The valley of Fressiniere, at the entrance of which Pallons lies, is the centre of those special interests which first prompted the pilgrimage I am recording.  With it are specially associated the earliest traditions of Protestantism in France, and here Felix Neff spent the larger part of his brief but memorable career as pastor in the High Alps.  I suppose the exact antiquity of the Protestants of Dauphine is one of the historical problems that still await their final solution.  The older chronicles provide them with what seems an unbroken line of descent from the second century, when Irenaeus preached in Lyons and Vienne.  Christian fugitives from those cities during the persecution of Marcus Aurelius may, it is alleged, have taken refuge in the not distant Dauphine mountains, and have transmitted to their descendants the primitive faith they had received.  But modern criticism has so seriously undermined, as practically to have demolished, this imposing genealogical structure.  It is not denied that voices of more or less emphatic protest against Rome made themselves heard among these mountains and the neighboring Cottian Alps during the earlier centuries.  Can such voices be held to represent any definitely-organized dissentient body of more remote origin than the Poor Men of Lyons, led by Peter Waldo in 1172?  The latest researches give an apparently final negative answer to this question.  At least, however, it is beyond dispute that long before the Reformation the valleys of the High Alps were a retreat for persecuted schismatics whose opposition to the Romish Church anticipated Protestantism.  As early as the fifteenth century a papal bull denounced as inveterate the heretics of Dauphine and Provence, and about the middle of the next century delegates from those provinces appeared at the first national Protestant synod in France with the following declaration:  “We consent to merge in the common cause, but we require no Reformation, for our forefathers and ourselves have ever disclaimed the corruptions of the churches in communion with Rome.”  Enough is therefore certain as to the antecedents of these Protestant mountaineers to surround them with an entirely peculiar interest.  The saddest feature, perhaps, of all their history is the stunting of mind and character that has resulted from centuries of oppression.  After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes they were subject to fresh persecution, and until within the present century they have been denied the privileges of citizenship and forced to look upon themselves as outcasts.  One can only wonder at the degree of individuality and force which they have still preserved.