will spring along after the point of the needle,
so dazzling in contrast to the extreme dark of the matt that it looks as
if the plate had been cut in two, while the matt beside it becomes
pitch-black by contrast. Well, you go on, and by putting more strokes,
and reducing the surrounding darkness generally, you get the drawing to
look grey--but you get it to look like a grey _pen-drawing_ or
_etching_, not like a painting at all. We will suppose that this seems
to you no disadvantage (though I must say, at once, that I think it a
very great one); but now you come to the deep shadows; and these, I need
hardly say, cut themselves out, more than ever, like dark patches or
blots, in the manner already spoken of. You try pricking it with the
brush I have described for that operation, and it will not do it; then
you resort to the needle itself, and you are startled at the little,
hard, glittering specks that come jumping out of the black shadow at
each touch. You get a finer needle, and then you sharpen even that on
the hone; and perhaps then, by pricking gingerly round the edges of the
shadows, you may get the drawing and modelling to melt together fairly
well. But beware! for if there is one dot of light too many, the
expression of the head goes to the winds. Let us say that such a thing
occurs; you have pricked one pinhole too many round the corner of the
mouth.

What can you do?

You take your tracing-brush and try to mend it with a touch of pigment;
and so on, and so on; till you timidly say (feeling as if you had been
walking among egg-shells for the last hour), "Well, I _think_ it will
_do_, and I daren't touch it any more." And supposing by these means you
get a head that looks really what you wanted; the work is all what
glass-painters call "rotten"; liable to flake off at the least touch;
isolated bits of thick crust, cut sheer out from each other, with clear
glass between.

In short, the thing is a niggling and botching sort of process to my
mind, and I hope that the above description is sufficiently life-like to
show that I have really given it a good trial myself--with, as a result,
the conclusion certainly strongly borne home to me, that the delight of
having one's work unchanged by the fire is too dearly purchased at the
cost of it.

_How to get the greatest degree of Strength into your Painting without
Danger._--Short of using a needle then, and a matt that will only yield
to that instrument, I would advi