ailors--going out with the
tide--and if they did not come back it was only because those who go down
to the sea in ships sometimes never do.

And now this first-born of the peasant flock was going to leave his
native village of Gruchy.

He was clad in a new suit of clothes, spun, woven, cut and sewed by the
hands of his grandmother.

He was going away, and his belongings were all packed in a sailor's
canvas bag; but he was not going to sea.

Great had been the preparations for this journey.

The family was very poor: the father a day-laborer and farmer; the mother
worked in the fields, and as the children grew up they too worked in the
fields; and after a high tide the whole family hurried to the seashore to
gather up the "varech," and carry it home for fertilizer, so that the
rocky hillside might next Summer laugh a harvest.

And while the father and the mother toiled in the fields, or gathered the
varech, or fished for shrimps, the old grandmother looked after the
children at home. The grandmother in such homes is the real mother of the
flock: the mother who bore the children has no time to manifest
mother-love; it is the grandmother who nurses the stone-bruises, picks
out the slivers, kisses away the sorrows, gladdens young hearts by her
simple stories, and rocks in her strong, old arms the babe, as she croons
and quavers a song of love and duty.

And so the old grandmother had seen "her baby" grow to a man, and with
her own hands she had made his clothes, and all the savings of her years
had been sewed into a belt and given to the boy.

And now he was going away.

He was going away--going because she and she alone had urged it. She had
argued and pleaded, and when she won the village priest over to her side,
and Father Lebrisseau in his turn had won several influential men--why,
it must be!

The boy could draw: he could draw so well that he some day would be a
great artist--Langlois, the drawing-master at Cherbourg, ten miles away,
said so.

What if they were only poor peasants and there never had been a painter
in the family! There would be now. So the priest had contributed from his
own purse; and the Councilmen of Cherbourg had promised to help; and the
grandmother had some silver of her own.

Jean Francois Millet was going to Paris to study to be an artist.

Tears rained down the wrinkled, leathery cheeks of the old grandmother;
the mother stood by dazed and dumb, nursing a six-months-old babe;