er devoutness than
was common among her class. And in this devoutness, too, a thing more
significant still, she manifested a diffidence, a desire to withdraw
herself and her prayers from the profanation of vulgar and inquisitive
eyes.

Much has been made of the mysterious associations of forests
fairy-haunted, of trees where the children danced and hung garlands in
honor of some fairy queen, whom the good _cure_ of the village devoutly
exorcised every spring. What community in a land neighbored by mountains
but has its "little people," whether fairies, hobgoblins, or gnomes? The
learned doctors at Jeanne's trial were trying to fasten upon her some
preposterous charge of witchcraft and association with the powers of
evil; it was their business to drag in the fairies and to show that
Jeanne knew more of such things than was good for the glory of God; and
ever since, the biographers have seized upon what scanty ravellings of
childish legend Jeanne could recall upon her trial, and have woven of
them fine cobwebs of filmy pattern, to show how the whole soil of
Domremy, more than any other particular spot in France, produced
mushroom crops of fairies, and that a very miasma of enchantment was in
the air. The mass of fanciful and sometimes exquisite rhetoric on this
theme in the lives of Jeanne would surely have convicted her of
witchcraft in the fifteenth century. In good truth, Jeanne probably had
as firm belief in fairies as you and I once had in Hop-o'-my-Thumb and
Red Ridinghood; but those were childish things, in no way connected with
her mission.

That which is of importance to note is that she was always a gentle and
tender-hearted girl, ready to nurse the sick or to play with the
children. "Well do I know it," says an aged peasant who testified for
her memory years after she was dead, "I was then but a child, and she
nursed me." But most important of all is the knowledge that her enemies
could not find in Domremy one witness to testify against her; there was
in her native village no envious wretch, no Ascalaphus, who could
concoct a probable tale of any sort to the injury of one who had as a
child led a life so pure, so good, but likewise so uneventful.

At what time Jeanne began to see visions we cannot tell exactly; it is
probable that the dreams of childhood, long indulged, merged at first
unconsciously into visions that seemed to her as real as things seen
with the bodily eye. By her own account, it was some si