tried to get
it, as we know. And of all people in the world, this majestic windmill
carries it off. Well, isn't it a gigantic promotion, when you come to
look at it!"

"There's no doubt about it. It's a kind of copy of Joan's own in
miniature."

"I don't know how to account for it--do you?"

"Yes--without any trouble at all--that is, I think I do."

Noel was surprised at that, and glanced up quickly, as if to see if I
was in earnest. He said:

"I thought you couldn't be in earnest, but I see you are. If you can
make me understand this puzzle, do it. Tell me what the explanation is."

"I believe I can. You have noticed that our chief knight says a good
many wise things and has a thoughtful head on his shoulders. One day,
riding along, we were talking about Joan's great talents, and he said,
'But, greatest of all her gifts, she has the seeing eye.' I said, like
an unthinking fool, 'The seeing eye?--I shouldn't count on that for
much--I suppose we all have it.' 'No,' he said; 'very few have it.' Then
he explained, and made his meaning clear. He said the common eye sees
only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye
pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there
capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the
other kind of eye couldn't detect. He said the mightiest military genius
must fail and come to nothing if it have not the seeing eye--that is
to say, if it cannot read men and select its subordinates with an
infallible judgment. It sees as by intuition that this man is good for
strategy, that one for dash and daredevil assault, the other for patient
bulldog persistence, and it appoints each to his right place and wins,
while the commander without the seeing eye would give to each the
other's place and lose. He was right about Joan, and I saw it. When she
was a child and the tramp came one night, her father and all of us took
him for a rascal, but she saw the honest man through the rags. When I
dined with the governor of Vaucouleurs so long ago, I saw nothing in our
two knights, though I sat with them and talked with them two hours;
Joan was there five minutes, and neither spoke with them nor heard them
speak, yet she marked them for men of worth and fidelity, and they have
confirmed her judgment. Whom has she sent for to take charge of this
thundering rabble of new recruits at Blois, made up of old disbanded
Armagnac raiders, unspeakable hellions, every