covering glasses on you cannot trace them readily direct on
to your ground glasses.

This difficulty is overcome by using tracing paper, making the lines
with a fine crow-quill and ink. Then you can easily trace from these
copies through the ground glass. We also made some very good sets of
shadow pictures by cutting out suitable sketches in paper from the comic
and other illustrated journals, and mounting them between two sheets of
glass. These answered admirably, and when carefully cut out, no one
would believe, when thrown on the sheet, that they had not been painted.

We also made some sets of tracings on plain glass, of sketches in black
and white. Of course ink would not do, as a fine line could not be drawn
with it, and it was too transparent, but we found that, by using black
water color, in which a drop or two of thin gum had been mixed, it was
quite easy to draw upon plain glass with a fine pen, and then the solid
parts could be filled in with a sable brush.

Comic sets copied from the illustrated papers were very easily made, and
came out exceedingly well on the sheet and afforded great amusement.
This system, and the cutting out in paper, is very simple, and of course
takes much less time than the colored and varnished drawings on
roughened glass.

THE AKHOOND OF SWAT.

By J. H. S.

A number of years ago there came over the cable an announcement that the
Akhoond of Swat had died, and immediately there was an outburst of
merriment in the newspapers. No one could tell who or what he was, many
believed him to be a myth, and for a long time the Akhoond was a
standing joke among paragraph writers all over the world.

But the Akhoond was a real personage and no joke, and it is only
recently that we have found out what a really great man he was.

Swat itself is a considerable province of Afghanistan, bordering on
India, and just southwest of the Pamirs. The Akhoond was not, however,
its civil ruler. At any rate, he was not nominally so. The title Akhoond
merely means "teacher," and he was, primarily, a religious teacher and
nothing more.

He lived in the town of Saidu, and he reached manhood and began to teach
the people more than half a century ago, when Dost Mohammed was Ameer of
Cabul.

An intense fanatic and a mystic, he exerted a marvelous sway over the
people of Swat, who like all the Afghan tribes, are nervous,
imaginative, and given to mysticism. So he became not only their
spiritual pr