wondered whether it could possibly be that God permitted such excesses
and disasters. In 1425, on a summer's day, at noon, she was in her
father's little garden. She heard a voice calling her, at her right
side, in the direction of the church, and a great brightness shone upon
her at the same time in the same spot. At first she was frightened, but
she recovered herself on finding that "it was a worthy voice;" and, at
the second call, she perceived that it was the voice of angels. "I saw
them with my bodily eyes," she said, six years later, to her judges at
Rouen, "as plainly as I see you; when they departed from me I wept, and
would fain have had them take me with them." The apparitions came again
and again, and exhorted her "to go to France for to deliver the kingdom."
She became dreamy, rapt in constant meditation. "I could endure no
longer," said she, at a later period, "and the time went heavily with me
as with a woman in travail." She ended by telling everything to her
father, who listened to her words anxiously at first, and afterwards
wrathfully. He himself one night dreamed that his daughter had followed
the king's men-at-arms to France, and from that moment he kept her under
strict superintendence. "If I knew of your sister's going," he said to
his sons, "I would bid you drown her; and, if you did not do it, I would
drown her myself." Joan submitted: there was no leaven of pride in her
sublimation, and she did not suppose that her intercourse with celestial
voices relieved her from the duty of obeying her parents. Attempts were
made to distract her mind. A young man who had courted her was induced
to say that he had a promise of marriage from her, and to claim the
fulfilment of it. Joan went before the ecclesiastical judge, made
affirmation that she had given no promise, and without difficulty gained
her cause. Everybody believed and respected her.

[Illustration: Joan of Arc in her Father's Garden----91]