eout twenty-five thaeousan' mild,"--said the boy he
asked,--"'f y' go 'z y' 'r' goin' naeow, 'n' 'baeout haeaf a mild 'f y' turn
right raeoun' 'n' go t'other way."

The negative picture being formed, it is washed with a solution of
hyposulphite of soda, to remove the soluble principles which are liable
to decomposition, and then coated with shellac varnish to protect it.

This _negative_ is now to give birth to a _positive_,--this mass of
contradictions to assert its hidden truth in a perfect harmonious
affirmation of the realities of Nature. Behold the process!

A sheet of the best linen paper is dipped in salt water and suffered to
dry. Then a solution of nitrate of silver is poured over it and it is
dried in a dark place. This paper is now sensitive; it has a conscience,
and is afraid of daylight. Press it against the glass negative and lay
them in the sun, the glass uppermost, leaving them so for from three to
ten minutes. The paper, having the picture formed on it, is then washed
with the solution of hyposulphite of soda, rinsed in pure water, soaked
again in a solution of hyposulphite of soda, to which, however, the
chloride of gold has been added, and again rinsed. It is then sized or
varnished.

Out of the perverse and totally depraved negative,--where it might
almost seem as if some magic and diabolic power had wrenched all things
from their proprieties, where the light of the eye was darkness, and the
deepest blackness was gilded with the brightest glare,--is to come the
true end of all this series of operations, a copy of Nature in all her
sweet gradations and harmonies and contrasts.

We owe the suggestion to a great wit, who overflowed our small
intellectual home-lot with a rushing freshet of fertilizing talk
the other day,--one of our friends, who quarries thought on his
own premises, but does not care to build his blocks into books and
essays,--that perhaps this world is only the _negative_ of that better
one in which lights will be turned to shadows and shadows into light,
but all harmonized, so that we shall see why these ugly patches, these
misplaced gleams and blots, were wrought into the temporary arrangements
of our planetary life.

For, lo! when the sensitive paper is laid in the sun under the negative
glass, every dark spot on the glass arrests a sunbeam, and so the spot
of the paper lying beneath remains unchanged; but every light space of
the negative lets the sunlight through, and the sen