husband planted this.”  Outside the little green door, on either hand, were stone benches set against the wall, on which the painter’s children sometimes sat and played; but it is somewhat strange that I never remember Millet at his door or on the village street.  He walked a great deal, but always went out of the garden to the fields back of the house, and from there gained the forest or the plain.  Among the young painters who frequented Barbizon in those days (which were, however, long after the time when the men of Millet’s age established themselves there), there were, strange as it may seem, few who cared for Millet’s work, and many who knew little or nothing of it.  The prejudices of the average art student are many and indurated.  His horizon is apt to be bounded by his master’s work or the last Salon success, and as Millet had no pupils, and had ceased to exhibit at the Salon, he was little known to most of the youths who, as I look back, must have made Barbizon a most undesirable place for a quiet family to live in.  An accident which made me acquainted with Millet’s eldest son, a painter of talent, seemed for a time to bring me no nearer to knowing the father until one day some remark of mine which showed at least a sincere admiration for his work made the son suggest that I should come and see a recently completed picture.

If the crowd of young painters who frequented the village were indifferent to Millet, such was not the case with people from other places.  The “personally conducted” were then newly invented, and I have seen a wagon load of tourists, who had been driven to different points in the forest, draw up before Millet’s modest door and express indignation in a variety of languages when they were refused admittance.  There were many in those days who tried with little or no excuse to break in on the work of a man whose working days were already counted, and who was seldom free from his old enemy migraine.  I was to learn this when—­I hope after having had the grace to make it plain that, though I greatly desired to know Millet, I felt no desire to intrude—­the son had arranged for a day when, at last, I was admitted to the studio.

Millet did not make his appearance at once; and when he came, and the son had said a few kindly words of presentation, he seemed so evidently in pain that I managed, in a French which must have been distinguished by a pure New York accent and a vocabulary more than limited, to express a fear that he was suffering, and suggested that my visit had better be deferred.

“No, it will pass,” was his answer; and going to his easel he placed, with the help of his son, picture after picture, for my delectation.