to enter.  She would take no refusal of her offer to fetch us grapes, and ran all the way to and from her vineyard on the opposite hillside, returning in an incredibly short time, scarcely out of breath, and carrying a basket heavy with great white and purple clusters.  As she stood watching with delight our appreciation of her produce—­the only sweet and luscious grapes, by the way, that we found throughout the autumn in that land of vines—­she talked frankly of her religious vicissitudes, summing up as follows:  “The priests used to say to me that I had turned Protestant because that is an easier religion than the Roman Catholic.  But I have not found it so at all. Il est beaucoup plus facile de me confesser que de me corriger.” Presently another woman came up the hill, bending painfully under the weight of two water-pails hanging from the ends of a yoke that rested on her shoulders.  “Ah,” said our hostess, “if they would but let us build the aqueduct, we should not have that ugly work to do.”  And then we learned that among the small minority of Roman Catholics left in the village, to care for whom, as soon as it was found a wolf had entered the fold, a priest arrived promptly enough, there prevail the wildest superstitions concerning the Protestants.  Among many improvements introduced by the latter an aqueduct had been planned to furnish the hamlet with wholesome water.  The project was defeated by the opposition of the Roman Catholics, who considered it a scheme for poisoning them en masse.  It was here that we heard for the first time the epithet Huguenots applied as a term of reproach and derision to the Protestants.  Afterward, in regions where Protestants have a history of centuries, we found it commonly used in the same way.

Our visit to Notre Dame des Commiers was like reading a living page of early Reformation history, and the whole neighborhood made a fitting stage for such a reproduction.  Some six or seven miles from Grenoble we passed the restored but still, in parts at least, historic chateau of Lesdiguieres at Vizille.  Nearer our mountain-village we stopped to admire an ivy-covered bit of tower-ruin, associated by a grim tradition with the same Dauphine hero.  A prisoner confined here by the apostate constable had, says the legend, a lady true who came every night and clasped her lover’s hand stretched out to her between the bars of his dungeon window.  Lesdiguieres discovered the rendezvous, and the spot is still pointed out where his soldier was stationed one fatal night to chop off the hand that sought its accustomed pledge.  The historical associations of our excursion were, indeed, somewhat confused, but a fresh feature was added to its interest by the departure, which we chanced to witness, of Monsieur Thiers from the Chateau de Vizille, now occupied by Casimir Perier, whom the ex-president had been visiting.