of the soil, rather than let one of them go to
seek his fortune by any other means in the great cities. Thus the
ground is often tilled up to an almost ridiculous extent, the entire
labour of the family being sometimes expended in cultivating, manuring,
weeding, and tending a patch of land perhaps hardly an acre in size.
It is quite touching to see the care and solicitude with which these
toilsome peasants will laboriously lay out their bit of garden with
fruits or vegetables, making every line almost mathematically regular,
planting every pea at a measured distance, or putting a smooth flat
pebble under every strawberry on the evenly ridged-up vines. It is
only in the very last resort that the peasant proprietor will consent
to let one of his daughters go out to service, or send one of his sons
adrift to seek his fortune as an artisan in the big, unknown, outer
world.

Millet the elder, however, had nine children, which is an unusually
large number for a French peasant family (where the women ordinarily
marry late in life); and his little son Jean Francois (the second child
and eldest boy), though set to weed and hoe upon the wee farm in his
boyhood, was destined by his father for some other life than that of a
tiller of the soil. He was born in the year before Waterloo--1814--and
was brought up on his father's plot of land, in the hard rough way to
which peasant children in France are always accustomed. Bronzed by sun
and rain, poorly clad, and ill-fed, he acquired as a lad, from the open
air and the toilsome life he led, a vigour of constitution which
enabled him to bear up against the numerous hardships and struggles of
his later days. "A Norman Peasant," he loved to call himself always,
with a certain proud humility; and happily he had the rude health of
one all his life long.

Hard as he worked, little Francois' time was not entirely taken up with
attending to the fields or garden. He was a studious boy, and learned
not only to read and write in French, but also to try some higher
flights, rare indeed for a lad of his position. His family possessed
remarkable qualities as French peasants go; and one of his
great-uncles, a man of admirable strength of character, a priest in the
days of the great Revolution, had braved the godless republicans of his
time, and though deprived of his cure, and compelled to labour for his
livelihood in the fields, had yet guided the plough in his priestly
garments. His grandm