Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it is no wonder that, as the long trial dragged on and question followed question, Jeanne’s firmness wavered. On the charge of sorcery and diabolical possession she still appealed firmly to God. “I hold to my Judge,” she said, as her earthly judges gave sentence against her, “to the King of Heaven and Earth. God has always been my lord in all that I have done. The devil has never had power over me.” It was only with a view to be delivered from the military prison and transferred to the prisons of the Church that she consented to a formal abjuration of heresy. She feared, in fact, among the English soldiery those outrages to her honor, to guard against which she had from the first assumed the dress of a man. In the eyes of the Church her dress was a crime, and she abandoned it; but a renewed insult forced her to resume the one safeguard left her, and the return to it was treated as a relapse into heresy, which doomed her to death. A great pile was raised in the market-place of Rouen where her statue stands now. Even the brutal soldiers who snatched the hated “witch” from the hands of the clergy and hurried her to her doom were hushed as she reached the stake. One indeed passed to her a rough cross he had made from a stick he held, and she clasped it to her bosom. “O Rouen, Rouen!” she was heard to murmur, as her eyes ranged over the city from the lofty scaffold, “I have great fear lest you suffer for my death.... Yes; my voices were of God!” she suddenly cried, as the last moment came; “they have never deceived me!” Soon the flames reached her, the girl’s head sank on her breast, there was one cry of “Jesus!” “We are lost,” an English soldier muttered, as the crowd broke up; “we have burned a saint!” MAHOMET OR MOHAMMED II. BY EDWARD GIBBON. [Surnamed the Great and the Victorious, born 1430, died 1481. His main title to fame is that he consummated the dreams of his predecessors, and after a siege of nearly two months, with a force of two hundred and fifty thousand men and a large fleet, carried the city of Constantinople by storm on May 29, 1453.]