Rembrandt was a typical Dutch worker all his life. Besides the great number of pictures that have come down to us, we have about three thousand of his drawings, and his etchings are very numerous and fine. I wonder if you know how prints are made? There are, broadly speaking, two different processes. You can take a block of wood and cut away the substance around the lines of the design. Then when you cover with ink the raised surface of wood that is left and press the paper upon it, the design prints off in black where the ink is but the paper remains white where the hollows are. This is the method called wood-cutting, which is still in use for book illustrations. In the other process, the design is ploughed into a metal plate, the lines being made deep enough to hold ink, and varying in width according to the strength desired in the print. You then fill the grooves with ink, wiping the flat surface clean, so that when the paper is pressed against the plate and into the furrows, the lines print black, out of the furrows, and the rest remains white. There are several ways of making these furrows in a metal plate, but the chief are two. The first is to plough into the metal with a sharp steel instrument called a burin. The second is to bite them out with an acid. This is the process of etching with which Rembrandt did his matchless work. He varnished a copper plate with black varnish. With a needle he scratched upon it his design, which looked light where the needle had revealed the copper. Then the whole plate was put into a bath of acid, which ate away the metal, and so bit into the lines, but had no effect upon the varnish. When he wanted the lines to be blacker in certain places, he had to varnish the whole rest of the plate again, and put it back into the bath of acid. The lines that had been subjected to the second biting were deeper than those that had been bitten only once. The number of plates etched by Rembrandt was great, at least two hundred; some say four hundred. Their subjects are very various--momentary impressions of picturesque figures, Scriptural scenes, portraits, groups of common people, landscapes, and whatever happened to engage the artist's fancy, for an etching can be very quickly done, and is well suited to record a fleeting impression. Thousands of the prints still exist, and even some of the original plates in a very worn-down condition.