Owing to the weather he stayed only a few days, but returned the following year, and continued his visits to the valleys year after year, until, in 1833, a severe illness obliged him to remain in England. In the autumn of 1835 he returned, and lived in the valleys with Pastor Bonjour, at St. John's, for the next five years. Again, after an interval of two years, he returned to the valleys, living at the ancient castle of La Torre. In 1836 the Vaudois Table had his portrait painted, and engravings distributed through the valleys. In 1844 the synod presented him with a cup of honour, also Dr. Gilly and the Count Waldburg Truchsesse. In 1846 he was promoted to the rank of major-general in the English army, and also received the dignity of a Knight of St. Maurice and Lazarus from the king of Sardinia. In 1850 he married a Vaudoise. In 1862 he dies among the people he had so long loved and served, and is buried at La Torre, amid the profoundest grief and deepest veneration of the whole population. FOOTNOTES: [I] _Narrative of an Excursion to the Mountains of Piedmont in the year 1823._ By WILLIAM STEPHEN GILLY. 2nd Ed. C. and J. Rivington. CHAPTER XIV. Our last chapter closed with a brief sketch of the life of Beckwith, so that in the present I might be free to speak of the work done, without interpolations as to the personal movements of him who was in several respects the chief worker. To those who desire to read the full particulars of General Beckwith's life, I very earnestly commend the deeply interesting work of Pastor J. P. Meille, to whose pages I am greatly indebted. Beckwith was early impressed with the conviction that God had providentially preserved the Vaudois, that they might be the agents of evangelizing Italy, through the political changes which were being wrought in that country by means of the kingdom of Sardinia. He was the first to recognize this important truth, and he never lost sight of it, either in the motive which it supplied for his own efforts, or in the influence he sought to bring to bear upon others. This belief in the mission of the Vaudois quickened all his sympathies and guided all his plans. To turn to these plans, one of the earliest was the improvement and extension of primary education. Beckwith saw at once the value of the Quartier schools, and he began to erect a better class of buildings for this purpose. First of all he bore the whole expense, excepting the site; afterwards he paid the cost of labour in erecting the buildings, but required the inhabitants to supply material as well as site. He also oftentimes contributed largely to augment the salary of the underpaid teachers. Some one hundred and twenty buildings, commodious and well-situated, were the result of these efforts.