e soldiers to follow Joan
wherever she would lead them, and it is not improbable that such a
crusade as she dreamt of, had it been possible, in which the two
nations, so closely connected by religious feeling, and so closely
united by position, but so long enemies owing to the rapacity and
greed of their kings, might have again placed the cross on the
battlements of the Holy City, under the leadership of her whom her
countrymen rightly called 'The Angelic.'

Joan rode out of Blois bearing her pennon in her hand, and as she rode
she chanted the '_Veni Creator_.' The sacred strain was taken up by
those who followed, and thus passed the Maid forth on her first great
deed of deliverance.

During the whole of the first night Joan remained, as was her custom
when she had no women about her, in her armour.

It was the Maid's wish to enter Orleans from the northern side, but
the officers with her thought this would be a great imprudence, and
followed the opposite bank of the river. Passing through Beaugency and
Meung, they went on by Saint Die, Saint Laurent, and Clery, without
meeting with any attack from the enemy who occupied these places. On
arriving at a place called Olivet, they were within the neighbourhood
of the beleaguered city. Below them rose the English bastille towers;
beyond, the walls, towers, and steeples of Orleans.

Joan had hoped that the city could have been entered without further
difficulty; she now found that not only the river lay between her and
the town, but that the English were in force on all sides. She wished
that the nearest of these bastilles, at Saint Jean le Blanc, should be
stormed, and the river forded there; but this scheme was judged by her
companions-in-arms to be too perilous, and Joan had again to comply
with the opinion of the officers.

Riding to the eastwards, and skirting the river some four miles below
the town, she and her knights forded it at a spot where some low long
islands, or 'eyots' as we call them on the Thames, lay in this part of
the Loire. On one of these, called l'Isle aux Bourdons, the provisions
and stores for the beleaguered city were shipped and transhipped, and
carried down to Orleans when the wind lay in that quarter.

It was at Reuilly that Dunois met the Maid, still chafing from her
thwarted plan of attacking the English in their stronghold at Saint
Jean le Blanc, and she appears to have shown him her displeasure.
While this interview took place the wind