en the Cross
was battling with the Crescent, and Christian Spain, step by step, was
forcing Mohammedan Spain back to the blue Mediterranean and the arid
wastes of Africa, from which, centuries before, the followers of the
Arabian Prophet had come.

At the time of our story, in the year 1525, this forcing process was
about over. Under the relentless measures of Ferdinand and Isabella,
with whose story all American children, at least, should be familiar,
the last Moorish stronghold had fallen, in the very year in which
Columbus discovered America, and Spain, from the Pyrenees to the Straits
of Gibraltar, acknowledged the mastership of its Christian sovereigns.

But the centuries of warfare that had made the Spaniards a fierce and
warlike race, had also filled Spain with frowning castles and embattled
towns. And such an embattled town was this same city of Avila, in which,
in 1525, lived the stern and pious old grandee, Don Alphonso Sanchez de
Cepeda, his sentimental and romance-loving wife, the Donna Beatrix, and
their twelve sturdy and healthy children.

Religious warfare, as it is the most bitter and relentless of strifes,
is also the most brutal. It turns the natures of men and women into
quite a different channel from the one in which the truths they are
fighting for would seek to lead them; and of all relentless and brutal
religious wars, few have been more bitter than the one that for fully
five hundred years had wasted the land of Spain.

To battle for the Cross, to gain renown in fights against the
Infidels--as the Moors were then called,--to "obtain martyrdom" among
the followers of Mohammed--these were reckoned by the Christians of
crusading days as the highest honor that life could bring or death
bestow. It is no wonder, therefore, that in a family, the father of
which had been himself a fighter of Infidels, and the mother a reader
and dreamer of all the romantic stories that such conflicts create, the
children also should be full of that spirit of hatred toward a conquered
foe that came from so bitter and long-continuing a warfare.

Don Alphonso's religion had little in it of cheerfulness and love.
It was of the stern and pitiless kind that called for sacrifice and
penance, and all those uncomfortable and unnecessary forms by which too
many good people, even in this more enlightened day, think to ease their
troubled consciences, or to satisfy the fancied demands of the Good
Father, who really requires non