ld joy about the
fields; possibly their gladness was caused by the unexpected rescue of
their cattle. Joan ran so much more fleetly than the rest, and leaped so
far, that the children believed she actually _flew_, and they told her
so! Tired and breathless, 'out of herself,' says the seneschal, she
paused, and in that moment she heard a Voice, but saw no man; the Voice
bade her go home, because her mother had need of her. And when she came
home the Voice said many things to her about the great deeds which God
bade her do for France. We shall later hear Joan's own account of how
her visions and Voices first came to her.[3]

Three years later there was an alarm, and the Domremy people fled to
Neufchateau, Joan going with her parents. Afterwards her enemies tried
to prove that she had been a servant at an inn in Neufchateau, had lived
roughly with grooms and soldiers, and had learned to ride. But this was
absolutely untrue. An ordinary child would have thought little of war
and of the sorrows of her country in the flowery fields of Domremy and
Vaucouleurs; but Joan always thought of the miseries of _France la
belle_, fair France, and prayed for her country and her king. A great
road, on the lines of an old Roman way, passed near Domremy, so Joan
would hear all the miserable news from travellers. Probably she showed
what was in her mind, for her father dreamed that she 'had gone off with
soldiers,' and this dream struck him so much, that he told his sons that
he, or they, must drown Joan if she so disgraced herself. For many girls
of bad character, lazy and rude, followed the soldiers, as they always
have done, and always will. Joan's father thought that his dream meant
that Joan would be like these women. It would be interesting to know
whether he was in the habit of dreaming true dreams. For Joan, his
child, dreamed when wide awake, dreamed dreams immortal, which brought
her to her glory and her doom.

THE CALLING OF JOAN THE MAID

When Joan was between twelve and thirteen, a wonderful thing befell her.
We have already heard one account of it, written when Joan was in the
first flower of her triumph, by the seneschal of the King of France. A
Voice spoke to her and prophesied of what she was to do. But about all
these marvellous things it is more safe to attend to what Joan always
said herself. She told the same story both to friends and foes; to the
learned men who, by her king's desire, examined her at Poictiers, bef