incessant strain to which it was subjected. Early in the spring of 1829
he was forced to go to Geneva with the hope of recruiting. There, after
two years of suffering, the details of which are painful beyond
expression, he died at the age of thirty-one.

With our minds full of these memories we set out on the morning after
our arrival at Pallons, with Pastor Charpiot as guide, to explore the
valley of Fressinière and ascend to Dourmillouse. The immediate vicinity
of Pallons is fair and fertile, but a short walk up the course of an
impetuous torrent brought us to a narrow gorge, beyond which we found a
totally different region. Bare slopes of rock that looked grim even in
the sunny morning, and a waste valley-bottom, here of considerable
width, but sterile and bleak, made up the landscape. Its dreariness was
only increased by an occasional chalet standing beside a patch of limp
and discolored potato-vines. As we went on the scene grew more and more
gloomy. The tillage is in cleared spots not so large as the heaps of
stones that surround them, or on bits of practicable soil left by
land-slides in the midst of their hideous débris. The only trees are
dwarfish pollards, reduced to bare trunks with thin tufts of green atop
by the practice of stripping off the sprouts every two or three years to
make fodder for the goats. Midway up the valley we passed the village of
Violins. It seemed mournfully empty, and many of the houses were in
reality deserted. A shy, bright-faced fellow opened the little _temple_
for our inspection, and Pastor Charpiot reminded us how its interior was
not only planned by Neff, but in large measure his actual handiwork.
Half an hour further on our path led us through the hamlet of Minsas,
now entirely abandoned and in ruins. The desolation of the valley here
becomes appalling. On either hand sheer precipices of crumbling rock
rise above steep slopes of gravel and loose stones. The ground is strewn
thick with great boulders, many of which had left traces of their