The masked men, who numbered six or eight, came fully armed with guns and rifles which they discharged in the very face of the Mayor, who fell dead, riddled with bullets. The assembled Councillors, seized with panic, fled. The murdered Mayor was a Conservative, and the only member of that party who held a seat in the Corporation. It is believed that the assassination was perpetrated in obedience to political motives. CHAPTER XVIII THE SPANISH BULL-FIGHT ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT Perhaps no other contemporary spectacle has been oftener and more minutely described by writers who--censors and enthusiasts alike--possess neither personal nor technical qualification, for the work. Impressions, once the Pyrenees are passed, grow spontaneously deeper and stronger in inverse ratio with experiences. And the majority of descriptions confessedly prejudge the scene in adverse sense--the writer (sometimes a lady) going into wild hysterics after half-seeing a single bull killed. We have not the slightest intention of entering that arena of ravelled preconceptions and misconceptions, nor are we concerned either to uphold or to condemn. A greater mind has satirised the human tendency to "condone the sins we are inclined to, by damning those we have no mind to," and we are content to leave it at that. In this chapter we purpose to glance at the subject from three points of view. (1) The origin of bull-fighting, 500 years ago, and its subsequent development. (2) The modern system of breeding and training the fighting bull. (3) The "Miura question"--an incident of to-day. As a Spanish institution, bull-fighting dates back to the Reconquest or shortly thereafter. When that abounding vigour and virility that had animated and sustained Spanish explorers and warriors--the sailors and adventurers who, following in the wake of the caravels of Columbus, opened up a new world to Spain and carried the purple banner of Castile to the ends of the earth--when that vigour had spent its fiery force and grown anæmic, there still remained (as always) a residue of bold spirits who, scorning decadent circumstance, turned intuitively to that virile and dangerous exercise left them as a heritage by the vanished Moors. For it was the Arab conquerors, the so-called Moors, who first practised this form of vicarious warfare. It was, however, in no sense as a sport--far less as a popular pastime--that the fierce Arab had risked equal chances with the fiercest wild beast of the Spanish plain. No, it was strictly as a substitute and a preparation for the sterner realities of war that, during the intervals of peace, the Moors "kept their hands in" by fighting bulls.