ing, and "food for powder." But to none of these did the call come.
Every detail goes to increase the profound impression of peacefulness
which fills the atmosphere--the slow river floating by, the roofs
clustered together, the church bells tinkling their continual summons,
the girl with her work at the cottage door in the shadow of the apple
trees. To pack the little knapsack of a brother or a lover, and to
convoy him weeping a little way on his road to the army, coming back to
the silent church to pray there, with the soft natural tears which the
uses of common life must soon dry--that is all that imagination could
have demanded of Jeanne. She was even too young for any interposition
of the lover, too undeveloped, the French historians tell us with their
astonishing frankness, to the end of her short life, to have been moved
by any such thought. She might have poured forth a song, a prayer, a
rude but sweet lament for her country, out of the still bosom of that
rustic existence. Such things have been, the trouble of the age forcing
an utterance from the very depths of its inarticulate life. But it was
not for this that Jeanne d'Arc was born.

(1) Mr. Andrew Lang informs me that the real proprietor was
a certain "Dame d'Orgevillier." "On Jeanne's side of the
burn," he adds, with a picturesque touch of realism, "the
people were probably _free_ as attached to the Royal
Chatellenie of Vancouleurs, as described below."

(2) This was probably not the God-dam of later French, a
reflection of the supposed prevalent English oath, but most
likely merely the God-den or good-day, the common
salutation.

(3) Domremy was split, Mr. Lang says, by the burn, and
Jeanne's side were probably King's men. We have it on her
own word that there was but one Burgundian in the village,
but that might mean on her side.

CHAPTER II -- DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS. 1424-1429.

In the year 1424, the year in which, after the battle of Agincourt,
France was delivered over to Henry V., an extraordinary event occurred
in the life of this little French peasant. We have not the same horror
of that treaty, naturally, as have the French. Henry V. is a favourite
of our history, probably not so much for his own merit as because of
that master-magician, Shakespeare, who of his supreme good pleasure, in
the exercise of that voluntary preference, which even God himself seems
to show to some