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.