s other sorts of produce offered for sale--wool,
undressed sheepskins, sticks for firewood, onions and vegetable
produce, and considerable quantities of honeycomb; while the sellers
of scythes, whetstones, caps, and articles of dress, seemed to meet
with a ready sale for their wares, arranged on stalls in the open
space in front of the church. Altogether, the queer collection of
beasts and their drivers, who were to be seen drinking together
greedily and promiscuously from the fountains in the market-place; the
steep streets, crowded with lean goats and cows and pigs, and their
buyers and sellers; the braying of donkeys and the shrieking of
chafferers, with here and there a goitred dwarf of hideous aspect,
presented a picture of an Alpine mountain fair, which, once seen, is
not readily forgotten.

There is a similar fair held at the village of La Bessie, before
mentioned, a little higher up the Durance, on the road to Briancon;
but it is held only once a year, at the end of October, when the
inhabitants of Dormilhouse come down in a body to lay in their stock
of necessaries for the winter. "There then arrives," says M. Albert,
"a caravan of about the most singular character that can be imagined.
It consists of nearly the whole population of the mountain hamlet, who
resort thither to supply themselves with the articles required for
family use during the winter, such as leather, lint, salt, and oil.
These poor mountaineers are provided with very little money, and, to
procure the necessary commodities, they have recourse to barter, the
most ancient and primitive method of conducting trade. Hence they
bring with them rye, barley, pigs, lambs, chamois skins and horns, and
the produce of their knitting during the past year, to exchange for
the required articles, with which they set out homeward, laden as they
had come."

* * * * *

The same circumstances which have concurred in making Guillestre the
seat of the principal fair of the valleys, led Felix Neff to regard it
as an important centre of missionary operations amongst the Vaudois.
In nearly all the mountain villages in its neighbourhood descendants
of the ancient Vaudois are to be found, sometimes in the most remote
and inaccessible places, whither they had fled in the times of the
persecutions. Thus at Vars, a mountain hamlet up the torrent Rioubel,
about nine miles from Guillestre, there is a little Christian
community, which, though