a fellow-feeling for the peasants; and as he watched them, day after day laboring so faithfully, he found a big idea in their work. It was something like this--work is necessary, and to do our own share of it as well as we can is the big thing for each of us. And the oldest work of all and the most necessary is the growing of the wheat. To-day the seed is laid in rows by machine-drills; but in Millet’s time it was scattered by hand, just as it had been since man began to sow. This sower, then, that he watched was a descendant of a long line of sowers, stretching back to the beginning of civilisation; and still in the fields of Barbizon he was doing his humble share of the world’s necessary work. Millet felt the bigness of this idea; and in his imagination the man was no longer Jacques or Jean--a sower; he became “The Sower,” a type--a big heroic type. Then, as Millet felt him to be, so he set to work to paint him, choosing such lines as would convey this big feeling to us. Observe, first, the balance of the figure: how the weight of the body is planted almost equally on both feet. If you try to put yourself in the position, you will find that you can raise neither foot without moving the body. If you wish to raise the back foot, you must move the body forward till the weight is on the right foot; or, if you would raise this latter, you must move the body back till the weight is over the left foot. The center of gravity or of mass runs down through the body and between the legs. Now sway your body backward and forward a few times, and then bring forward the left leg in front of the right, so that the position of the feet is reversed. Now sway again forward and backward. I ask you to do this that you may feel how freely the body moves in this position. And I ask you to stride, that you may feel that the position in the picture is only a momentary one, leading on to a natural advance. For this perfect poise of the body on the feet is not a stationary one, that in time will seem stiff, but part of a moving one, that has the freedom and the naturalness of life. And the movement is a swift one. We can feel it is so from the length of the stride; for it is only when you are moving quickly, that you can take long strides, and still preserve the balanced, rhythmic swing of the body.