you see, all the trouble comes because she don't know you, and
won't know you, and thinks everything wrong about you. Now if one of you
will just take this money, and buy her a new Sunday gown, and take it to
her as if it was a gift you wanted to make her, that will bring her all
right, I know, and we shall have peace in the house!'

What Sister could resist such an appeal? The pious fraud was
perpetrated, and the worthy dame gave way along the whole line!

This working population of Val-des-Bois, when M. Harmel began his work
among them, it will be seen, was a fair type of the average working
populations of France in those parts of France where the influence of
Radicalism has been most potent, and the influence of the Church
weakest. There is another factory in the same commune now. There are
sixteen others within a radius of three French leagues, and the city of
Reims, with its population of nearly a hundred thousand souls, is within
half an hour of the place. All the disturbing currents of socialism, of
agrarianism, of indifferentism play about and upon the place constantly.
The Sunday ball is an institution still. The influence of the local
authorities during the last ten years has been thrown against the
Catholic associations, and therefore, from the nature of the case, in
favour of dissipation, debauchery, and disorder.

To see his work prosper in a soil so unpropitious and amid such hostile
circumstances might well have quickened the faith of a man much colder
and more sceptical than M. Harmel.

In 1861, as I have said, not one workman could be found at Val-des-Bois
who dared to go to mass. In 1867, at the request of forty of his
workmen, M. Harmel assisted them in drawing up the statutes and
arranging the programme of a Catholic Working-Men's Club. The initiative
came from them. No pressure of any sort or kind was put upon them to
take it. It was the free outcome of the influence exerted upon them by
the example of the Harmel family and by the religious and charitable
work which the Sisters and the priests had been doing at Val-des-Bois.
Within a year the club doubled its membership. When the invasion came,
in 1870, it was an established institution.

'M. Harmel planted his Christians at Val-des-Bois,' said to me one of
the most interesting men I met at Reims, 'as our vine-growers in
Champagne plant their vines. It is one of the mysteries of our
viticulture that the grapes which yield our most delicate and