ns, and lost a leg while serving under him at the battle of
Waterloo. Hence the designation of him by a Roman Catholic bishop in
an article published by him in one of the Italian journals, as "the
adventurer with the wooden leg."

The general's attention was first attracted to the subject of the
Vaudois in the following curiously accidental way. Being a regular
visitor at Apsley House, he called on the Duke one morning, and,
finding him engaged, he strolled into the library to spend an idle
half-hour among the books. The first he took up was Dr. Gilly's
"Narrative," and what he read excited so lively an interest in his
mind that he went direct to his bookseller and ordered all the
publications relative to the Vaudois Church that could be procured.

The general's zeal being thus fired, he set out shortly after on a
visit to the Piedmontese valleys. He returned to them again and again,
and at length settled at La Tour, where he devoted the remainder of
his life and a large portion of his fortune to the service of the
Vaudois Church and people. He organized a movement for the erection
of schools, of which not fewer than one hundred and twenty were
provided mainly through his instrumentality in different parts of the
valleys, besides restoring and enlarging the college at La Tour,
erecting the present commodious dwellings for the professors,
providing a superior school for the education of pastors' daughters,
and contributing towards the erection of churches wherever churches
were needed.

The general was so zealous a missionary, so eager for the propagation
of the Gospel, that some of his friends asked him why he did not
preach to the people. "No," said he; "men have their special gifts,
and mine is _a brick-and-mortar gift_." The general was satisfied to
go on as he had begun, helping to build schools, colleges, and
churches for the Vaudois, wherever most needed. His crowning work was
the erection of the grand block of buildings on the Viale del Re at
Turin, which not only includes a handsome and commodious Vaudois
church, but an English church, and a Vaudois hospital and schools,
erected at a cost of about fourteen thousand pounds, principally at
the cost of the general himself, generously aided by Mr. Brewin and
other English contributors.

Nor were the people ungrateful to their benefactor. "Let the name of
General Beckwith be blessed by all who pass this way," says an
inscription placed upon one of the many schoo