whom he was surrounded. In spite of cold, and hunger, and poverty, he
had gone on trying to put upon his canvas the purer, truer, and higher
ideas with which his own beautiful soul was profoundly animated. In that
endeavour he nobly succeeded. While too many contemporary French
pictures are vicious and sensual in tone and feeling, every one of
Millet's pictures is a sermon in colour--a thing to make us sympathize
more deeply with our kind, and to send us away, saddened perhaps, yet
ennobled and purified.




VI.

JAMES GARFIELD, CANAL BOY.


At the present time, the neighbourhood of Cleveland, Ohio, the busiest
town along the southern shore of Lake Erie, may fairly rank as one of
the richest agricultural districts in all America. But when Abram
Garfield settled down in the township of Orange in 1830, it was one of
the wildest and most unpeopled woodland regions in the whole of the
United States. Pioneers from the older states had only just begun to
make little clearings for themselves in the unbroken forest; and land
was still so cheap that Abram Garfield was able to buy himself a tract
of fifty acres for no more than L20. His brother-in-law's family removed
there with him; and the whole strength of the two households was
immediately employed in building a rough log hut for their common
accommodation, where both the Garfields and the Boyntons lived together
during the early days of their occupation. The hut consisted of a mere