From day to day, this heroic defence was kept up, with unremitting obstinacy. In vain breaches were made and stormed; the besiegers were constantly repulsed. At last Verdier received orders to retire; and the French, after reducing the city almost to ashes, were compelled to abandon their attacks, and retreat. Meanwhile, all over Spain the contest was continued, and everywhere with the most unsparing cruelty. Her purest and noblest sons often fell victims to private malice. “No one’s life,” says one author, “was worth a week’s purchase.” One anecdote may serve as an example to illustrate the spirit of the times. It was night. The rays of the full moon shed their beautiful light on the hills of the Sierra Morena. On one of these hills lay a small division of the patriotic army. Its chief was a dark, fierce-looking man, in whose bosom the spirit of human kindness seemed extinct forever. A brigand, who had long dealt in deeds of death, he had placed himself without the pale even of the laws of Spain. But, when the war commenced, he had offered his own services and that of his men against the French, and had been accepted. On this night he sat, wrapped in his huge cloak, beside the decaying watch-fire, seemingly deep in thought. Near him lay a prisoner on the grass, with the knotted cords so firmly bound around his limbs that the black blood seemed every moment ready to burst from its enclosure. He might have groaned aloud in his agony, had not the pride of his nation,--for he, too, was a Spaniard,--and his own deep courage, prevented. His crime was, that, yielding to the promptings of humanity, he had shown kindness to a wounded French officer, and had thus drawn upon himself suspicion of favoring their cause. Short trial was needed, in those days, to doom a man to death; and, with the morning’s dawn, the brave Murillo was informed that he must die.