Proof of her guilt, in the legal sense, there was none, and so much even the lawyers of Rouen recognized; but out of her own answers the ministers of the God of Justice were enabled, after months of juggling, to torture proof sufficient to convict her in their own eyes. When the wolf in Æsop's fable, seeks a pretext for devouring the lamb, we know from the beginning that that pretext will be found: "You have muddied the stream," cries the wolf, as he raises his head from drinking. "Nay, good sir, I am lower down the stream than you are." "If it was not you, it was one of your family." There was no hope for this lamb of France. "Never from the foundations of the earth," says De Quincey, "was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defence and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! Trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honor thy flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning, and true as God's lightning to its mark,... confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood!... 'Would you examine me as a witness against myself?' was the question by which many times she defied their arts. Continually she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant to any business before the court, or that entered into the ridiculous charges against her." In the midst of the proceedings, about Palm Sunday, the poor girl fell ill, and there was some fear that through death she might escape the exemplary punishment they were preparing for her against the anticipated conviction. Her illness may have been chiefly mental and nervous exhaustion, helped on by what would have been to her one of the most severe trials, homesickness. This is the impression left upon our minds by Lamartine and by Michelet as well as by De Quincey: "A country girl, born on the skirts of a forest, and having ever lived in the open air of heaven, she was compelled to pass this fine Palm Sunday hi the depths of a dungeon." In the general rejoicing of Easter, while the bells of Rouen steeples rang forth the glad tidings of salvation for all, of relief from pain and sorrow, there lay in the castle dungeon a peasant girl, sick in body, sick in mind, dreaming of the fresh green fields, and the forests just now beginning to put forth their tender leaves, hearing the bells of her own far-away church in Domremy, and the homely talk of old friends as they plodded by on their way to that church. She woke in the morning with the sound of the bells in her ears, and on that holy morning, as oh many another for many weary weeks, there were the double chains upon her limbs padlocked to a transverse beam at the foot of her rough bed. And in the room, watching every move and torturing her with coarse jests or terrifying her with yet more cruel threats, were four or five soldiers, no woman near to minister to her wants or to shield her modesty. With such torture, with the added mental torture of almost