ary
circumstances has the new developments of life to think of, and how
to be a wife and mother. And the news brought by every passer-by would
prove doubly interesting, doubly important to Jeanne, in her daily
growing comprehension of what she was called upon to do. As she felt the
current more and more catching her feet, sweeping her on, overcoming all
resistance in her own mind, she must have been more and more anxious to
know what was going on in the distracted world, more and more touched by
that great pity which had awakened her soul. And all these reports were
of a nature to increase that pity till it became overwhelming. The
tales she would hear of the English must have been tales of cruelty
and horror; not so many years ago what tales did not we hear of German
ferocity in the French villages, perhaps not true at all, yet making
their impression always; and it was more probable in that age that every
such story should be true. Then the compassion which no one can help
feeling for a young man deprived of his rights, his inheritance taken
from him, his very life in danger, threatened by the stranger and
usurper, was deepened in every particular by the fact that it was the
King, the very impersonation of France, appointed by God as the head of
the country, who was in danger. Everything that Jeanne heard would help
to swell the stream.

Thus she must have come step by step--this extraordinary, impossible
suggestion once sown in her dreaming soul--to perceive a kind of
miraculous reasonableness in it, to see its necessity, and how
everything pointed towards such a deliverance. It would have seemed
natural to believe that the prophecies of the countryside which promised
a virgin from an oak grove, a maiden from Lorraine, to deliver France,
might have affected her mind, did we not have it from her own voice
that she had never heard that prophecy(1); but the word of the blessed
Michael, so often repeated, was more than an old wife's tale; and the
child's alarm would seem to have died away as she came to her full
growth. And Jeanne was no ethereal spirit lost in visions, but a
robust and capable peasant girl, fearing little, and full of sense and
determination, as well as of an inspiration so far above the level of
the crowd. We hear with wonder afterwards that she had the making of a
great general in her untutored female soul,--which is perhaps the most
wonderful thing in her career,--and saw with the eye of an experienc