on his own account; and we may be sure the priest and all the
good wives of Gruchy had quite settled in their own minds before long
that Jean Francois Millet's hands would be able in time to paint quite
a beautiful altar-piece for the village church.

By-and-by, when the time came for Francois to choose a trade, he being
then a big lad of about nineteen, it was suggested to his father that
young Millet might really make a regular painter--that is to say, an
artist. In France, the general tastes of the people are far more
artistic than with us; and the number of painters who find work for
their brushes in Paris is something immensely greater than the number
in our own smoky, money-making London. So there was nothing very
remarkable, from a French point of view, in the idea of the young
peasant turning for a livelihood to the profession of an artist. But
Millet's father was a sober and austere man, a person of great dignity
and solemnity, who decided to put his son's powers to the test in a
very regular and critical fashion. He had often watched Francois
drawing, and he thought well of the boy's work. If he had a real
talent for painting, a painter he should be; if not, he must take to
some other craft, where he would have the chance of making himself a
decent livelihood. So he told Francois to prepare a couple of
drawings, which he would submit to the judgment of M. Mouchel, a local
painter at Cherbourg, the nearest large town, and capital of the
department. Francois duly prepared the drawings, and Millet the elder
went with his, son to submit them in proper form for M. Mouchel's
opinion. Happily, M. Mouchel had judgment enough to see at a glance
that the drawings possessed remarkable merit. "You must be playing me
a trick," he said; "that lad could never have made these drawings." "I
saw him do them with my own eyes," answered the father warmly. "Then,"
said Mouchel, "all I can say is this: he has in him the making of a
great painter." He accepted Millet as his pupil; and the young man set
off for Cherbourg accordingly, to study with care and diligence under
his new master.

Cherbourg, though not yet at that time a great naval port, as it
afterwards became, was a busy harbour and fishing town, where the young
artist saw a great deal of a kind of life with which he possessed an
immense sympathy. The hard work of the fishermen putting out to sea on
stormy evenings, or toiling with their nets ashore after a