stabbed. At last the bugles sang "Halt!"

The Battle of Patay was won.

Joan of Arc dismounted, and stood surveying that awful field, lost in
thought. Presently she said:

"The praise is to God. He has smitten with a heavy hand this day."
After a little she lifted her face, and looking afar off, said, with the
manner of one who is thinking aloud, "In a thousand years--a thousand
years--the English power in France will not rise up from this blow."
She stood again a time thinking, then she turned toward her grouped
generals, and there was a glory in her face and a noble light in her
eye; and she said:

"Oh, friends, friends, do you know?--do you comprehend? France is on the
way to be free!"

"And had never been, but for Joan of Arc!" said La Hire, passing before
her and bowing low, the other following and doing likewise; he muttering
as he went, "I will say it though I be damned for it." Then battalion
after battalion of our victorious army swung by, wildly cheering. And
they shouted, "Live forever, Maid of Orleans, live forever!" while Joan,
smiling, stood at the salute with her sword.

This was not the last time I saw the Maid of Orleans on the red field
of Patay. Toward the end of the day I came upon her where the dead and
dying lay stretched all about in heaps and winrows; our men had mortally
wounded an English prisoner who was too poor to pay a ransom, and from
a distance she had seen that cruel thing done; and had galloped to the
place and sent for a priest, and now she was holding the head of her
dying enemy in her lap, and easing him to his death with comforting soft
words, just as his sister might have done; and the womanly tears running
down her face all the time. (1)

(1) Lord Ronald Gower (Joan of Arc, p. 82) says: "Michelet discovered
this story in the deposition of Joan of Arc's page, Louis de Conte, who
was probably an eye-witness of the scene." This is true. It was a part
of the testimony of the author of these "Personal Recollections of
Joan of Arc," given by him in the Rehabilitation proceedings of 1456.
--TRANSLATOR.

31 France Begins to Live Again

JOAN HAD said true: France was on the way to be free.

The war called the Hundred Years' War was very sick to-day. Sick on its
English side--for the very first time since its birth, ninety-one years
gone by.

Shall we judge battles by the numbers killed and the ruin wrought? Or
shall we not rather judge them by the results which flowed