The Class was told one
story here which is worthy of a poem.

"A beautiful stream once watered the valley. Its bed may still be
seen, but it now runs under ground. On the stream an industrious
miller built his mill and did a thriving business. One day a woman,
sick and destitute, came to him for help. He turned heartlessly away
from her with abuse. The poor creature raised her withered arm, and
said,--

"'To-morrow thou shalt have thy reward.'

"When the miller awoke the next morning he found his mill standing on
dry ground. The river had gone down into the earth, where it still
runs."

[Illustration: TOWER OF JOAN OF ARC, ROUEN.]

The fisher's hymn which Ernest Wynn gave the Club at its first meeting
was asked for here by Master Lewis, and was procured. It is sung
before the departure of ships and during great storms in the fishing
season, being a part of the mass for seamen, or the _messe
d'equipage_.

The Class left Etretat for Rouen.

* * * * *

"O Rouen! Rouen! it is here I must die, and here shall be my last
resting-place!" said Joan of Arc at the stake. Rouen was hardly the
resting-place of the heroic peasant girl, for her ashes were thrown
into the Seine. But the thought of the stranger on coming to Rouen is
less associated with its history under the sea-kings of the North, the
Norman dukes and the English invaders, than with the hard fate and the
public memorials of the simple shepherdess, who seems to have been
called from her flocks to change the destiny of France.

[Illustration: THE MAID OF ORLEANS.]

The Class entered Rouen after a series of short, zigzag journeys,
partly in coaches and partly on foot, going leisurely from town to
town through roads that presented to view continuous landscapes of
shining orchards, ripening gardens, and resplendent poppy-fields;
stopping at Amiens, the birthplace of Peter the Hermit, meeting here
and there a ruin, and finding everywhere the connecting historical
links between the present and the past.

At Amiens the Class was brought into the presence of a relic which
greatly excited the boys' wonder.

"This church," said their guide, taking the Class to a side chapel of
the cathedral, "contains a very rare relic,--a part of the head of
John the Baptist!"

Passing into the beautiful chapel the Class was shown the shrine
containing the precious treasure, which consists of the supposed
frontal bone, and the upper jaw of the sa