ambition to be to his people such a guide and helper as the pastor of
Ban de la Roche had been to the peasants of the Vosges.

Neff was not long in discovering that his work must begin with the most
elementary instruction. Generally, the people were ignorant of any
language but their native patois. Up to this period their schoolmasters,
paid at the rate of twenty-five francs a year, had been peasants like
themselves. Their only time for study was such of the year as was not
needed for the tilling of the niggardly soil or spent in the care of the
flocks. And even the little they were able to learn was easily lost on
account of the scarcity of books. Neff first addressed himself to
learning the patois, and then, as he went from village to village, made
ordinary teaching a part of his pastoral functions. At the beginning of
his second winter he resolved to undertake the training of teachers. "I
foresaw," he writes, "that the truth which I had been permitted to
preach would not only not spread, but might even be lost, unless
something should be done to promote its continuance." Accordingly, for
five months he relinquished the more congenial general work of his
parish and devoted himself to a normal school at Dourmillouse. One
reason for planting it there was the inaccessibility of the place and
its consequent freedom from distraction. More than twenty young men from
other villages cheerfully submitted to the long confinement in this
ice-bound fastness, and the people of Dourmillouse were glad to make
room in their huts for the new-comers, and to add to the supplies
brought by them their own scanty stores.

The following winter, his third in the High Alps, Neff again opened this
school, dividing its care, however, with one of his most capable pupils
of the previous year, and paying occasional visits to other parts of his
parish. But now his health, never robust, began to give way under the