So in all countries, and in all ages, Jean François Millet's idea is the right one--that to find life at its plainest, at its fullest, one should study it, _au fond_, in the lives of the sons and daughters of the soil. Their open-air life prints deep on their faces the divine impress of Nature, obtainable, in quite the same measure, in no other way; they have become intimate with Nature, and have lived their everyday life close to her heart-beats. What she gives is incommunicable to others: it can only be given by direct contact, and can never be passed on, for only by direct contact can the creases of the mind, caused by the life of towns and great cities, be smoothed out, and a calm, strong, new breadth of outlook given. I remember a typical face of this kind. We had been out for a day's excursion from Arcachon, and, coming home, at the station where we took train, there got into our carriage, a mother and daughter. After getting into conversation with them--a thing they were quite willing to do, with ready natural courtesy of manner,--we learned that the mother was eighty-one years old and had worked as a _parcheuse_ in her young days. She had a fine old face, wrinkled and lined with a thousand life stories. Kindly, pathetic, had been their influence upon her, for her eyes and expression were just like a sunset over a beautiful country: it was the beauty that is only reached when one has well drunk at the goblets of life--some of us to the bitter dregs--and set them down, thankful that at last it is growing near the time when one need lift them to one's lips no more. The mother told me that the women _parcheuses_ could not earn so much as the men, three francs a day--perhaps only thirty centimes--being their ordinary wage. She turned to me once, so tragically, with such a sudden world of sorrow rising in her eyes. "I have worked all my life in the fields, and at fishing, and now, one by one, all whom I love have left me, and I am so lonely left behind." "Ah, _c'est malheureux_!" exclaimed the daughter, turning sympathetically to her. We parted at Arcachon station, but how often since, have I not seen the face of the old mother looking sadly out of our carriage window, the tears gathering slowly in her eyes as she remembered those with whom she had started life, and whom death had distanced from her now, so far.