In our walks about the village after dinner the schoolmaster took us to see an ancient woman who in her youth had been a catechumen of Felix Neff.  It is curious to find that term, which was applied by the early Church to candidates for admission, in use now among the Protestants of France and Italy.  With tears in her eyes and an enthusiasm that made her speech almost incoherent, the grandame talked of “Monsieur Neff,” his courage, his friendliness, how he went among his people like one of themselves, and what good words he always spoke.  As we left St. Laurent our host and his wife bore us company to the brow of a little hill whither we had sent on our chaise, and stood there to wave us an adieu as we descended on the other side.  Then we saw them turn back toward the group of thatched and moss-grown cottages which was all their world.

That evening we reached Gap, the capital of the department of the High Alps, and once an important Protestant centre.  Farel, the French Reformer of the sixteenth century, was born and for a time preached here.  But since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes until very lately—­during a period, that is, of nearly two hundred years—­no Protestant pastor has been tolerated in the town, and the once numerous flock was long since dispersed.  A Swiss society undertook two or three years ago a Protestant mission at Gap, and a friend in Geneva had given us the name of the present evangelist.  A humbler or more thankless charge could scarcely be imagined than such a work in such a place.  There is no nucleus of hereditary Protestants, as in the mountain-parishes of the department, and at the same time the little city is so isolated that its people have retained the superstitions and religious animosities of the Dark Ages.  It was therefore with much compassionate thought of his pitiful case that we sought the evangelist’s house.  He was not, however, a man toward whom one could maintain for a moment that frame of mind.  Brisk, cheerful, polished in manner and with an unsought elegance of dress and carriage, he had not in the least the air of a despised heretic struggling hopelessly against social as well as ecclesiastical contempt.  Six avowed converts were the definite results of his work for more than two years.  During much of that time he had been hampered by insuperable difficulties in finding a place for his service or even a lodging for his family.  The latter was at last provided, as a daring defiance of popular prejudice, by a landlord who prided himself upon being a libre penseur.  For his chapel he secured a disused shop in the front of a bath-house.  The proprietress of the establishment was punished by the priests for her unrighteous thrift by being refused the sacrament.  Her business, too, was for a while endangered.  One instance out of many of the kind of prejudice she provoked was that of two wealthy and educated ladies, who, as they entered the bath one day, heard music in the chapelle evangelique and instantly beat a hurried