Dormilleuse, who were
growing up to womanhood, were now the only persons for whom a system of
instruction was unprovided. But these stood in as great need of it as
the others, and more particularly as most of them were now manifesting
Christian dispositions. I therefore proposed that they should assemble
of an evening in the room, which the children occupied during the day,
and I engaged some of my students to give them lessons in reading and
writing. We soon had twenty young women from fifteen to twenty-five
years of age in attendance, of whom two or three only had any notion of
writing, and not half of them could read a book of any difficulty. While
Ferdinand Martin was practising the rest of my students in music, I
myself and two of the most advanced, by turns, were employed in teaching
these young women, so that the whole routine of instruction went on
regularly, and I was thus able to exercise the future schoolmasters in
their destined profession, and both to observe their method of teaching,
and to improve it. I thus superintended teachers and scholars at the
same time.

It is quite impossible for those who have not seen the country, to
appreciate the devotedness to the Christian cause, which could induce
Neff to entertain even the thought of making the dreary and savage
Dormilleuse his own head quarters from November to April, and of
persuading others to be the companions of his dismal sojournment there.
I learn from a memorandum in his Journal, that the severity of that,
winter commenced early. "We have been in snow and ice since the first of
November, on this steep and rugged spot, whose aspect is more terrible
and severe than any thing can be supposed to be in France." He himself
was the native of a delightful soil and climate, and even some of the
mountaineers, whom he drew to that stern spot, were inhabitants of a
far less repulsive district, but had yet made it their custom to seek a
milder region than their own, during the inclemency of an Alpine winter.
To secure attendance and application, when once his students were
embarked in their undertaking, he selected this rock, where neither
amusement, nor other occupations, nor the possibility of frequent egress
or regress, could tempt them to interrupt their studies:--and he had
influence enough to induce them to commit themselves to a five months'
rigid confinement within a prison-house, as it were, walled up with ice
and snow.

It was a long probation of h