St. Maurice and Lazarus from the king of Sardinia.
In 1850 he married a Vaudoise. In 1862 he dies among the people he had so
long loved and served, and is buried at La Torre, amid the profoundest
grief and deepest veneration of the whole population.

FOOTNOTES:

[I] _Narrative of an Excursion to the Mountains of Piedmont in the year
1823._ By WILLIAM STEPHEN GILLY. 2nd Ed. C. and J. Rivington.

CHAPTER XIV.

Our last chapter closed with a brief sketch of the life of Beckwith, so
that in the present I might be free to speak of the work done, without
interpolations as to the personal movements of him who was in several
respects the chief worker. To those who desire to read the full particulars
of General Beckwith's life, I very earnestly commend the deeply interesting
work of Pastor J. P. Meille, to whose pages I am greatly indebted.

Beckwith was early impressed with the conviction that God had
providentially preserved the Vaudois, that they might be the agents of
evangelizing Italy, through the political changes which were being wrought
in that country by means of the kingdom of Sardinia. He was the first to
recognize this important truth, and he never lost sight of it, either in
the motive which it supplied for his own efforts, or in the influence he
sought to bring to bear upon others. This belief in the mission of the
Vaudois quickened all his sympathies and guided all his plans. To turn to
these plans, one of the earliest was the improvement and extension of
primary education. Beckwith saw at once the value of the Quartier schools,
and he began to erect a better class of buildings for this purpose. First
of all he bore the whole expense, excepting the site; afterwards he paid
the cost of labour in erecting the buildings, but required the inhabitants
to supply material as well as site. He also oftentimes contributed largely
to augment the salary of the underpaid teachers. Some one hundred and
twenty buildings, commodious and well-situated, were the result of these
efforts.

But the improvement in the hamlet schools brought out more distinctly the
sad condition of the parish schools. To overcome difficulties, Beckwith
would say to the parish authorities, You need a better school and residence
for your teacher; if you will raise a thousand francs (about a fourth or
fifth, according to circumstances), I will supply the rest.

If this offer was accepted, the colonel generally made th