auvais then sentenced her to prison for the rest of her life, on
condition that she resume woman's apparel; yet one morning she woke to
find no dress in her prison but the clothes she had worn in battle. No
sooner had she donned these than the bishop appeared, and accused her of
disobedience to the orders of the Church, and he fixed her execution for
the next day.

When the horrible fact was made known to her that she was to be burned
at the stake in the market-place of Rouen, before a multitude of people,
she burst into piercing cries of agony. Her physical strength, courage,
and brain-power were all impaired by the months of abuse she had
endured, and her very soul was torn by the neglect and indifference
which the base king manifested toward her. Up to the very last hour she
had believed deliverance would come, but it came only through death.
Never since that spectacle of the bleeding Nazarene upon the Cross of
Calvary, has the world beheld so terrible a picture of crucified
innocence and purity as that of Joan of Arc, the saviour of France,
burning in the market-place of Rouen. With her dying breath she cried
out that the Voices were real, and that she had obeyed God in listening
to their counsels.

Her last word was the name of--Jesus.

[Signature: Ella Wheeler Wilcox.]

HANS GUTENBERG

By ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE

(1400-1468)

Hans Gensfleisch Gutenberg von Sorgeloch was a young patrician--born at
Mainz, a free and wealthy city on the banks of the Rhine, in the year
1400. His father, Friel Gensfleisch, married Else von Gutenberg, who
gave her name to her second son John.

It is probable that if Mainz, his country, had not been a free city,
this young gentleman would have been unable to conceive or to carry into
execution his invention. Despotism and superstition equally insist upon
silence; they would have stifled the universal and resistless echo which
genius was about to create for written words. Printing and liberty were
both to spring from the same soil and the same climate.

[Illustration: Hans Gutenberg.]

Mainz, Strasburg, Worms, and other municipal towns on the Rhine, then
governed themselves, under the suzerainty of the empire, as small
federal republics, like Florence, Genoa, Venice, and the other states of
Italy. The nobility warlike, the burgesses increasing in importance, and
the laboring population vacillating between these two classes, who
alternately oppressed and courted it, from