A NELSON GIRL IN ROUEN.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 49, 21 November 1907, Page 3

A NELSON GIRL IN ROUEN.

_ A. NeJ son girl jiow travelling on the Continent writes from Rouen to say that she has fallen in love with the peasant women of France:— Even the children here : have such protty, easy, gracious manners, and X doii't wonder that ,we often make the French, peo<ple stand aghast at our stolidity and "gaucherie." ' As for the peasant women of Toui-aine, 1 often thought that, judging from their'appearance,'-they were an ideal type of self-respecting,.hard-working, pleasant, cheery humanity. What nice faces you do see ■ under, the heat ..pretty. caps.l No such horrors as "Hinde's curling-pins" all tho morning, and. a fuzz-bush all the afternoon. No, indeed! Hair parted in the middlo and smoothly brushed down each side; a spotless oap, usually embroidered;,a neat black dress, and a white something round the throat; and suoh kindly, strong faces I Yes, it is the women of France who are always arousing my admiration. But the women work in tho fields and drive the carts, and carry the burdens in the most astonishing way. In Chartres I was looking out of the window at •the hotel one day, when along camo the town dust-cart, a colossal great thing like a furniture waggon; and in charge a woman, if you please,, shovel in hand, collecting tho successive piles of refuse. I didn't like that x bit. ' I have not said a word about the crowning interest of Rouen, namely, Jeanne d'Arc. Yes! I quite agree, there is nothing to equal her history f<sr wonder and thrill. No wonder Mark Twain calls her "the supremest heroine of the world's history." Yesterday I visited the 'Tour de Jeanne d'ATc,"'an imiinense keep of the old Rouen Castle, which is'now destroyed, and there 1 saw tho room in which she was tried bv the unspeakable Bishop Beauvais, and tho tablet recording her famous reply when threatened with torture. . Upstairs_ was the big round room in which she was imprisoned for a month before her trial, .and,. most terribly touching,. the cell into .which she was thrown for twenty days after the judgment—nearly pitch dark, . ®Dd. about twelve feet by four, I suppose. Oh, dear!-1 felt almost ashamed to do an Englishwoman, yet proud to be a woman. As a book I am reading says, "She had sacrificed . herself for her country and her religion,. yot 'it; was Frenchmen and ecclesiastics .who were judging her, so her task was twice as hard as that of a martyr defying the foes of his faith." X I shall be delighted to read Mark Twain's book after all this. It tied one's throat into a knot to stand and look at the various memorial wreaths, French and English, hung oil the Walls of the judgment chamber to do belated to the girl whose ashes we flung into tho Seine. There was a lettor from Mark Twain, in the little museum of things—and the original MS. of his article in "Harper's" which I should liko to read. She was imprisoned nearly five, months altogether. It's an amazing story I