ent
two winters in Nice. Now he was here as the assistant of the
superannuated pastor of Villeneuve, who had a salary of $600 a year from
the Government; but how little our preacher had I dare not imagine, or
what the pastor of the Free Church was paid by his parishioners. M.
P---- was a man of culture far above that of the average New England
country minister of this day; probably he was more like a New England
minister of the past, but with more of the air of the world. He wore the
Genevan bands and gown, and represented in that tabernacle of the
ancient faith the triumph of "the Religion" with an effectiveness that
was heightened by the hectic brightness of his gentle, spiritual eyes;
and he preached a beautiful sermon from the beautiful text, "Suffer
little children," teaching us that they were the types, not the models,
of Christian perfection. There was first a prayer, which he read; then a
hymn, and one of the Psalms; then the sermon, very simply and decorously
delivered; then another hymn, and prayer. Here, and often again in
Switzerland, the New England that is past or passing was recalled to me;
these Swiss are like the people of our hill country in their faith, as
well as their hard, laborious lives; only they sang with sweeter voices
than our women.

The wood-carving of the chapel, which must have been of the fourteenth
century or earlier, was delightfully grotesque, and all the queerer for
its contrast with the Protestant, the Calvinistic, whitewash which one
of our fellow-boarders found here in the chapel and elsewhere in the
castle _un peu vulgaire_--as if he were a Boston man. But the whole
place was very clean, and up the corner of one of the courts ran a strip
of Virginia-creeper, which the Swiss call the Canada vine, blood-red
with autumn. There was also a rose-tree sixty years old stretching its
arms abroad, over the ancient masonry, and feeling itself still young in
that sheltered place.

We saw it when we came later to do the whole castle, and to revere the
dungeon where Bonivard wore his _vionnet_ in the rock. I will not
trouble the reader with much about the Hall of Justice and the Chamber
of Tortures opening out of it, with the pulley for the rack formerly
used in cross-questioning prisoners. These places were very interesting,
and so were the bedchambers of the duke and duchess, and the great Hall
of the Knights. The wells or pits, armed round with knife points,
against which the prisoner str