He confessed his own lack of success, and that he had made no impression upon them. He told Oberlin of the people, descendants of the Huguenots, who had fled from fiery persecutions in France to this wild and sterile mountain country. As the years had gone on for more than seven generations of men, their teachers had died, their preachers had died, until they, exiled and outcast, had declined into heathenish ignorance. He had found as a distant memory of what once had been, a single school in a mountain hamlet. It was in a miserable hovel in one corner of which lay a helpless old man on a rude truckle-bed, surrounded by a crowd of ragged, noisy, wild-looking children. He asked: “Are you the schoolmaster?” “Yes.” “What do you teach the children?” “Nothing.” “You teach them nothing, how is that?” “Because I know nothing.” “Why then are you the schoolmaster?” “Well, sir, I was taking care of the Waldbach pigs, but the people thought me too old for that, and so I was appointed to take care of the children.” The missionary did not conceal the facts of the case, that the people living in these remote and solitary places were not only frightfully ignorant, but were rebellious against improvement. The region had six months of winter, with bitter icy winds sweeping over the mountains. There was not a single practicable road in the entire district. Deep mud holes were before the cabin doors and the huts in which the people were sheltered. In the short summer season they gathered enough food to sustain an impoverished life through the winter, in which winter they often herded for warmth in the stables with their cattle. So far had they sunk into material and moral desolation. To such a ministry was invited this young man of large ambitions and large reasons for them; to minister to this wretchedness, to go to a people who were without sense of their needs, without aspirations, without appreciation of the services to be done for them. One prepared for the Professor’s chair in the great University where it was pleasant to live, was invited to bury himself among those who would not give him even the reward of gratitude. It was not a pleasant call. The words of it struck the young man’s heart like the blows of a hammer. But seven years before, he had written in his own hand his consecration to God, that with all sincerity of heart and in a fidelity which should not sleep he would walk in the ways of Christ as God should reveal them to him.