e patience and perseverance
required in the monotonous day's work, and we are forced to a feeling
of respect and admiration for him.

In these days with what ease and skill the same task is performed by
the aid of machinery! Riding on the seat of a machine which drills the
seed into the ground and covers it up, the man would have found the
simple task of guiding his horses a very pleasant one indeed. As he
walks along so energetically, his eyes are probably fixed on some
stake at the end of the field to guide him as he travels back and
forth, sowing the grain.

No doubt he used a team of oxen to plow and harrow the ground before
he sowed the seed. We have no way of knowing just what kind of a
harrow he had, but very likely it was one made of brush or branches of
trees. We can see a team of oxen and a driver in the distance, who
seem to be following in the tracks of our sower and covering up the
seeds he is sowing.

The artist, Millet, knew all about such work, for he himself had
worked out in the fields through the long day. He tells us that his
"ancestors were peasants and he was born a peasant."

No doubt the man in our picture started out on his day's work long
before the sun was up. His first task, after eating his breakfast and
feeding his oxen, was to yoke the oxen ready for the journey to the
field where their work was to be done. No doubt the man has been working
steadily ever since, for he does not look like a man who would stop to
rest very many times. He gives us rather a feeling of physical strength
and of steady, faithful effort in the accomplishment of his daily tasks.

At the close of such a day's labor in the field he will be too utterly
weary to sit up and read, as most of our farmers do during these days
of farm machinery and rural delivery. And yet, there were some who did
read even in those days when work was so difficult, for we know that
Millet sat up many nights with the village priest, who taught him
reading and arithmetic, and with whom he studied Latin and read the
works of Shakespeare. It was due to this greater knowledge that Millet
became something more than a mere peasant. It was this that gave him
such perfect sympathy with and keen insight into the peasants' lives.
His own knowledge of the world made him more conscious of the great
contrast between their narrow, hard-working lives so full of
privation, and those of the men and women in the great world outside
so full of opportunity