Neff, however, found a little of the leaven of French levity in his mountaineers. The inhabitants of the High Alps,' he says, like those of the other provinces of France, have very little gravity; and though they are more pious than others, they are gay and full of humour, so much so that very often a sally of wit or a bon mot will burst out very unseasonably, and excite a laugh in the midst of the most serious conversation. It is necessary to be on one's guard, or be in danger of being disconcerted every moment.' He complains that the only person in his parish whose education gave him a claim to the title of Monsieur, though he was a young man of good sense, the very antipodes to a petitmaître, and moreover a zealous Protestant, was notwithstanding, ‘Frenchman like, not yet serious enough to answer his views as a Christian.' Good Bishop Hacket's motto, Serve God and be cheerful,' would probably have called from Neff rather a pitying sigh, than a smile of approbation. In another respect his people differed widely from their countrymen; the women were treated with such disregard among them, that they never sat at table with their husbands or brothers, but stood behind them, and received morsels from their hands with obeisance and profound reverence.' Nefftaught the men better manners.' That the women were, for the most part, 'ignorant and confined in their notions through the whole of this country' was to be expected, for how should they have been otherwise? In the frontier villages he used to perform service in a barn or stable, for want of a better place. The people of two of these poor hamlets willingly taxed themselves and built a neat little church twenty-seven feet long, by twenty feet wide, and thus added one more to the Protestant sanctuaries of God in this department.' Materials, such as the country afforded, and labour, were easily supplied; the cost in money was 600 francs (24/.), and onehalf of that still remained at Neff's death, as a debt upon the building, which it would be long before the twenty-five poor families of these hamlets could discharge. Another temple, as the Protestants choose to call their churches in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic places of worship, was built in Val Fressinière; and when the external building was completed, 'not a soul there, either workmen or others, knew how to give the interior the proper air and character of a house of worship. To fashion and place the pulpit, to plan and arrange the seats, and not only to direct and to superintend, but to labour with the smiths and carpenters, so called, was the pastor's occupation, when he could spare time from his preaching, and his catechizing, and his visiting from hamlet to hamlet, and from house to house. Nothing was too much, too great, or too little for this citizen of two worlds; this man of God, this servant of servants. From break of day to midnight he was toiling, in one way or other, with unyielding perseverance, and as the season had now permitted some of his catechumens to return to their labours, the young men to the fields, or their slate quarries, and the young women to their flocks, in the few sunny corners, where a thaw had taken place, his evening expositions began later, and were extended far into the night. The ardour of the teacher and his scholars seemed to be equal: both stole from their hours of rest: and the long glare of blazing pine-wood torches, and the shouting of voices, directing the footsteps of the timid, or of the tottering, often broke the silence and the darkness of the night in those wild glens, and announced that the pastor's catechumens were finding their way home from one hamlet to another, after the sacred lessons that followed upon the manual labours of the day.'—pp. 155, 156. No better place for a school-room than a dark and dirty stable could be found in Dormilleuse, and this is not a climate where the teacher could take his seat on a sunny bank, or under a tree, and gather his scholars round him. Warmth and shelter were required; and when the civilizer of this forlorn region had constructed his aqueduct, fitted up his church, and introduced his agricultural improvements, he set about building a school. His influence was now so well established, that every family in this hamlet consented to furnish a man who should work under his direction. 'Having first marked out the spot with line and plummet, and levelled the ground, he marched at the head of his company to the torrent, and selected stones fit for the building. The pastor placed one of the heaviest upon his own shoulders-the others did the same, and away they went with their burthens, toiling up the steep acclivity, till they reached the site of the proposed building. This labour was continued until the materials were all ready at hand; the walls then began to rise, and in one week from the first commencement, the exterior masonry work was completed, and the roof was put upon the room. The windows, chimney, door, tables, and seats, were not long before they also were finished. A convenient stove added its accommodation to the apartment, and Dormilleuse, for the first time probably in its history, saw a public school-room erected, and the process of instruction conducted with all possible regularity and comfort. I had the satisfaction of visiting and inspecting this monument of Neff's judicious exertions for his dear Dormilleusians-but it was a melancholy pleasure. The shape, the dimensions, the materials of the room, the chair on which he sat, the floor which had been laid in part by his own hands, the window-frame and desks, at which he had worked with cheerful alacrity, were all objects of intense interest, and I gazed on these relics of "the Apostle of the Alps," with feelings little short of veneration. It was here that he sacrificed his life. The severe winters of 1826-7, and the unremitted attention which he paip to his duties, more especially to those of his school-room, were his death-blow.'-p. 253. But But this was among the most useful of his labours,-Mr. Gilly calls it his crowning work.' Neff did not deceive himself; he saw too surely that all which he had done in spiritual instruction was kept up by his presence and personal exertions, and that unless provision were made for the maintenance of the gospel here, it not only would not spread, but was in danger of being lost. So he resolved to become a training-master, and form a winter school for some of the most intelligent and well-disposed young men of the different villages in his great parish. Lamentably ignorant as they were, many of them had chosen to become teachers, and used to leave their mountain homes in the winter to open schools in the warmer and more sheltered hamlets, and then return in spring and cultivate their own little heritages. Where there was so strong a desire of learning themselves while they were teaching others, Neff's proposal was most joyfully accepted; but how were these poor mountaineers to support the cost? for their winter migration had the further end of subsistence in view. Funds were supplied by some of his friends in Geneva, and Mr. Gilly believes that the lady who favoured him with Neff's journal for the compilation of this most interesting volume, was greatly instrumental in raising money for him in England. There was another difficulty; no one in France can lawfully exercise the office of a schoolmaster without a license, and no license can be granted either to a foreigner or a pastor. It was necessary, therefore, to obtain an assistant, not merely that he might be at liberty to look after the rest of his diocese (for so the parish might, for its extent, be called), but that he might thus be saved from any molestation. One was found, who, at no slight sacrifice of his own concerns, answered the invitation, and came at the worst season of the year, when winter was beginning, to take up his residence in the midst of the ice and frightful rocks of Dormilleuse.! As it was only the winter which the students could spare for this occupation, they suffered no time to be lost. They divided the day into three parts: from sunrise till eleven, when they breakfasted; from noon to sunset when they supped (dinner caret, like the vocative in old grammars); and from supper till ten or eleven at night, fourteen or fifteen hours of study in all. Much of their time was employed in unteaching them to read; the wretched manner in which they had been taught, their detestable accent, and strange tone of voice,' rendering this, though a most tiresome, a most necessary duty. Grammar too, of which not one of them had the least idea,' occupied much of their time. 'People,' says Neff, who have been brought up in towns, can have no conception of the difficulty, which mountaineers and rustics, whose ideas are confined to those objects only to which they have been been familiarized, find in learning this branch of science. There is scarcely any way of conveying the meaning of it to them.' He might have been asked, whether, except in the case of learning a new language, there is any occasion for conveying it? Spelling was weary work; but it is remarkable that arithmetic also seems to have excited no pleasurable excitement of intellect. Geography they delighted in; and when Neff gave them some notions of the sphere, and of the form and motion of the earth, of the seasons, and the climates, and of the heavenly bodies,' every thing was as novel to them as it would have been to the South Sea islanders. Up to this time,' says he, I had been astonished by the little interest they took, Christian-minded as they were, on the subject of Christian missions; but when they began to have some idea of geography, I discovered that their former ignorance of this science, and of the very existence of many foreign nations in distant quarters of the globe, was the cause of such indifference. As soon as they began to learn who the people are who require to have the gospel preached to them, and in what part of the globe they dwell, they felt the same concern for the circulation of the gospel that other Christians entertained. These new acquirements, in fact, enlarged their spirit, made new creatures of them, and seemed to triple their very existence.' Neff proceeded with them so far as to give some lectures on geometry, and this too produced a happy moral developement.' Lessons in music formed part of the evening employment, for from the beginning of his career he had given instructions in psalmody, with that intuitive knowledge of human nature,' says his biographer, and of the chords by which it is moved, that so eminently distinguished him; and this added very substantially both to his own influence and to the number of those who expressed a desire to enrol themselves in his little company of hearers and learners. During his probationary ministry, he used to prolong his meetings by singing till a late hour in the evening, that his people might not be able to go to the dances.' Most of the young adults were present at such lessons as they could understand; to them, indeed, it supplied the want of any other amusement; and as there was a separate instructor for the children, the only persons for whom no instruction had been provided were the young women and the elder girls. Neff proposed, therefore, that they should assemble of an evening in the school-room which the children occupied by day; and then some of his students gave them lessons in reading and writing, while he superintended all, and carried on the education of teachers and pupils at the same time. It is an observation of Neff's, that when young women have an ear ear and love music, it is always an advantage for a minister to find such aid; and his own experience had taught him that, with this help, he might always hope for some degree of success. The church of England has lost much by its indolent-not to say scandalous-neglect of psalmody; and many of its hostile sects have gained as much by their attention to it. But in nothing was this excellent man more wise than in his clear perception,-to use Mr. Gilly's words, that the spiritual condition of his church would be improved, by laying a foundation for the high and holy things of the gospel, with the precious stones of commonplace information.' He prepared the minds of his flock for the reception and comprehension of sacred truths, by giving them an insight into those secrets of knowledge, which some are weak enough to imagine are too profound for the simple, and too attractive for the religious.' He led his scholars methodically and patiently into the pleasant paths of music, geography, history, and astronomy.' 'His mind,' says his biographer, was too enlarged to fear that he should be teaching his peasant boys too much. It was his aim to show what a variety of enjoyments may be extracted out of knowledge; and that even the shepherd and the goatherd of the mountain side will be all the happier and better for every piece of solid information that he can acquire.' Woe be to those who would separate knowledge and religion, whether their motive originate in the feeble fear of the one, or the wicked dislike of the other! The costs of this winter academy for four months, including candles, paper and ink, the salary of an assistant-master, and food for seventeen students who came from a distance (there were eight from the immediate neighbourhood, and these of course boarded at home), amounted to about 227. 10s.; rather more than twothirds of which Neff was able to replace, because some of the pupils made up their share of the expenses, and even the poorest furnished their quota of bread. This,' says the biographer, is a statement which will excite some wonder in the minds of many readers, who are not aware how much good may be done at a small cost, when the stream of bounty is made to pass through proper channels.' 6 'We cannot but feel respect for students, who willingly shut themselves up amidst the most comfortless scenes in nature, and submitted to the severity of not less than fourteen hours of hard study a day, where the only recreation was to go from dryer lessons to lectures in geography and music. It was a long probation of hardship. Their fare was in strict accordance with the rest of their situation. It consisted of a store of salted meat, and rye bread, which had been baked in autumn, and when they came to use it, was so hard, that it required to be chopped up with hatchets, and to be moistened with hot water. Meal and flour will not keep in this mountain atmosphere, but would become mouldy, |