little way from the village; it edged the horizon and filled the child with a sort of terror. He retained throughout life the remembrance of a storm when five or six vessels were wrecked hard by and when he saw a heap of dead bodies lying on the beach under a great sail. As soon as he was old enough to help his father and mother he worked with them in the fields, mowing, making hay, winnowing, ploughing, manuring, sowing, and so taking part personally in all those acts of rustic life, the poetic and mysterious grandeur of which he was afterwards to express. Through them he became more and more deeply attached to the soil and especially to that Norman soil which he never ceased to love. He never forgot his own country. "Oh how I belong to my own place!" he wrote, when he saw it again on the 12th of August 1871, a few years before his death.
His artistic proclivities showed themselves very early. As a child, when his relations were taking their afternoon sleep, he would draw the fields. His father knew enough to see and understand his vocation, but the family was poor, and the ground had to be tilled.
43
