"See the race of hero-spirits
Pass the torch from hand to hand."

In this book the stories of a few of them are told as yarns to boys
and girls round a camp-fire. Every one of the tales is historically
true, and is accurate in detail.

In that ancient Greek relay-race the prize to each winner was simply a
wreath of leaves cut by a priest with a golden knife from trees in the
sacred grove near the Sea,--the grove where the Temple of Neptune, the
god of the Ocean, stood. It was just a crown of wild olive that would
wither away. Yet no man would have changed it for its weight in gold.

For when the proud winner in the race went back to his little city,
set among the hills, with his already withering wreath, all the people
would come and hail him a victor and wave ribbons in the air. A great
sculptor would carve a statue of him in imperishable marble and it
would be set up in the city. And on the head of the statue of the
young athlete was carved a wreath.

In the great relay-race of the world many athletes--men and
women--have won great fame by the speed and skill and daring with
which they carried forward the torch and, themselves dropping in their
tracks, have passed the flame on to the next runner; Paul, Francis,
Penn, Livingstone, Mackay, Florence Nightingale, and a host of others.
And many who have run just as bravely and swiftly have won no fame
at all though their work was just as great. But the fame or the
forgetting really does not matter. The fact is that the race is still
running; _it has not yet been won_. Whose team will win? That is what
matters.