The valley terminates abruptly at what seems an impassable wall of rock. Upon nearer approach a zigzag path up its face is discovered. Not far from the top the narrow way creeps by a ledge which barely affords foothold across a thread of sparkling foam slipping down a perpendicular precipice. In winter this passage is sheeted in dangerously unstable ice, and makes Dourmillouse inaccessible for weeks. Neff gives a spirited account in his journal of leading out a party of young peasants by torchlight, armed with axes, to cut a path here on the evening before some service in which he wished the people of the upper and lower valleys to unite. Dourmillouse lies on a slope above this difficult ascent. It is a mere group of rude chalets, like the other villages, but it has a less miserable air. The land-slides are mostly confined to the lower valley, and here the scanty Alpine pastures and steep patches of rye are out of reach of the floods. The people are seldom reduced to actual want of food, and are esteemed prosperous by their more destitute neighbors below.
Our first visit was to the old priory in which Neff held his winter schools. A row of half a dozen trees planted by him in front of the house now shuts off a good deal of much-needed sunshine, but is nevertheless carefully cherished as a memorial. Beside the priory stands the temple, once a Roman Catholic church, in which, before the Revolution, a priest is said to have ministered for twenty-five years without making a single convert, his own servant constituting his flock. Presently we went to rest and eat the lunch Pastor Charpiot had brought, at the house of the local ancien, or elder. His wife, a sturdy, smiling young woman, gave us an eager welcome. Two round-cheeked boys frisked about their old friend the pastor, and a baby—its spirits quite unclouded by its austere surroundings—crowed lustily from the cradle in which, after the fashion of the country, it was tightly strapped. It was a low, grimy room, with one square bit of a window, and far from clean. Dr. Gilly, the prim English biographer of Neff, quaintly says: "Cleanliness is not a virtue which distinguishes any of the people in these mountains; and, with such a nice sense of moral perception as they display, and with such strict attention to the duties of religion, it is astonishing that they have not yet learnt those ablutions in their persons or habitations which are as necessary to comfort as to health." I suspect, however, that the nicest "sense of moral perception" in the world would excuse the omission of a good many "ablutions" in a place where all the water that is used has to be carried more than a quarter of a mile up a steep and rough mountain-path from the nearest stream. And there was one refinement in the rude chalet not always present in regions far less removed from the centres of civilization: besides the cloth—so coarse as to be a curiosity—which the woman laid for us over an end of the unscoured table, she put at each of our places, as a matter of course, a fresh napkin of the same rude stuff.
I could not sufficiently admire the brave cheerfulness of these simple folk. Many of the villagers were busy gathering their little stock of potatoes, and all had something bright to say about their good fortune in getting them so well grown and safely stored before the frosts. It was the last week in September, and they thought the winter already close at hand. There was, too, in spite of a shrinking from strangers painfully suggestive of tendencies inherited from generations of persecuted ancestors, a degree of intelligence and self-respect often wanting among peasants far more favorably circumstanced. And it seemed to me worthy of remark that in all our walk—notwithstanding the valley's unexampled poverty—we did not encounter a single beggar. Before we left Dourmillouse the "elder" appeared, a stalwart young mountaineer with his gun slung across his shoulder. He had finished his morning's work in some distant field, and was off for a chamois-hunt among the rocks and glaciers. As a relic of our visit he gave us a block of rye bread twenty-two months old, which he chopped off the loaf with a hatchet.
We had frequent evidence in the course of our excursion that Pastor Charpiot is a real shepherd to his needy flock. Indeed, he gave to the walk an intimate and peculiar interest quite apart from its historical associations. Here he bade us go slowly on while he looked in upon a sick man, explaining that he had to be doctor as well as minister. Again he asked us to stop and share with him some of the grapes which a stout young peasant-woman was bringing on her donkey from the Durance vineyards, and which had no sweetness save in the good-will that offered them. For all whom we met he had a cheery greeting or an affectionate inquiry that showed familiar acquaintance with their concerns; and occasionally a word or two suggested a truth or hope, aptly illustrated in some passing incident, no matter how trifling or homely.
A storm was gathering in the mountains as we made our way back to Pallons through the deepening shadows of the autumn afternoon. Before we emerged from the desolate valley its gloom had grown almost intolerable; and yet this was but a suggestion of the winter horrors which the white-haired pastor at our side had faced for years in his regular ministrations at the different hamlets we had visited. Speaking of the five pastors now distributed over the field of which Neff assumed the whole charge, he said with a modesty that was quite unaffected, "All five together, we are not worth him alone" (nous ne le valons pas). What we had seen that day convinced us that so far at least as concerned himself his deprecation was unfounded, but in expressing it he echoed the tone that seemed universal in the High Alps in reference to the illustrious young pastor. Neff could not, of course, in his short career accomplish the permanent revolution which he dreamed of and longed for. At the same time, it cannot be said that his work has perished while not only pastors but people feel so strongly the inspiration of that heroic life.
JAMES M. BRUCE.
BLOOMING.
A little seed lay underneath the ground,
While from the south a mild wind-current blew,