truly than ever before, and he will love her as the author loved
her, for "the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable child the
ages have produced."

The tale is matchless in its workmanship. The quaint phrasing of the old
Sieur de Conte is perfectly adapted to the subject-matter, and the lovely
character of the old narrator himself is so perfectly maintained that we
find ourselves all the time as in an atmosphere of consecration, and feel
that somehow we are helping him to weave a garland to lay on Joan's tomb.
Whatever the tale he tells, he is never more than a step away. We are
within sound of his voice, we can touch his presence; we ride with him
into battle; we laugh with him in the by-play and humors of warfare; we
sit hushed at his side through the long, fearful days of the deadly
trial, and when it is all ended it is to him that we turn to weep for
Joan--with him only would we mingle our tears. It is all bathed in the
atmosphere of romance, but it is the ultimate of realism, too; not hard,
sordid, ugly realism, but noble, spiritual, divine realism, belonging to
no particular class or school--a creation apart. Not all of Mark Twain's
tales have been convincing, but there is no chapter of his Joan that we
doubt. We believe it all happened--we know that it must have happened,
for our faith in the Sieur de Conte never for an instant wavers.

Aside from the personality of the book--though, in truth, one never is
aside from it--the tale is a marvel in its pageantry, its splendid
panorama and succession of stirring and stately scenes. The fight before
Orleans, the taking of the Tourelles and of Jargeau, all the movement of
that splendid march to Rheims, there are few better battle-pictures than
these. Howells, always interested mainly in the realism of to-day, in
his review hints at staginess in the action and setting and even in Joan
herself. But Howells himself did not accept his earlier judgment as
final. Five years later he wrote:

"She is indeed realized to the modern sense as few figures of the past
have been realized in fiction."

As for the action, suppose we consider a brief bit of Joan's warfare. It
is from the attack on the Tourelles:

Joan mounted her horse now with her staff about her, and when our
people saw us coming they raised a great shout, and were at once
eager for another assault on the boulevard. Joan rode straight to
the foss where she had received her wound, and, s