Gruchy, situated in one of the wildest parts of Normandy, feels the full effect of every storm which blows up from the Atlantic. There is nothing to shelter the exposed hamlets studded along the coast from the fury of the western gale, and the rocks are but too often strewn with the wrecks of vessels which have come to grief in that terrible sea. Millet in his youth must have witnessed many of these catastrophes. Quite a number of drawings by him are extant representing succour being extended to some vessel in difficulties, or the hauling up of some wreckage on to the rocks. The studious boy must have been impressed as he saw the sternness of the combat in his native country between men and nature; the wind-swept fields, and hills bare to the point of savageness. The very trees themselves dwarfed and gnarled; in their struggle with the elements they have been made tough and hardy as the inhabitants of the country themselves, and, stunted as they are, yet show well that they can resist the force of the fiercest storm. The brooding and contemplative character of the father having descended to the son, we can quite imagine the effect such surroundings would have upon him. As he looked back in after years upon his roamings in his native country, he appreciated the awe-inspiring character of the scenery in which he had been born. He would doubtless recall many a walk amidst the fields with the wind blowing in his face as it rushed in from the Atlantic, the rain beating hard upon the freshly ploughed fields, and the distant figure of the ploughman struggling hard with his team against the stiff sou'wester. The great mass of vapour overhead whirled before the violence of the storm, casting grey and pearly light over the whole scene, whilst far away on the top of the hill a clump of trees, bent with their resistance to the wind, are silhouetted against the sky. Many a drawing of this kind we encounter in the later work of Millet, which shows how his thoughts harked back in certain moments to the scenes he had left behind him for ever. We know that on one or two occasions he returned to Gruchy. Once or twice he had urgent business which took him back, but sometimes he went with no other purpose than to renew acquaintance with the scenes of yore. Little Jean François was his grandmother's favourite. It was she who taught him the names of things which surrounded him, and perhaps directed his thoughts in the channels to which they were finally to be devoted. Her brother Charles, who formed one of the family, used to take him for walks, telling him stories on the way. Millet was devotedly attached to this old man, and when at the age of seven years he lost him, the gap in his life thus left made an impression upon his memory never to be effaced.