Millet did not make his appearance at once; and when he came, and the son had said a few kindly words of presentation, he seemed so evidently in pain that I managed, in a French which must have been distinguished by a pure New York accent and a vocabulary more than limited, to express a fear that he was suffering, and suggested that my visit had better be deferred. "No, it will pass," was his answer; and going to his easel he placed, with the help of his son, picture after picture, for my delectation. It was Millet's habit to commence a great number of pictures. On some of them he would work as long, according to his own expression, as he saw the scene in nature before him; for, at least at this epoch, he never painted directly from nature. For a picture which I saw the following summer, where three great hay-stacks project their mass against a heavy storm cloud, the shepherd seeking shelter from the impending rain, and the sheep erring here and there, affected by the changing weather--for this picture, conveying, as it did, the most intense impression of nature, Millet showed me (in answer to my inquiry and in explanation of his method of work) in a little sketch-book, so small that it would slip into a waistcoat pocket, the pencilled outline of the three hay-stacks. "It was a stormy day," he said, "and on my return home I sat down and commenced the picture, but of direct studies--_voila tout_." Of another picture, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, of a young girl, life size, with a distaff, seated on a hillock, her head shaded by a great straw hat relieved against the sky, he told me that the only direct painting from nature on the canvas was in a bunch of grass in the foreground, which he had plucked in the fields and brought into his studio. [Illustration: THE SOWER. FROM A PAINTING BY JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET. From the original painting, now in the collection of Mrs. W.H. Vanderbilt; reproduced by permission of Braun, Clement & Co. In his criticism of the Salon of 1850, where the picture was first exhibited, Théophile Gautier thus described it: "The sower advances with rhythmic step, casting the seed into the furrowed land; sombre rags cover him; a formless hat is drawn down over his brow; he is gaunt, cadaverous, and thin under his livery of misery; and yet life is contained in his large hand, as with a superb gesture he who has nothing scatters broadcast on the earth the bread of the future."]