And go it was.  You never saw anything like it.  We swarmed up the ladders and over the battlements like a wave—­and the place was our property.  Why, one might live a thousand years and never see so gorgeous a thing as that again....

We were busy and never heard the five cannon-shots fired, but they were fired a moment after Joan had ordered the assault; and so, while we were hammering and being hammered in the smaller fortress, the reserve on the Orleans side poured across the bridge and attacked the Tourelles from that side.  A fireboat was brought down and moored under the drawbridge which connected the Tourelles with our boulevard; wherefore, when at last we drove our English ahead of us, and they tried to cross that drawbridge and join their friends in the Tourelles, the burning timbers gave way under them and emptied them in a mass into the river in their heavy armor—­and a pitiful sight it was to see brave men die such a death as that.

“God pity them!” said Joan, and wept to see that sorrowful spectacle.  She said those gentle words and wept those compassionate tears, although one of those perishing men had grossly insulted her with a coarse name three days before when she had sent him a message asking him to surrender.  That was their leader, Sir William Glasdale, a most valorous knight.  He was clothed all in steel; so he plunged under the water like a lance, and of course came up no more.

We soon patched a sort of bridge together and threw ourselves against the last stronghold of the English power that barred Orleans from friends and supplies.  Before the sun was quite down Joan’s forever memorable day’s work was finished, her banner floated from the fortress of the Tourelles, her promise was fulfilled, she had raised the siege of Orleans!

England had resented the Yankee, but it welcomed Joan.  Andrew Lang adored it, and some years later contemplated dedicating his own book, ‘The Maid of France’, to Mark Twain.’—­[His letter proposing this dedication, received in 1909, appears to have been put aside and forgotten by Mr. Clemens, whose memory had not improved with failing health.]

Brander Matthews ranks Huck Finn before Joan of Arc, but that is understandable.  His literary culture and research enable him, in some measure, to comprehend the production of Joan; whereas to him Huck is pure magic.  Huck is not altogether magic to those who know the West—­the character of that section and the Mississippi River, especially of an older time—­it is rather inspiration resulting from these existing things.  Joan is a truer literary magic—­the reconstruction of a far-vanished life and time.  To reincarnate, as in a living body of the present, that marvelous child whose life was all that was pure and exalted and holy, is veritable necromancy and something more.  It is the apotheosis of history.