and take up his residence at the worst season
of the year, in the midst of the ice and frightful rocks of Dormilleuse.
But he was sensible of the importance of the work, and, without any
hesitation, he joined our party at the beginning of November. The short
space of time which we had before us, rendered every moment precious. We
divided the day into three parts. The first was from sunrise to eleven
o'clock, when we breakfasted. The second from noon to sunset, when we
supped. The third from supper till ten or eleven o'clock at night,
making in all fourteen or fifteen hours of study in the twenty-four.
We devoted much of this time to lessons in reading, which the wretched
manner in which they had been taught, their detestable accent, and
strange tone of voice, rendered a most necessary, but tiresome duty.
The grammar, too, of which not one of them had the least idea, occupied
much of our time. People 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 familiarized,
find in learning this branch of science. There is scarcely any way
of conveying the meaning of it to them. All the usual terms and
definitions, and the means which are commonly employed in schools, are
utterly unintelligible here. But the curious and novel devices which
must be employed, have this advantage,--that they exercise their
understanding, and help to form their judgment. Dictation was one of
the methods to which I had recourse: without it they would have made no
progress in grammar and orthography; but they wrote so miserably and
slowly, that this consumed a great portion of valuable time. Observing
that they were ignorant of the signification of a great number of French
words, of constant use and recurrence, I made a selection from the
vocabulary, and I set them to write down in little copy-books,[14] words
which were in most frequent use; but the explanations contained in the
dictionary were not enough, and I was obliged to rack my brain for new
and brief definitions which they could understand, and to make them
transcribe these. Arithmetic was another branch of knowledge which
required many a weary hour. Geography was considered a matter of
recreation after dinner: and they pored over the maps with a feeling of
delight and amusement, which was quite new to them. I also busied myself
in giving them some notions of the sphere,