Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/399

Rh Basle, Neufchâtel. They were fed, clothed, and well-cared for. They received gifts of habitations and fields, as well in Wurtemburg as in Switzerland. The Catholics took possession of the valleys of the Waldenses; dwelt in their homes, sowed and reaped the harvests of their fields.

The people of the valleys now lived in foreign countries, amongst their friends, who did all to make them comfortable, and forget the past and the old native land.

But that people could not forget. In Switzerland and in Germany, the Waldenses lived by the labor of their hands, leading exemplary lives amongst their foreign brethren, but listening with indifference to their offer of substantial dwellings, answering little, but silently longing for their valleys, their chestnut woods, their clear mountain streams. The little light which shone there so brightly amidst the bloody night of persecution, burned feebly in peaceful but foreign abodes. Their longings grew into action. Whether it was a secret feeling, that they were called to testify of the most ancient faith and doctrine, in the place where they built their earliest temple, or whether it was something of that instinct which leads the eagle and the bird of passage back to their former nest, certain it is, that troops of the exiled people, attempted again and again to force their way into their former habitations.

The year 1687 saw four hundred people, secretly assembled on the shore at Lausanne, ready to betake themselves across the lake to Savoy. But the Bernese government—at that time powerful in