4. But the last of these ebullitions is the most lively. We English, at Orleans, and after Orleans (which is not quite so extraordinary, if all were told), fled before the Maid of Arc. Yes, says M. Michelet, you _did_: deny it, if you can. Deny it, _mon cher_? I don't mean to deny it. Running away, in many cases, is a thing so excellent that no philosopher would, at times, condescend to adopt any other step. All of us nations in Europe, without one exception, have shown our philosophy in that way at times. Even people "_qui ne se rendent pas_" have deigned both to run and to shout, "_Sauve qui peut_!" at odd times of sunset; though, for my part, I have no pleasure in recalling unpleasant remembrances to brave men; and yet, really, being so philosophic, they ought _not_ to be unpleasant. But the amusing feature in M. Michelet's reproach is the way in which he _improves_ and varies against us the charge of running, as if he were singing a catch. Listen to him: They "_showed their backs_" did these English. (Hip, hip, hurrah! three times three!) "_Behind good walls they let themselves be taken_." (Hip, hip! nine times nine!) They "_ran as fast as their legs could carry them_" (Hurrah! twenty-seven times twenty-seven!) They "_ran before a girl_"; they did. (Hurrah! eighty-one times eighty-one!) This reminds one of criminal indictments on the old model in English courts, where (for fear the prisoner should escape) the crown lawyer varied the charge perhaps through forty counts. The law laid its guns so as to rake the accused at every possible angle. While the indictment was reading, he seemed a monster of crime in his own eyes; and yet, after all, the poor fellow had but committed one offence, and not always _that_. N. B.--Not having the French original at hand, I make my quotations from a friend's copy of Mr. Walter Kelly's translation; which seems to me faithful, spirited, and idiomatically English--liable, in fact, only to the single reproach of occasional provincialisms.]