ut, by the gleaming of the white paper between the black
lines; and if you cannot gradate well with pure black lines, you will
never gradate well with pale ones. By looking at any common woodcuts, in
the cheap publications of the day, you may see how gradation is given to
the sky by leaving the lines farther and farther apart; but you must
make your lines as _fine_ as you can, as well as far apart, towards the
light; and do not try to make them long or straight, but let them cross
irregularly in any direction easy to your hand, depending on nothing but
their gradation for your effect. On this point of direction of lines,
however, I shall have to tell you more presently; in the meantime, do
not trouble yourself about it.

EXERCISE IV.

As soon as you find you can gradate tolerably with the pen, take an H.
or HH. pencil, using its point to produce shade, from the darkest
possible to the palest, in exactly the same manner as the pen,
lightening, however, now with India-rubber instead of the penknife. You
will find that all _pale_ tints of shade are thus easily producible with
great precision and tenderness, but that you cannot get the same dark
power as with the pen and ink, and that the surface of the shade is apt
to become glossy and metallic, or dirty-looking, or sandy. Persevere,
however, in trying to bring it to evenness with the fine point, removing
any single speck or line that may be too black, with the _point_ of the
knife: you must not scratch the whole with the knife as you do the ink.
If you find the texture very speckled-looking, lighten it all over with
India-rubber, and recover it again with sharp, and excessively fine
touches of the pencil point, bringing the parts that are too pale to
perfect evenness with the darker spots.

You cannot use the point too delicately or cunningly in doing this; work
with it as if you were drawing the down on a butterfly's wing.

At this stage of your progress, if not before, you may be assured that
some clever friend will come in, and hold up his hands in mocking
amazement, and ask you who could set you to that "niggling;" and if you
persevere in it, you will have to sustain considerable persecution from
your artistical acquaintances generally, who will tell you that all good
drawing depends on "boldness." But never mind them. You do not hear them
tell a child, beginning music, to lay its little hand with a crash among
the keys, in imitation of the great masters; yet the