To imitate Rembrandt properly, get hold of the first East-end basket-woman that you chance to meet--a herring or orange vendor will do; take her as she sits, without arranging a single fold, adding to or removing one iota about her; take her in the street or in the close, or as she squats down inside the half-darkened doorway of her own little shop. She can neither have too little nor too much about her if she struck you distinctly while you passed as being picturesque. Never mind the lighting, and don't think to be original; as she stands, or sits, or squats, she is the woman for your camera; out with it, and secure her before she can wink or know what you are up to, and you have caught the whole secret of Rembrandt's power and realistic talent. In hatching and touching your plate, which to me seems to represent the second working, think upon all the dodges of the etchers, Haydon, Hamerton, Herkomer, Whistler, &c. If you have a chemical to eat down certain parts of it broadly, leaving the prominent parts (be sparing of prominent parts) standing out dense, do not niggle with your pencil-point over-much, except it is to blur out an accessory which may be too distinct. I do not know much about printing photographs, yet I am inclined to think that it is here where the genius of the photographer may be brought out. If I were a photographer I'd never for a second leave a plate while it was printing. I'd try all sorts of dodges upon the sun with pieces of paper having little eccentric holes torn out where I wanted an artificial shadow to fall across my plate, by exposing the print altogether at times, so as to mellow any extreme lights, painting touches of white on it to bar out the sun altogether where I wanted a mysterious gleam, whether it was on my picture or not, and never rest until I had made it my own. I may be wrong, of course, in all this; but it is the idea which now strikes me; or all this may have been done already, or considered _infra dig._ or illegitimate; yet here, I think, as in the treating of a painted picture, the photographer can liberate himself entirely from the trammels of custom, and never be at a loss for fresh tracks.