The laborer and his wife move along the field, facing each other on opposite sides of the row they are planting. The man turns the sod with his hoe, a short-handled tool which long practice has taught him to use skilfully. The wife carries the potato seed in her apron, and as her husband lifts each spadeful of earth, she throws the seed into the hole thus made. He holds the hoe suspended a moment while the seed drops in, and then replaces the earth over it. The two work in perfect unison, each following the other's motion with mechanical regularity, as they move down the field together.

The two who work so well together in the field are sure to work well together in the home. The man has the serious, capable look of a provident husband. The woman looks like a good housewife. That shapely hand throwing the seed so deftly into the ground is well adapted to domestic tasks.

We may easily identify our picture as a familiar scene in Millet's Barbizon surroundings. We are told that "upon all sides of Barbizon, save one, the plain stretches almost literally as far as the eye can reach," and presents "a generally level and open surface." "There are no isolated farmhouses, and no stone walls, fences, or hedges, except immediately around the villages; and were it not all under cultivation, the plain might be taken for a vast common."[[1]]

It is evident, then, that we here see the plain of Barbizon and true Barbizon peasants of Millet's day. The villagers of the painter's acquaintance were on the whole a prosperous class, nearly all owning their houses and a few acres of ground. The big apple-tree under which the donkey rests is just such an one as grew in Millet's own little garden.

Fruit trees were his peculiar delight. He knew all their ways, and "all their special twists and turnings;" how the leaves of the apple-tree are bunched together on their twigs, and how the roots spread under ground. "Any artist," he used to say, "can go to the East and paint a palm-tree, but very few can paint an apple-tree."

[1]

From Edward Wheelwright's Recollections of Jean François Millet, in Atlantic Monthly, September, 1876.