or less devout in those days, when faith was without question, and the
routine of church ceremonial was followed as a matter of course; but few
so much as Jeanne, whose chief pleasure it was to say her prayers in the
little dark church, where perhaps in the morning sunshine, as she made
her early devotions, there would blaze out upon her from a window, a
Holy Michael in shining armour, transfixing the dragon with his spear,
or a St. Margaret dominating the same emblem of evil with her cross in
her hand. So, at least, the historians conjecture, anxious to find out
some reason for her visions; and there is nothing in the suggestion
which is unpleasing. The little country church was in the gift of St.
Remy, and some benefactor of the rural curé might well have given
a painted window to make glad the hearts of the simple people. St.
Margaret was no warrior-saint, but she overcame the dragon with her
cross, and was thus a kind of sister spirit to the great archangel.

Sitting much of her time at or outside the cottage door with her
needlework, in itself an occupation so apt to encourage musing and
dreams, the bells were one of Jeanne's great pleasures. We know a
traveller, of the calmest English temperament and sobriety of Protestant
fancy, to whom the midday Angelus always brings, he says, a touching
reminder--which he never neglects wherever he may be--to uncover the
head and lift up the heart; how much more the devout peasant girl softly
startled in the midst of her dreaming by that call to prayer. She was so
fond of those bells that she bribed the careless bell-ringer with simple
presents to be more attentive to his duty. From the garden where she sat
with her work, the cloudy foliage of the _bois de chêne_, the oak
wood, where were legends of fairies and a magic well, to which her
imagination, better inspired, seems to have given no great heed, filled
up the prospect on one side. At a later period, her accusers attempted
to make out that she had been a devotee of these nameless woodland