blushed when her fair friends taxed her with being too religious.  In 1421, when Joan was hardly nine, a band of Anglo-Burgundians penetrated into her country, and transferred thither the ravages of war.  The village of Domremy and the little town of Vaucouleurs were French, and faithful to the French king-ship; and Joan wept to see the lads of her parish returning bruised and bleeding from encounters with the enemy.  Her relations and neighbors were one day obliged to take to flight, and at their return they found their houses burned or devastated.  Joan wondered whether it could possibly be that God permitted such excesses and disasters.  In 1425, on a summer’s day, at noon, she was in her father’s little garden.  She heard a voice calling her, at her right side, in the direction of the church, and a great brightness shone upon her at the same time in the same spot.  At first she was frightened, but she recovered herself on finding that “it was a worthy voice;” and, at the second call, she perceived that it was the voice of angels.  “I saw them with my bodily eyes,” she said, six years later, to her judges at Rouen, “as plainly as I see you; when they departed from me I wept, and would fain have had them take me with them.”  The apparitions came again and again, and exhorted her “to go to France for to deliver the kingdom.”  She became dreamy, rapt in constant meditation.  “I could endure no longer,” said she, at a later period, “and the time went heavily with me as with a woman in travail.”  She ended by telling everything to her father, who listened to her words anxiously at first, and afterwards wrathfully.  He himself one night dreamed that his daughter had followed the king’s men-at-arms to France, and from that moment he kept her under strict superintendence.  “If I knew of your sister’s going,” he said to his sons, “I would bid you drown her; and, if you did not do it, I would drown her myself.”  Joan submitted:  there was no leaven of pride in her sublimation, and she did not suppose that her intercourse with celestial voices relieved her from the duty of obeying her parents.  Attempts were made to distract her mind.  A young man who had courted her was induced to say that he had a promise of marriage from her, and to claim the fulfilment of it.  Joan went before the ecclesiastical judge, made affirmation that she had given no promise, and without difficulty gained her cause.  Everybody believed and respected her.

[Illustration:  Joan of Arc in her Father’s Garden——­91]

In a village hard by Domremy she had an uncle whose wife was near her confinement; she got herself invited to go and nurse her aunt, and thereupon she opened her heart to her uncle, repeating to him a popular saying, which had spread indeed throughout the country:  “Is it not said that a woman shall ruin France, and a young maid restore it?” She pressed him to take her to Vaucouleurs to Sire Robert de Baudricourt, captain of the bailiwick, for she wished to go to the