and their work in the fields, and flocked round me to entreat me to preach to them. The same at Frassynière, Violin, and Dormilleuse. I pleaded my imperfect knowledge of French, and they reluctantly gave up the point.

The scene was overpowering. We had been deeply moved at Val Queiras, but the continued excitement, added to the fatigue, was too much for our spirits, and we felt the consequences severely.

We did not sleep at Dormilleuse-in truth there was not a place where we could have laid us down with any hope of repose. We took up our lodging at La Bressie, a village near the Durance.

This visit to the Protestants of Dormilleuse, and of the valleys of Queiras and Frassynière, I may pronounce to have been intensely interesting, as well as instructive. It confirmed my belief, that, when the primitive Churches were supplanted by the Roman Church in the plains, there were branches of the old stock which still flourished in the remote mountain hamlets. Some few of these have survived. But the sight of them, and of the scattered settlements of the Waldensian remnant in Dauphiné, has left me in greater admiration than before, when I reflect that the Church of the Valleys, and its fifteen united parishes, should have been able, not only to escape extermination, but to present a front, and to make conditions for themselves, and to succeed in their demands of being

recognised as an independent, organised, and regularly constituted Church, through the most direful ages of intolerance, and in the very midst of enemies leagued to destroy it. The non-conformists of Dauphiné dwelt in a country which was quite as defensible as the valleys of Luserna, San Martino, and Perosa:-but Dormilleuse is the only village there, which never received a Romish priest, and whose inhabitants would not conform even outwardly. The shield of God is the first and principal cause to which we attribute the protection of the Vaudois of Piemont; but the secondary cause is the obligation of solemn treaties, by which the princes of the house of Savoy pledged themselves, on their first possession of the territory, and from time to time afterwards, to respect the personal and religious rights of the "Men of the Valleys;" of men who resisted the jurisdiction of Rome, and who were members of an ancient independent Church, long before the house of Savoy reigned in Piemont. These were the treaties, as I have maintained in the Introduction, by which the dukes of Savoy were bound to tolerate them, "astretti tolerarli," and were prevented from eradicating them '.

1 See page 73.

In the course of my journey through the valleys of Queiras and Frassynière, I enquired in vain for MSS. and ancient documents. Not a paper of the least value did I see.

CHAPTER XV.

Return to Piemont by Briançon and the Pass of Mont GenevreCesane The Valley of Pragela-The perfidy of Louis XIV. and Victor Amadée in the extermination of the Waldenses of Val Pragela-The Col Albergian-Fenestrelle-M. Coucourde -Bartholomew Coucourde,—and anecdotes of the late Moderator Peyrano.

JULY 30. Instead of returning to Piemont by the way we came, and re-crossing the Col de la Croix, we determined to take the route to Briançon, Cesane, and Fenestrelle, for the purpose of seeing the pass of Mont Genevre, and the remains of the old Roman road over the Cottian Alps', and of visiting the valley of Pragela, where there were six Waldensian churches, till the exterminating edict of Victor Amadée completed the devastation which Louis XIV. had begun.

Our track from La Bressie, where the Durance "wide and fierce came roaring by," was in the line of road laid down in the Itinerary of Antonine; but I could not satisfy myself that the distances are there correctly given. Rama is stated in the

Itinerary to be eighteen miles from Brigantio (Briançon), but we were not three hours in walking from Bouches, the village which is directly opposite to the ancient station, said to be the Rama of the Romans, to Briançon. Rama, in the same Table of Antonine, appears to be nearly equidistant from Briançon and Embrun-whereas, according to present measurement, the difference is very great.

Near Saint Martin a peasant accosted us, and told us of the terrors of a glacier near by, where the cold is so intense, that any body who should venture to cross it would die. In the times of Hannibal, Polybius, and Livy, the ignorant natives entertained strangers with the same marvellous tales of the inaccessibility of the snowy mountains in these regions.

The approach to Briançon is magnificent. The town and its main fortress occupy a fine position on a rock, at the bottom of which the Durance rolls his foaming waters; and on the opposite side of the river, a line of bastions and battlemented walls extent to the summit of a mountain.

It was here that hundreds of English prisoners of war were detained during the reign of Napoleon, and many a heart sickened under the rigours of captivity, and the disappointment of hope deferred, amidst some of the most glorious scenes in nature,

We did not make any stay at Briançon. The archives of the Burgundian kingdom, and records

that would have served to illustrate the military history of the Cottian Alps, were formerly preserved in this frontier keep; but when the duke of Savoy burnt the town in one of the forays of 1692, they were all destroyed in the conflagration. Travellers are too much disposed to run in each others' footsteps, and to confine their attention to the well known regions of the Alps; but it would amply repay the tourist to make Briançon his head-quarters, and to explore from thence the attractive and romantic country which lies within a day's journey of it. The scenery, as described by Brockedon and others, is of the very first description. The historian would gather information relative to some of the most interesting events in border history, and the naturalist endless amusement in the quarries and forests. There are no less than 2,700 species of aromatic and other plants to be found in the vicinity of the Durance. The sportsman would not only find partridges and pheasants, but might occupy his time in the nobler pursuit of the wolf, the bear, and the chamois.

An event which occurred near Briançon will give some notion of the incidents, which emblazon mountain life and field sports in these regions.

A peasant, with his wife and three children, had taken up his summer quarters in a châlet, and was depasturing his flocks on one of the rich Alps which overhang the Durance. The oldest boy