My readers may perhaps be disappointed that so far we have but few records of noble deeds or great wars, and that instead of individual heroes we have been chiefly interested in large movements of races and religions. We had, it is true, a stirring outset with Tārik and his Berbers, whose brilliant conquests are no more legendary than is the history of the nineteenth century. We had the great and decisive battle of Tours, but of this the details, which might have proved of surpassing interest, are wanting; and the other engagement with the Franks, the field of Roncesvalles, errs in the opposite direction, for it is overclouded with myth. Since that day, a hundred years have now passed, and we have come to the death of Eulogius and the consequent decline of the Christian martyrs; and in all that century we have been reading of nothing but the struggle between the different races and creeds that made up the mixed population of the Spanish peninsula. But after all, golden deeds are rare, and are too often the invention of poets, whose spiritual minds clothe with the attributes of ideal chivalry what are really the ordinary events of war; while the struggle of race with race and creed with creed is what the world has been incessantly witnessing ever since man came into existence. We must not allow ourselves to think that the history of these large movements is uninteresting because it has not the personal charm of individual acts of heroism. In the devotion of countless unnoticed men and women during the piteous epoch of martyrdom at Cordova there was perhaps more real heroism than in the impetuous deeds of chivalry displayed by rude warriors on the battle-field. It is much easier to be brave in hot blood than to endure the alarms and sufferings of long imprisonment, to look forward with undaunted courage to the day of execution, and keep a firm heart through it all. The Christian martyrs were misguided, they threw away their lives without cause; but their courage is as worthy of admiration as their wisdom is to be pitied. Flora was as real a heroine as if she had sacrificed herself for a worthy sake. Eulogius, with all his bigotry, was of the true hero's mould. And in all these great movements of race or faith there are numberless acts of devotion and fortitude which, though they may escape the eye of the historian, call for as much resolution and endurance as the most brilliant exploits of the soldier. It is often in the little acts of heroism that the hardest duties of mankind are found; and in the conflicts between large bodies of people there are endless opportunities for their exercise.