end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and amicable
relations towards his God. Like my mountain Plymouth Brother, he knows
the Lord. His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic; it is the
poetry of the man's experience, the philosophy of the history of his
life. God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has appeared to
this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the ground and
essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds and dogmas by
authority, or proclaim a new religion with the sound of trumpets, if you
will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and will stubbornly
adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a Protestant, or a
Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible sense that a man is not a
woman, or a woman not a man. For he could not vary from his faith,
unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a strict and
not a conventional meaning, change his mind.



THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY


I was now drawing near to Cassagnas, a cluster of black roofs upon the
hillside, in this wild valley, among chestnut gardens, and looked upon in
the clear air by many rocky peaks. The road along the Mimente is yet
new, nor have the mountaineers recovered their surprise when the first
cart arrived at Cassagnas. But although it lay thus apart from the
current of men's business, this hamlet had already made a figure in the
history of France. Hard by, in caverns of the mountain, was one of the
five arsenals of the Camisards; where they laid up clothes and corn and
arms against necessity, forged bayonets and sabres, and made themselves
gunpowder with willow charcoal and saltpetre boiled in kettles. To the