wheat flamed,
the harvestmen worked with their faces scorched by the reflection of the
sun-rays on the hard and arid earth. All were silent, their shirts wet
with perspiration; while from time to time, they slaked their thirst
with water from round, earthenware jugs, furnished with two handles and
a mouth-piece stoppered with a willow stick.

At the father end of the stubble-field stood the carts which contained
the sheaves, and near them a group of at least a hundred beings who far
exceeded the hideous conceptions of Murillo and Teniers, the boldest
painters of such scenes, or of Callot, that poet of the fantastic in
poverty. The pictured bronze legs, the bare heads, the ragged garments
so curiously faded, so damp with grease, so darned and spotted and
discolored, in short, the painters' ideal of the material of abject
poverty was far surpassed by this scene; while the expression on those
faces, greedy, anxious, doltish, idiotic, savage, showed the everlasting
advantage which nature possesses over art by its comparison with the
immortal compositions of those princes of color. There were old women
with necks like turkeys, and hairless, scarlet eyelids, who stretched
their heads forward like setters before a partridge; there were
children, silent as soldiers under arms, little girls who stamped like
animals waiting for their food; the natures of childhood and old age
were crushed beneath the fierceness of a savage greed,--greed for the
property of others now their own by long abuse. All eyes were savage,
all gestures menacing; but every one kept silence in presence of the
count, the field-keeper, and the bailiff. At this moment all classes
were represented,--the great land-owners, the farmers, the working men,
the paupers; the social question was defined to the eye; hunger had
convoked the actors in the scene. The sun threw into relief the hard and
hollow features of those faces; it burned the bare feet dusty with the
soil; children were present with no clothing but a torn blouse, their
blond hair tangled with straw and chips; some women brought their babes
just able to walk, and left them rolling in the furrows.

The gloomy scene was harrowing to the old soldier, whose heart was
kind, and he said to Michaud: "It pains me to see it. One must know the
importance of these measures to be able to insist upon them."

"If every land-owner followed your example, lived on his property, and
did the good that you and yours are