in
Grenoble who had lost most of his fortune by a bad speculation, though
enough of it yet remained to cause him to be looked upon in the village
as a wealthy man. It was M. Gravier who induced him to settle among
us. He built himself a comfortable house and helped me by uniting his
efforts to mine. He also laid out a farm, and broke up and cleaned some
of the waste land, and at this moment he has three chalets up above on
the mountain side. He has a large family. He dismissed the old registrar
and the clerk, and in their place installed better-educated men, who
worked far harder, moreover, than their predecessors had done. One
of the heads of these two new households started a distillery of
potato-spirit, and the other was a wool-washer; each combined these
occupations with his official work, and in this way two valuable
industries were created among us.

"Now that the Commune had some revenues of its own, no opposition was
raised in any quarter when they were spent on building a town-hall, with
a free school for elementary education in the building and accommodation
for a teacher. For this important post I had selected a poor priest who
had taken the oath, and had therefore been cast out by the department,
and who at last found a refuge among us for his old age. The
schoolmistress is a very worthy woman who had lost all that she had, and
was in great distress. We made up a nice little sum for her, and she
has just opened a boarding-school for girls to which the wealthy farmers
hereabouts are beginning to send their daughters.

"If so far, sir, I have been entitled to tell you the story of my own
doings as the chronicle of this little spot of earth, I have reached
the point where M. Janvier, the new parson, began to divide the work of
regeneration with me. He has been a second Fenelon, unknown beyond the
narrow limits of a country parish, and by some secret of his own has
infused a spirit of brotherliness and of charity among these folk that
has made them almost like one large family. M. Dufau, the justice of
the peace, was a late comer, but he in an equal degree deserves the
gratitude of the people here.

"I will put the whole position before you in figures that will make
it clearer than any words of mine. At this moment the Commune owns two
hundred acres of woodland, and a hundred and sixty acres of meadow.
Without running up the rates, we give a hundred crowns to supplement the
cure's stipend, we pay two hundred