asant girl is not at all like the pretty milkmaids
who carry milking-stools and shining pails through the pages of the
picture books. Millet had no patience with such pictures. Pretty girls
were not fit for hard work, he said, and he always wanted to have the
people he painted look as if they belonged to their station. Fitness
was in his mind one of the chief elements of beauty.

So he shows us in this Milkmaid a young woman framed in the massive
proportions of an Amazon, and eminently fitted for her lot in life.
Her chief beauty lies in the expression of her splendidly developed
figure. Her choicest gifts are the health and virtue which most abound
in the free life of God's country.

"God made the country, and man made the town.
What wonder, then, that health and virtue, gifts
That can alone make sweet the bitter draught
That life holds out to all, should most abound
And least be threatened in the fields and groves."[2]

A study of the lines of the picture will show the artistic beauty of
the composition. You may trace a long beautiful curve beginning at the
girl's finger tip and extending along the cord across the top of the
milk jar. Starting from the same point another good line follows the
arm and shoulder across the face and along the edge of the jar. At the
base of the composition we find corresponding lines which may be drawn
from the toe of the right foot. One follows the diagonal of the path
and the other runs along the edge of the lifted skirt.

There are other fine lines in the drawing of the bodice and the folds
of the skirt. Altogether they are as few in number and as strongly
emphasized, though not so grand, as those of the Sower.

[Footnote 1: The title of Water-Carrier has been incorrectly attached
to this picture, though the sketch on which it is based is properly
known as the Milkmaid.]

[Footnote 2: From Cowper's _Task_.]

XIV

THE WOMAN CHURNING

Again we are in the picturesque province of Normandy, and are shown
the interior of a dairy where a woman is busy churning. It is a
quaint place, with raftered ceiling and stone-paved floor, and the
furnishings are only such as are required by the work in hand. On some
wooden shelves against the farther wall are vessels of earthenware and
metal, to hold cream, cheese, butter, and the like. The churn is one
of the old-fashioned upright sort, not unlike those used in early New
England households, and large enough to contain a g