1.

This beautiful and graceful art may be acquired by every girl and boy in
the land who will take the necessary steps. And they are pleasant steps.

A pretty drawing-book, a nicely cut No. 2 Faber's drawing pencil, a
piece of _black_ India rubber, some pieces of tissue-paper to cover the
drawings, unless the drawing-book is furnished with tissue-paper. These
are the implements required. In this pencil drawing which I now
recommend there are no lines, straight and slanting, repeated to utter
weariness. This is _object_ drawing, and drawing from _nature_ also, and
the _objects_ are inexhaustible, being the _leaves_ which nature gives
to every plant and tree.

Drawings of leaves are beautiful when well done. The writer knew a young
girl of twelve or thirteen years who began with drawing simple, easy
leaves, and went on to more difficult ones season after season. Her
drawing-books were charming; and not this alone, for she acquired a fund
of pleasant knowledge, which loses none of its delight as time goes on.
She began with leaves, picked from the house plants which her mother
cultivated.

As the spring came on, she sought the _wild_ leaves in the woods. No one
who has not tried it can judge of the interest felt in the beauty and
wonderful variety in the growth and shapes of leaves. They seem endless;
and when to these are added the leaves of forest trees, the enchanting
maples, beeches, birches, and hosts of others, it may be imagined that
young fingers may find ample employment in portraying these, to say
nothing of the wild flowers which come on in the New England woods--the
early anemones, hepatica, bloodroot, and all the flowery train--as the
season advances.

This young girl learned to draw with great accuracy, and to this day
(for it is years since she began) her ready pencil can sketch any object
with ease and skill, the beginning of which was the effort to draw a
leaf of smilax.

I have a few simple outlines of leaves ready, but will reserve them for
another time.

[Begun in No. 17 of HARPER'S YOUNG PEOPLE, February 24.]

BIDDY O'DOLAN.

BY MRS. ZADEL B. GUSTAFSON.

CHAPTER III.

Any one who had seen Biddy O'Dolan in the old hard days, when she was
dirty and ragged and wretched and rude, and lived in the street, and
slept in a cellar, would hardly have known her if he had seen her three
weeks after she came to live with the Kennedys.

Biddy was not pretty, but she had a clear skin--now t