l and
supposed her dead, saw this, they were troubled with the strangest fears,
and some of them cried out that they beheld Saint Michael on a white
horse (probably Joan herself) fighting for the French. They lost the
bridge, and lost the towers, and next day set their chain of forts on
fire, and left the place.

But as Lord Suffolk himself retired no farther than the town of Jargeau,
which was only a few miles off, the Maid of Orleans besieged him there,
and he was taken prisoner. As the white banner scaled the wall, she was
struck upon the head with a stone, and was again tumbled down into the
ditch; but, she only cried all the more, as she lay there, 'On, on, my
countrymen! And fear nothing, for the Lord hath delivered them into our
hands!' After this new success of the Maid's, several other fortresses
and places which had previously held out against the Dauphin were
delivered up without a battle; and at Patay she defeated the remainder of
the English army, and set up her victorious white banner on a field where
twelve hundred Englishmen lay dead.

She now urged the Dauphin (who always kept out of the way when there was
any fighting) to proceed to Rheims, as the first part of her mission was
accomplished; and to complete the whole by being crowned there. The
Dauphin was in no particular hurry to do this, as Rheims was a long way
off, and the English and the Duke of Burgundy were still strong in the
country through which the road lay. However, they set forth, with ten
thousand men, and again the Maid of Orleans rode on and on, upon her
white war-horse, and in her shining armour. Whenever they came to a town
which yielded readily, the soldiers believed in her; but, whenever they
came to a town which gave them any trouble, they began to murmur that she
was an impostor. The latter was particularly the case at Troyes, which
finally yielded, however, through the persuasion of one Richard, a friar
of the place. Friar Richard was in the old doubt about the Maid of
Orleans, until he had sprinkled her well with holy water, and had also
well sprinkled the threshold of the gate by which she came into the city.
Finding that it made no change in her or the gate, he said, as the other
grave old gentlemen had said, that it was all right, and became her great
ally.

So, at last, by dint of riding on and on, the Maid of Orleans, and the
Dauphin, and the ten thousand sometimes believing and sometimes
unbelieving men, came t