Roman Catholic fellow-subjects. I was shown in M. Malan's banking office the Bible depot, and was gratified to find that the sales which were made to applicants only had during the past year amounted to a thousand copies. Evening meetings were held every day of the week, in various parts of Turin, at which the Bible was read, and points of controversy betwixt Christianity and Romanism eagerly discussed. The Rev. M. Meille, the able editor of the Buona Novella—a paper then just starting—informed me that not fewer than ninety persons had been present at the meeting superintended by him the night before. These week-day assemblages, as well as the Sabbath audiences, were of a very miscellaneous character—Vaudois, who had come to Turin to be servants, for, prior to the revolution, they could be nothing else; Piedmontese tradesmen; Swiss, Germans, and Italian refugees, to whom three pastors ministered—one in French, one in German, and a third in the Italian tongue. There were then not fewer than ten re-unions every week in Turin. The idea, too, had been started of taking advantage of the workmen's clubs for the propagation of the gospel. A network of such societies covered northern and central Italy. The clubs in Turin corresponded with those in Genoa, Alessandria, and all the principal towns of Piedmont; and these again with similar clubs in central Italy; and any new theory or doctrine introduced into one soon made the round of all. The plan adopted was to send evangelical workmen into these clubs, who were listened to as they propounded the new plan of justification by faith. The clubs in Turin were first leavened with the gospel; thence it was extended to Genoa, and gradually also to central Italy. While the prolétaires in France were discussing the claims of labour, the workmen in Piedmont were canvassing the doctrines of the New Testament; and hence the difference betwixt the two countries.
It was now drawing towards sunset, and I purposed enjoying the twilight—delicious in all climates, but especially in Italy—on the terrace of the College or Monastery of the Capuchins. This monastery stands on the Collina, a romantic height on the south of Turin, washed by the Po, with villas and temples on its crest and summits. I took my way through the noble street that leads southwards, halting at the book-stalls, and picking out of their heaps of rubbish an Italian copy of the Catechism of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. The Collina was all in a blaze; the windows of the Palazzo Regina glittered in the setting beams; and the dome of the Superga shone like gold. Crossing the Po, I ascended by the winding avenue of shady acacias, which are planted there to protect the cowled heads of the fathers from the noonday sun. One of the monks was winding his way up hill, at a pace which gave me full opportunity of observing him. A little black cap covered his scalp; his round bullet-head, which bristled with short, thick-set hairs, joined on, by a neck of considerably more than the average girth, to shoulders of Atlantean dimensions. His body was enveloped in a coarse brown mantle, which descended to his calves, and was gathered round his middle with a slender white cord. His naked feet were thrust into sandals. The features of the "religious" were coarse and swollen; and he strode up hill before me with a gait which would have made a peaceful man, had he met him on a roadside in Scotland, give him a wide offing. Parties of soldiers wounded in the late campaign were sauntering in the square of the monastery, or looking over the low wall at the city beneath. Their pale and sickly looks formed a striking contrast to the athletic forms of the full-fed monks. It was inexplicable to me, that the youth of Sardinia, immature and raw, should be drafted into the army, while such an amount of thews and sinews as this monastery, and hundreds more, contained, should be allowed to run to waste, or worse. If but for their health, the monks should be compelled to fight the next campaign.
The sun went down. Long horizontal shafts of golden light shot through amidst the Alps; their snows glittered with a dazzling whiteness: whiteness is a weak term;—it was a brilliant and lustrous glory, like that of light itself. Anon a crimson blush ran along the chain. It faded; it came again. A wall of burning peaks, from two to three hundred miles in length, rose along the horizon. Eve, with her purple shadows, drew on; and I left the mountains under a sky of vermilion, with Monte Viso covering with its shadow the honoured dust that sleeps around it, and pointing with its stony finger to that sky whither the spirits of the martyred Vaudois have now ascended. It seemed to say, "Come and see."
CHAPTER IV.
STRUCTURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE VAUDOIS VALLEYS.
Journey to "Valleys"—Dinner at Pignerolo—Grandeur of Scenery—Associations—Bicherasio—Procession of Santissimo—Connection betwixt the History and the Country of the Vaudois—The Three Valleys of Martino, Angrona, and Lucerna—Their Arrangement—Strength—Fertility—La Tour—The Castelluzzo—Scenery of the Val Lucerna—The Manna of the Waldenses—Populousness of the Valleys—Variety of Productions—The Roman Flood and the Vaudois Ark.
The Valleys of the Vaudois lie about thirty miles to the south-west of Turin. The road thither it is scarce possible to miss. Keeping the lofty and pyramidal summit of Monte Viso in your eye, you go straight on, in a line parallel with the Alps, along the valley of the Po, which is but a prolongation of the great plain of Lombardy. On my way down to these valleys, I observed on the roadside numerous little temples, which the natives, in true Pagan fashion, had erected to their deities. The niches of these temples were filled with Madonnas, crucifixes, and saints, gaunt and grizzly, with unlighted candles stuck before them, or rude paintings and tinsel baubles hung up as votive offerings. The signboards—especially those of the wine venders—were exceedingly religious. They displayed, for the most part, a bizarre painting of the Virgin, and occasionally of the Pope; and not unfrequently underneath these personages were a company of heretics, such as those I was going to visit, sweltering in flames. Were a Protestant vintner to sell his ale beneath a picture of Catholics burning in hell, I fear we should never hear the last of it. But I must say, that these pictures seemed the production of past times. They were one and all sorely faded, as if their owners were beginning to be somewhat ashamed of them, or lacked zeal to repair them. The conducteur of the stage had an Italian translation of Mr. Gladstone's well-known pamphlet on Naples in his hand, which then covered all the book-stalls in Turin, and was read by every one. This led to a lively discussion on the subject of the Church, between him and two fellow-travellers, to whom I had been introduced at starting, as Waldenses. I observed that, although he appeared to come off but second best in the controversy, he bore all with unruffled humour, as if not unwilling to be beaten. At length, after a ride of twenty miles over the plain, in which the husbandman, with plough as old in its form as the Georgics, was turning up a soil rich, black, and glossy as the raven's wing, we arrived at Pignerolo, a town on the borders of the Vaudois land.
The two Vaudois and myself adjourned to the hotel to dine. Even in this we had an instance of changed times. In this very town of Pignerolo a law had been in existence, and was not long repealed, forbidding, under severe penalties, any one to give meat or drink to a Vaudois. The "Valleys" were only ten miles distant, and we agreed to walk thither on foot. Indeed, all such spots must be so visited, if one would feel their full influence. Leaving Pignerolo, the road began to draw into the bosom of the mountains, and the scenery became grander at every step. On the right rose the hills of the Vaudois, with knolls glittering with woods and cottages scattered at their feet. On the left, long reaches of the Po, meandering through pasturages and vineyards, gleamed out golden in the western sun. The scenery reminded me much of the Highlands at Comrie, only it was on a scale of richness and magnificence unknown to Scotland.
After advancing a few miles, I chanced to turn and look back. The change the mountains had undergone struck me much. A division of Alps, tall and cloud-capped, appeared to have broken off from the main army, and to have come marching into the plain; and while the mountains were closing in upon us behind, they appeared to be falling back in front, and arranging themselves into the segment of a vast circle. A magnificent amphitheatre had risen noiselessly around us. On all sides save the south, where a reach of the valley was still visible, the eye met only a lofty wall of mountains, hung in a rich and gorgeous tapestry of bright green pasturages and shady pine-forests, with the frequent sunlight gleam of white chalets. The snows of their summits were veiled in masses of cloud, which the southerly winds were bringing up upon them from the Mediterranean. I seemed to have entered some stately temple—a