n, when her father's turn came round, keeping for him the whole flock
of the commune," was fulfilling her sixteenth year. It was Joan of Arc,
whom all her neighbors called Joannette. She was no recluse; she often
went with her companions to sing and eat cakes beside the fountain by the
gooseberry-bush, under an old beech, which was called the fairy-tree: but
dancing she did not like. She was constant at church, she delighted in
the sound of the bells, she went often to confession and communion, and
she blushed when her fair friends taxed her with being too religious. In
1421, when Joan was hardly nine, a band of Anglo-Burgundians penetrated
into her country, and transferred thither the ravages of war. The
village of Domremy and the little town of Vaucouleurs were French, and
faithful to the French king-ship; and Joan wept to see the lads of her
parish returning bruised and bleeding from encounters with the enemy.
Her relations and neighbors were one day obliged to take to flight, and
at their return they found their houses burned or devastated. Joan
wondered whether it could possibly be that God permitted such excesses
and disasters. In 1425, on a summer's day, at noon, she was in her
father's little garden. She heard a voice calling her, at her right
side, in the direction of the church, and a great brightness shone upon
her at the same time in the same spot. At first she was frightened, but
she recovered herself on finding that "it was a worthy voice;" and, at
the second call, she perceived that it was the voice of angels. "I saw
them with my bodily eyes," she said, six years later, to her judges at
Rouen, "as plainly as I see you; when they departed from me I wept, and
would fain have had them take me with them." The apparitions came again
and again, and exhorted her "to go to France for to deliver the kingdom."
She became dreamy, rapt in constant meditation. "I could endure no
longer," said she, at a later period, "and the time went heavily with me
as with a woman in travail." She ended by telling everything to her
father, who listened to her words anxiously at first, and afterwards
wrathfully. He himself one night dreamed that his daughter had followed
the king's men-at-arms to France, and from that moment he kept her under
strict superintendence. "If I knew of your sister's going," he said to
his sons, "I would bid you drown her; and, if you did not do it, I would
drown her myself." Joan submitted: th