y treating the teachers (lay as well as religious) with the
sort of amiable condescension which marks the demeanour of an agent of
the octroi overhauling the basket of a peasant-woman at a barrier. If a
Sister has a religious book, her own property, lying on her desk, it is
violently snatched up, and the children are invited to say whether it
has been used to poison their young minds with religious ideas. 'In
short,' said the Mother Superior very quietly, 'our Sisters are really
much better treated in Protestant countries than in Catholic France.'

Domremy-la-Pucelle is a typical agricultural village of Eastern France.
It is in the Department of the Vosges and in the verdant valley of the
Meuse. I drove to it on a lovely summer's morning after visiting
Vaucouleurs, where the Pucelle came before the stout Captain Robert de
Beaudricourt and said to him, 'You must take me to the King. I must see
him before Mid Lent, and I will see him if I walk my legs off to the
knees!' This interview began her marvellous career.

From certain articles in newspapers about a drama of _Jeanne d'Arc_, now
performing at Paris, I gather that Jeanne's moral conquest of France
which preceded and led to her material victory over the English
invaders, has at last been satisfactorily explained by the scientific
believers in hypnotism! Of this I can only say, with President Lincoln
on a memorable occasion, 'for those who like this kind of explanation of
historical phenomena, I should suppose it would be just the kind of
explanation they would like.'

The country between Vaucouleurs and Domremy is agreeably diversified,
well wooded in parts, and rich in fair meadow-lands. At Montbras a
little old lady dwells and looks after her affairs in one of the most
picturesque chateau of the sixteenth century to be seen in this part of
France, machicolated, crenellated, and dominated by lofty towers. We
passed, too, through Greux, a small village on the Meuse, the dwellers
in which were astute enough to get themselves exempted by Charles VII
from all talliages and subsidies 'by fabricating documents' to prove
that Jeanne d'Arc was born there. The incident is curious as going to
show that the 'downtrodden serfs' and 'manacled villeins' of the middle
ages had their wits about them, and could take care of themselves when
an opportunity offered, as well as the 'oppressed tenantry' of modern
Ireland. Domremy, which is no bigger than Greux, neither of them having
t