Note (return) — NOTES OF A READER.

Dormilleuse was the spot which I chose for my scene of action, on account of its seclusion, and because its whole population is Protestant, and a local habitation was already provided here for the purpose. I reckoned at first that I should have about a dozen élèves; but finding that they were rapidly offering themselves, and would probably amount to double that number, at the least, I thought it right to engage an assistant, not only that I might be at liberty to go and look after my other churches and villages, but that I might not be exposed to any molestation, for in France nobody can lawfully exercise the office of a schoolmaster without a license, and this cannot be granted either to a foreigner or a pastor. For these reasons I applied to Ferdinand Martin, who was then pursuing his studies at Mens, to qualify himself for the institution of M. Olivier, in Paris. It was a great sacrifice on his part to interrupt his studies, and to lose the opportunity of an early admission to the institution; nor was it a small matter to ask him to come and take up his residence at the worst season of the year, in the midst of the ice and frightful rocks of Dormilleuse. But he was sensible of the importance of the work, and, without any hesitation, he joined our party at the beginning of November. The short space of time which we had before us, rendered every moment precious. We divided the day into three parts. The first was from sunrise to eleven o'clock, when we breakfasted. The second from noon to sunset, when we supped. The third from supper till ten or eleven o'clock at night, making in all fourteen or fifteen hours of study in the twenty-four. We devoted much of this time to lessons in reading, which the wretched manner in which they had been taught, their detestable accent, and strange tone of voice, rendered a most necessary, but tiresome duty. The grammar, too, of which not one of them had the least idea, occupied much of our time. People who have been brought up in towns, can have no conception of the difficulty which mountaineers and rustics, whose ideas are confined to those objects only to which they have been familiarized, find in learning this branch of science. There is scarcely any way of conveying the meaning of it to them. All the usual terms and definitions, and the means which are commonly employed in schools, are utterly unintelligible here. But the curious and novel devices which must be employed, have this advantage,—that they exercise their understanding, and help to form their judgment. Dictation was one of the methods to which I had recourse: without it they would have made no progress in grammar and orthography; but they wrote so miserably and slowly, that this consumed a great portion of valuable time. Observing that they were ignorant of the signification of a great number of French words, of constant use and recurrence, I made a selection from the vocabulary, and I set them to write down in little copy-books,14 words which were in most frequent use; but the explanations contained in the dictionary were not enough, and I was obliged to rack my brain for new and brief definitions which they could understand, and to make them transcribe these. Arithmetic was another branch of knowledge which required many a weary hour. Geography was considered a matter of recreation after dinner: and they pored over the maps with a feeling of delight and amusement, which was quite new to them. I also busied myself in giving them some notions of the sphere, and of the form and motion of the earth; of the seasons and the climates, and of the heavenly bodies. Every thing of this sort was as perfectly novel to them, as it would have been to the islanders of Otaheite; and even the elementary books, which are usually put into the hands of children, were at first as unintelligible as the most abstruse treatises on mathematics. I was consequently forced to use the simplest, and plainest modes of demonstration; but these amused and instructed them at the same time. A ball made of the box tree, with a hole through it, and moving on an axle, and on which I had traced the principal circles; some large potatoes hollowed out; a candle, and sometimes the skulls of my scholars, served for the instruments, by which I illustrated the movement of the heavenly bodies, and of the earth itself. Proceeding from one step to another, I pointed out the situation of different countries on the chart of the world, and in seperate maps, and took pains to give some slight idea, as we went on, of the characteristics, religion, customs, and history of each nation. These details fixed topics of moment in their recollection. Up to this time I had been astonished by the little interest they took, Christian-minded as they were, in the subject of Christian missions, but, when they began to have some idea of geography, I discovered, that their former ignorance of this science, and of the very existence of many foreign nations in distant quarters of the globe, was the cause of such indifference. But as soon as they began to learn who the people are, who require to have the Gospel preached to them, and in what part of the globe they dwell, they felt the same concern for the circulation of the Gospel that other Christians entertained. These new acquirements, in fact, enlarged their spirit, made new creatures of them, and seemed to triple their very existence.