widow was agreeable, her conversation vivacious.
He decided that this being so it might be better still to have her by him
all the time. And this was what the lady desired, for it was she who did
the courting.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "Because I like an occasional pinch of
salt is no reason why you should immerse me in brine," but Ary Scheffer,
the mild, gentle and guileless, did not reason quite so far.

The vivacious Sophie took him captive, and he was shorn of his strength.
And no doubt the ex-widow was as much disappointed as he; there really
was no good reason why he should not paint better than ever, when here he
wouldn't work at all! Lawks-a-daisy!

His spirit beat itself out against the bars, health declined, and
although he occasionally made groggy efforts to shake himself back into
form, his heart was not in his work.

Seven years went dragging by, and one morning there came word from London
that the Duchess of Orleans, the mother of the beloved Marie, was dying.
Scheffer was ill, but he braced himself for the effort, and hastily
started away alone, leaving a note for Cornelie.

He arrived in England in time to attend the funeral of his lifelong
friend, and then he himself was seized with a deadly illness.

His daughter was sent for, and when she came the sick man's longing
desire was to get back to France. If he was to die, he wanted to die at
home. "To die at home at last," is the prayer of every wanderer. Ary
Scheffer's prayer was answered. He expired in the arms of his beloved
daughter on June Fifteenth, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight, aged
sixty-three years.

FRANCOIS MILLET

When I meet a laborer on the edge of a field, I stop and look at
the man: born amid the grain where he will be reaped, and turning
up with his plow the ground of his tomb, mixing his burning sweat
with the icy rain of Autumn. The furrow he has just turned is a
monument that will outlive him. I have seen the pyramids of
Egypt, and the forgotten furrows of our heather: both alike bear
witness to the work of man and the shortness of his days.

--_Chateaubriand_

[Illustration: FRANCOIS MILLET]

Jean Francois Millet is to art what Wagner is to music, or what Whitman
is to poetry. These men, one a Frenchman, another a German, the third an
American, taught the same gospel at the same time, using different
languages, and each quite unaware of the existence of the others. Th