r Charpiot and his wife
at Pallons. The village is a mere group of Alpine huts, and the only
chance of shelter was at the presbytery. So much we had little doubt of
finding there, but we counted as little upon the warm and graceful
hospitality which greeted our application. And when our nationality
transpired it added new zest to the good-will of our host and hostess.
We were their first Transatlantic guests.

The valley of Fressiniere, at the entrance of which Pallons lies, is the
centre of those special interests which first prompted the pilgrimage I
am recording. With it are specially associated the earliest traditions
of Protestantism in France, and here Felix Neff spent the larger part of
his brief but memorable career as pastor in the High Alps. I suppose the
exact antiquity of the Protestants of Dauphine is one of the historical
problems that still await their final solution. The older chronicles
provide them with what seems an unbroken line of descent from the second
century, when Irenaeus preached in Lyons and Vienne. Christian fugitives
from those cities during the persecution of Marcus Aurelius may, it is
alleged, have taken refuge in the not distant Dauphine mountains, and
have transmitted to their descendants the primitive faith they had
received. But modern criticism has so seriously undermined, as
practically to have demolished, this imposing genealogical structure. It
is not denied that voices of more or less emphatic protest against Rome
made themselves heard among these mountains and the neighboring Cottian
Alps during the earlier centuries. Can such voices be held to represent
any definitely-organized dissentient body of more remote origin than the
Poor Men of Lyons, led by Peter Waldo in 1172? The latest researches
give an apparently final negative answer to this question. At least,
however, it is beyond dispute that long before the Reformation the
valleys of the High Alps were a retreat for persecuted schismatics whose
opposition to the Romish Church anticipated Protestantism. As early as
the fifteenth century a papal bull denounced as _inveterate_ the
heretics of Dauphine and Provence, and about the middle of the next
century delegates from those provinces appeared at the first national
Protestant synod in France with the following declaration: "We consent
to merge in the common cause, but we require no Reformation, for our
forefathers and ourselves have ever disclaimed the corruptions of the
churc