright, 1897, by A. Conan Doyle. So nervous was Captain Scarrow, with his new full-rigged ship and her full and valuable lading, that he struck out to the west as far as Bird's Island to be out of the usual track of commerce. And yet even in those solitary waters he had been unable to shake off sinister traces of Captain Sharkey. One morning they had passed a single skiff adrift upon the face of the ocean. Its only occupant was a delirious seaman, who yelled hoarsely as they hoisted him aboard, and showed a dried-up tongue like a black and wrinkled fungus at the back of his mouth. Water and nursing soon transformed him into the strongest and smartest sailor on the ship. He was from Marblehead, in New England, it seems, and was the sole survivor of a schooner which had been scuttled by the dreadful Sharkey. For a week Hiram Evanson, for that was his name, had been adrift beneath a tropical sun. Sharkey had ordered the mangled remains of his late captain to be thrown into the boat, "as provisions for the voyage," but the seaman had at once committed it to the deep, lest the temptation should be more than he could bear. He had lived upon his own huge frame until at the last moment the "Morning Star" had found him in that madness which is the precursor of such a death. It was no bad find for Captain Scarrow, for, with a shorthanded crew, such a seaman as this big New Englander was a prize worth having. He vowed that he was the only man whom Captain Sharkey had ever placed under an obligation. Now that they lay under the guns of Basseterre, all danger from the pirate was at an end, and yet the thought of him lay heavily upon the seaman's mind as he watched the agent's boat shooting out from the custom-house quay. "I'll lay you a wager, Morgan," said he to the first mate, that the agent will speak of Sharkey in the first hundred words that pass his lips." "Well, Captain, I'll have you a silver dollar, and chance it," said the rough old Bristol man beside him. The negro rowers shot the boat alongside, and the linen-clad steersman sprang up the ladder. "Welcome, Captain Scarrow," he cried. "Have you heard about Sharkey?" The captain grinned at the mate. "What devilry has he been up to now?" he asked. "Devilry! You've not heard, then! Why, we've got him safe under lock and key here at Basseterre. He was tried last Wednesday, and he is to be hanged tomorrow morning." Captain and mate gave a shout of joy, which an instant later was RECEPTION OF HIRAM EVANSON ABOARD THE "MORNING STAR," |