retreat.  They only stopped to explain that all the world knows the object of Protestant worship is the devil, and they dare not stay within hearing of the sacrilegious rites.  In spite of multiform discouragements like these, the evangelist and his wife, a motherly woman of much quiet strength, whose gentleness made sweet a very homely face, talked of their work and prospects with a matter-of-course hopefulness which it was not easy to share.  Nothing in their habits, they told us, had more amazed their Roman Catholic neighbors at first than their lavish use of water.  But in that particular, at least, suspicion had been allayed, their perseverance had proved the practice harmless, and their example was beginning to find a few timid imitators.

Our first night after leaving Gap was spent at Embrun.  As we approached the town, which surmounts an extraordinary platform of rock, its walls looking like part of the smooth, brown tufa precipice that rises abruptly out of the valley, we seemed to see in its picturesque and impressive aspect something of the grandeur and gloom of its long history.  The cathedral where so many archbishops have ministered preserves little trace of its former splendors:  even architecturally it is without attraction.

For the next two days our route continued to lie through the valley, which we entered upon leaving Gap, of the Durance.  It is an apparently insignificant but treacherous stream, which by repeated floods has spread ugly devastation over a hill-girdled country that ought to be smiling with peace and plenty.  At Guillestre we came in sight of the jagged double peak of Mont Pelvoux, and got a magnificent vista toward the south, ending in the white slopes of some giant of the Cottian Alps.  The Mont Pelvoux and the Pointe des Ecrins, the greatest of those mountains from which the department takes its name, although they appear on none of the ordinary maps, stand, I believe, only twelfth and thirteenth in the scale of height among the mountains of Europe.  The explorations of Whymper have introduced them to his readers, but they still remain almost untrodden by other climbers.

On the second afternoon we reached the lateral valley of Fressiniere, the climax of our journey.  There was refreshment for soul as well as body in the daintily-clean, bare-floored rooms, redolent of apples set out to dry, into which we were welcomed by Pastor Charpiot and his wife at Pallons.  The village is a mere group of Alpine huts, and the only chance of shelter was at the presbytery.  So much we had little doubt of finding there, but we counted as little upon the warm and graceful hospitality which greeted our application.  And when our nationality transpired it added new zest to the good-will of our host and hostess.  We were their first Transatlantic guests.