guardian
of one who was to prove himself, all his life, the passionate lover of
nature.

The boyhood of Millet was passed at home. He had no schooling except
some small instruction in Latin from the village priest and from a
neighboring curate, but he made good use of what he learned. He worked
on the farm with his father and his men, ploughing, harrowing, sowing,
reaping, mowing, winnowing--in a word, sharing actively and
contentedly in all the work that belongs to the farmer's life. And in
the long winter evenings or in the few hours of rest that the day
afforded, he would hungrily devour the books that were at hand--the
"Lives of the Saints," the "Confessions of Saint Augustine," the "Life
of Saint Jerome," and especially his letters, which he read and
re-read all his life. These and the philosophers of Port Royal, with
Bossuet, and Fenelon, with the Bible and Virgil, were his mental food.
Virgil and the Bible he read always in the Latin; he was so familiar
with them both that, when a man, his biographer, Sensier, says he
never met a more eloquent translator of these two books. When the time
came, therefore, for Millet to go up to Paris, he was not, as has been
said by some writer, an ignorant peasant, but a well-taught man who
had read much and digested what he had read, and knew good books from
bad. The needs of his narrow life absorbed him so seriously that the
seeds of art that lay hid in his nature found a way to the light with
difficulty. But his master-passion was soon to assert itself, and, as
in all such cases, in an unexpected manner.

Millet's attempts at drawing had hitherto been confined to studies
made in hours stolen from rest. He had copied the engravings found in
an old family Bible, and he had drawn, from his window, the garden,
the stable, the field running down to the edge of the high cliff, and
with the sea in the horizon, and he had sometimes tried his hand at
sketching the cows and sheep in the pasture. But he was now to take a
step in advance. Coming home one day from church, he walked behind an
old man bent with age and feebleness, painfully making his way. The
foreshortening and the movement of the man's figure struck the boy
forcibly, and in a flash he discovered the secret of perspective and
the mystery of planes. He ran quickly home, got a pencil and drew from
memory a picture of the old man, so lively in its resemblance that as
soon as his parents saw it, they recognized it and fell a-