that you think pretty, as veinings in marble or
tortoiseshell, spots in surfaces of shells, etc., as tenderly as you
can, in the darknesses that correspond to their colors; and when you
find you can do this successfully, it is time to begin rounding.

EXERCISE VIII.

41. Go out into your garden, or into the road, and pick up the first
round or oval stone you can find, not very white, nor very dark; and the
smoother it is the better, only it must not _shine_. Draw your table
near the window, and put the stone, which I will suppose is about the
size of _a_ in Fig. 5 (it had better not be much larger), on a piece of
not very white paper, on the table in front of you. Sit so that the
light may come from your left, else the shadow of the pencil point
interferes with your sight of your work. You must not let the _sun_ fall
on the stone, but only ordinary light: therefore choose a window which
the sun does not come in at. If you can shut the shutters of the other
windows in the room it will be all the better; but this is not of much
consequence.

42. Now if you can draw that stone, you can draw anything; I mean,
anything that is drawable. Many things (sea foam, for instance) cannot
be drawn at all, only the idea of them more or less suggested; but if
you can draw the stone _rightly_, everything within reach of art is also
within yours.

For all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing
_Roundness_. If you can once do that, all the rest is easy and
straightforward; if you cannot do that, nothing else that you may be
able to do will be of any use. For Nature is all made up of roundnesses;
not the roundness of perfect globes, but of variously curved surfaces.
Boughs are rounded, leaves are rounded, stones are rounded, clouds are
rounded, cheeks are rounded, and curls are rounded: there is no more
flatness in the natural world than there is vacancy. The world itself is
round, and so is all that is in it, more or less, except human work,
which is often very flat indeed.

[Illustration: FIG. 5.]

Therefore, set yourself steadily to conquer that round stone, and you
have won the battle.

43. Look your stone antagonist boldly in the face. You will see that the
side of it next the window is lighter than most of the paper; that the
side of it farthest from the window is darker than the paper; and that
the light passes into the dark gradually, while a shadow is thrown to
the right on the paper itself by the st