peasant was walking toward us. His legs and body were horribly twisted;
the dangling arms and crooked limbs appeared as if caricaturing the
gnarled and tortured boughs and trunks of the apple-trees. The
peasant's blouse was filthy; his sabots were reeking with dirty straw;
his feet and ankles, bare, were blacker than the earth over which he
was painfully crawling; and on his face there was the vacuous, sensuous
deformity of the smile idiocy wears. Again I ask, why did he not
disfigure this fair scene, and put out something of the beauty of the
day? Is it because the French peasant seems now to be an inseparable
adjunct of the Frenchman's landscape? That even deformity has been so
handled by the realists as to make us see beauty in ugliness? Or is it
that, as moderns, we are all bitten by the rabies of the picturesque;
that all things serve and are acceptable so long as we have our
necessary note of contrast? Certain it is that it appears to be the
peasant's blouse that perpetuates the Salon, and perhaps--who
knows?--when over-emigration makes our own American farmer too poor to
wear a boiled shirt when he ploughs, we also may develop a school of
landscape, with figures.

Meanwhile the walk and the talk had made Charm thirsty. "Why should we
not go," she asked, "across the next field, into that farm house
yonder, and beg for a glass of milk?"

The farm-house might have been waiting for us, it was so still. Even
the grasses along its sloping roof nodded, as if in welcome. The house,
as we approached it, together with its out-buildings, assumed a more
imposing aspect than it had from the road. Its long, low facade, broken
here and there by a miniature window or a narrow doorway, appeared to
stretch out into interminable length beneath the towering beeches and
the snarl of the peach-tree boughs.