One day, as he sat half undressed at his window watching the birds as they darted through the air, and the people who were walking in the street, he saw Fabri passing in front of his house. In great excitement he called to him and began abusing him: 'Gaol-bird! forger!' he said, stretching his head out of window; 'tell me why you corrupt Holy Scripture?' Fabri, hoping the curé would grant him the discussion he had so much desired, made answer: 'Come down and bring out your Bible; we will take a clerk who can read it to the people, and I will show you that I am no forger.' At these words the alarmed priest exclaimed: 'I have something else to do besides disputing with a gaol-bird like you;' and he retired hastily from the window. Such were the struggles the reformers had to go through in order to transform the church. This transformation was going on, and ere long the whole principality of Neuchatel was won to the Reformation. In 1532 it penetrated into the mountain regions among the shepherds and hunters of Locle and Chaux de Fonds. Claude d'Arberg, who had so often followed the chase in these mountains, had built an oratory there to St. Hubert, the hunters' patron saint. The saint (says the legend) was once met by a bear, which killed his horse, but Hubert got on the bear's back, and rode him home to the great astonishment of everybody. A more formidable hunter was now about to tame the bears of these parts. Jean de Bély, the evangelist of Fontaine, having gone to Locle at the time of the fair of St. Magdalen, Madame Guillemette de Vergy had him seized instantly and forced him to dispute for two hours in her presence with the curé, Messire Besancenet. 'Put him in prison,' said the countess, who was offended at his doctrines; but whilst the high-born dame was so irritated at what she had heard, the priest, a good-natured man, interceded in the kindest manner in favour of the heretic. The lady released him, and the worthy vicar, taking Bély by the arm, led him graciously to the parsonage, and drank wine with him. Already people said that the mountain bears were beginning to be tamed. From Locle the Gospel made its way to Chaux de Fonds, and thence to Brenets (1534). The earnest mountaineers had taken the images out of the church, desiring to _worship God in spirit and in truth_, and were preparing to break them in pieces and throw them into the Doubs, when they saw two fine oxen approaching, driven by some devout inhabitants from a neighbouring village of Franche Comté. 'We offer you these beasts,' said they, 'in exchange for your pictures and statues.'—'Pray take them,' said the people of Brenets. The Franche-Comtois gathered up the idols, the Neuchatelans drove away the oxen, and 'each thought they had made a fine exchange,' says a chronicler.