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might fall on my face. I knew it was only a hole in the plaster, but every time I opened my eyes, there was the sinister black thing and I even began to imagine I saw it move. At last I screwed up enough courage to settle the question once and for all by touching it. I put up my ringer. It was a black beetle; and it did fall on my face.
My mother's great pride — and my despair — was my long golden hair which she insisted in doing up into long curls all round my head and one prodigious sausagey one right across the top from front to back. Then she put me into a black velvet frock with white lace cuffs and trimmings and sent me off to a party. There I gained notoriety by bowing down so low that my careful coiffure fell over the top of my head and touched the floor in front. This anecdote would have no value except for the fact that it was at this party that I fell in love with a girl in a pink-and-white muslin frock. A man's first love affair inevitably sets its mark upon him.
In St. Paul's Crescent, further up where it is a crescent, there lived a man whose name was Mr. Belton. He had a peculiar trade. He made and sold sheets of sensitised albumenised paper such as photographers used to print their cartes-de-visite and cabinet portraits upon. I could buy these sheets for ninepence each — not often, for ninepence was a lot of money. Then, with old negatives begged from dad, and a cheap printing-frame, I could produce veritable photographs.
So there I was, at say four years old, equipped with a tiny but basic knowledge of electricity and photography, a film-producer in embryo, and with a forgotten love affair to build up the heart interest.
But though my father was without doubt the great vital spirit; the mainspring of my future career — the setting, the background, the atmosphere, were all provided by the Polytechnic. He and that, were the two grand factors which prepared me for my future life — and then blind chance tipped me into it.
The Royal Polytechnic Institution, as it was called, was a building in Upper Regent Street, in London's West End. Upon that site the present Polytechnic was later built. The old Toly' was a wondrous place of delight to the small boys, and even to some of the small girls, of Queen Victoria's days. It was opened about the time she came to the throne but it languished and died several years before her reign came to an end.
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