many contemporary French pictures are vicious and sensual in tone and
feeling, every one of Millet's pictures is a sermon in colour--a thing
to make us sympathize more deeply with our kind, and to send us away,
saddened perhaps, yet ennobled and purified.

VI.

JAMES GARFIELD, CANAL BOY.

At the present time, the neighbourhood of Cleveland, Ohio, the busiest
town along the southern shore of Lake Erie, may fairly rank as one of
the richest agricultural districts in all America. But when Abram
Garfield settled down in the township of Orange in 1830, it was one of
the wildest and most unpeopled woodland regions in the whole of the
United States. Pioneers from the older states had only just begun to
make little clearings for themselves in the unbroken forest; and land
was still so cheap that Abram Garfield was able to buy himself a tract
of fifty acres for no more than 20 pounds. His brother-in-law's family
removed there with him; and the whole strength of the two households
was immediately employed in building a rough log hut for their common
accommodation, where both the Garfields and the Boyntons lived together
during the early days of their occupation. The hut consisted of a mere
square box, made by piling logs on top of one another, the spaces
between being filled with mud, while the roof was formed of loose stone
slabs. Huts of that sort are everywhere common among the isolation of
the American backwoods; and isolated indeed they were, for the
Garfields' nearest neighbours, when they first set up house, lived as
far as seven miles away, across the uncleared forest.

When Abram Garfield came to this lonely lodge in the primaeval
woodlands, he had one son and one daughter. In 1831, the year after
his removal to his new home, a second boy was born into the family,
whom his father named James Abram. Before the baby was eighteen months
old, the father died, and was buried alone, after the only possible
fashion among such solitary settlers, in a corner of the wheat field
which he himself had cleared of its stumps. A widow's life is always a
hard one, but in such a country and under such conditions it is even
harder and more lonely than elsewhere. Mrs. Garfield's eldest boy,
Thomas, was only eleven years old; and with the aid of this one
ineffectual helper, she managed herself to carry on the farm for many
years. Only those who know the hard toil of a raw American township
can have any idea what that real