"This pure creature--pure from every suspicion of even a visionary self interest; even as she was pure in senses more obvious--never once did this holy child, as she regarded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was traveling to meet her. She might not prefigure the very manner of her death; she saw not in vision the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold, the spectators without end on every road pouring into Rouen as to a coronation, the surging smoke, the volleying flames, the hostile faces all around her, the pitying eye that lurked here and there until nature and imperishable truth broke loose from artificial restraints--these might not be apparent through the mists of the hurrying future. But the voice that called her to death, that she heard forever. "Great was the throne of France even in those days, and great was he that sat upon it; but well Joanna knew that not the throne nor he that sat upon it was for her; but on the contrary, that she was for them; not she by them, but they by her, should rise from the dust. "Gorgeous were the lilies of France, and for centuries had they privilege to spread their beauty over land and sea, until in another century the wrath of God and man combined to wither them; but well Joanna knew, early at Domremy she had read that bitter truth, that the lilies of France would decorate no garland for her. Flower nor bud, bell nor blossom, would ever bloom for her." (Thomas De Quincey.) And now comes in this, which is perhaps the final year of the great war, a strange story from a small town in the Loire region near Cholet, of another illiterate peasant girl named Clotilde Perchaud, seemingly the reincarnation of Jeanne, who likewise sees visions and hears voices. Brought up on one of the small farms on the edge of the hamlet of Puy-Saint-Bonnet, this girl, now about twenty years old, since the age of fourteen has been of a strange personality. Instead of following the fairs and dancing at the village festivals like the other young girls of the neighborhood, Clotilde has always kept aloof, avoiding the young men who would offer her attentions, and devoting herself to devotions at church, and prayers in her squalid room in the farmhouse granary, where she had constructed an altar. So strange were her actions at the village school that the good priest advised her parents to keep her at home, as she would not study her lessons, but preferred to sit with clasped hands, and her eyes fixed in a wrapt gaze at the ceiling, to the demoralization of the scholars, who at length came to believe her half witted, and ceased to consider her. Not so, however, the elders. Soon it became known that this strange girl was a clairvoyant, and the more credulous consulted her as to future events, but these became dissatisfied because all of the girl's prophecies had to do with events beyond the ken of the simple folk of the neighborhood; with kings and