brutality and cruelty. At length she was delivered from her
tormentors, and, preceded by the executioner, she mounted the ladder,
and was bound round the body by a chain attached to the stake.

The good priest, Isambard, closely followed her, and stood immediately
beneath her, with the cross held and raised towards Joan, who but once
removed her gaze from off it.

'Keep it,' she said to Isambard, 'keep it always before my eyes, till
death.'

Then she took a last look around her--a last look on a world which had
been so harsh and cruel a world to her, poor victim of all the powers
of evil on this earth! She looked but once on the surging crowd
beneath, at the old timbered houses of the town, filled from basement
to high-peaked roof, with thousands of its citizens. 'O, Rouen,
Rouen!' she cried, 'must I die here? I have great fear lest you will
suffer for my death.' And with that she put away from her all earthly
things, and gave herself up to Heaven. In the interval the
executioners had lighted the lower portion of the pile of wood, and
the fire, fed by the pitch-covered fagots, mounted rapidly.

Joan of Arc gave a cry of terror, and called aloud for 'Water, holy
water!' The body had for an instant conquered the spirit--but it was
only for an instant.

At that moment Cauchon had the inconceivable and apparently
devil-driven curiosity to approach the martyr, hoping, perhaps, that
in the first terror at seeing the fire springing up to her, Joan of
Arc would let fall some words of reproach against her King or her
saints.

'Joan,' he cried through the crackling of the flames, 'I have come to
exhort you for the last time.'

'I die through you,' she said, as she had said once before, and then
she was allowed to die in peace, so far as Cauchon and his Church were
concerned. For her all earthly things were now over. Till the last sign
of life expired the eye-witnesses who have given us the fullest account
of her last moments--the priests Isambard and Massieu--declared that
she continued to call on her God and on her saints. Frequently through
the blinding smoke and the fierce rush of flame her face looked that of
a blessed saint uplifted and radiant.

With one loud cry of 'Jesus!' her head fell on her breast.

Thus came Joan of Arc to her glorious end.

There is a tradition that when the ashes of the martyr Maid were
gathered to be cast into the Seine, the heart was found
unconsumed--_Cor cordium!_

Many other tr