at the Anglo-Saxon invaders first settled down in England,
a band of similar English pirates, from the old common English home by
the cranberry marshes of the Baltic, drove their long ships upon the
long rocky peninsula of the Cotentin, which juts out, like a French
Cornwall, from the mainland of Normandy up to the steep cliffs and
beetling crags of busy Cherbourg. There they built themselves little
hamlets and villages of true English type, whose very names to this day
remind one of their ancient Saxon origin. Later on, the Danes or
Northmen conquered the country, which they called after their own name,
Normandy, that is to say, the Northmen's land. Mixing with the early
Saxon or English settlers, and with the still more primitive Celtic
inhabitants, the Northmen founded a race extremely like that which now
inhabits our own country. To this day, the Norman peasants of the
Cotentin retain many marks of their origin and their half-forgotten
kinship with the English race. While other Frenchmen are generally
dark and thick-set, the Norman is, as a rule, a tall, fair-haired,
blue-eyed man, not unlike in build to our Yarmouth fisherman, or our
Kentish labourers. In body and mind, there is something about him even
now which makes him seem more nearly akin to us than the true Frenchmen
who inhabit almost all the rest of France.

In the village of Gruchy, near Greville, in this wild and beautiful
region of the Cotentin, there lived at the beginning of the present
century a sturdy peasant family of the name of Millet. The father of
the family was one of the petty village landholders so common in
France; a labourer who owned and tilled his own tiny patch of farm,
with the aid of his wife and children. We have now no class in England
exactly answering to the French peasant proprietors, who form so large
and important an element in the population just across the Channel.
The small landholder in France belongs by position to about the same
level as our own agricultural labourer, and in many ways is content
with a style of dress and a mode of living against which English
labourers would certainly protest with horror. And yet, he is a
proprietor, with a proprietor's sense of the dignity of his position,
and an ardent love of his own little much-subdivided corner of
agricultural land. On this he spends all his energies, and however
many children he may have, he will try to make a livelihood for all by
their united labour out