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.