“I draw my stakes,” said Sancho, “and
will retreat with this pasty to the brook there, where
I mean to victual myself for three days; for I have
heard my lord, Don Quixote, say that a knight-errant’s
squire should eat until he can hold no more, whenever
he has the chance, because it often happens them to
get by accident into a wood so thick that they cannot
find a way out of it for six days; and if the man is
not well filled or his alforjas well stored, there
he may stay, as very often he does, turned into a
dried mummy.”
“Thou art in the right of it, Sancho,”
said Don Quixote; “go where thou wilt and eat
all thou canst, for I have had enough, and only want
to give my mind its refreshment, as I shall by listening
to this good fellow’s story.”
“It is what we shall all do,” said the
canon; and then begged the goatherd to begin the promised
tale.
The goatherd gave the goat which he held by the horns
a couple of slaps on the back, saying, “Lie
down here beside me, Spotty, for we have time enough
to return to our fold.” The goat seemed
to understand him, for as her master seated himself,
she stretched herself quietly beside him and looked
up in his face to show him she was all attention to
what he was going to say, and then in these words
he began his story.
WHICH DEALS WITH WHAT THE GOATHERD TOLD THOSE WHO WERE CARRYING OFF DON
QUIXOTE
Three leagues from this valley there is a village
which, though small, is one of the richest in all
this neighbourhood, and in it there lived a farmer,
a very worthy man, and so much respected that, although
to be so is the natural consequence of being rich,
he was even more respected for his virtue than for
the wealth he had acquired. But what made him
still more fortunate, as he said himself, was having
a daughter of such exceeding beauty, rare intelligence,
gracefulness, and virtue, that everyone who knew her
and beheld her marvelled at the extraordinary gifts
with which heaven and nature had endowed her.
As a child she was beautiful, she continued to grow
in beauty, and at the age of sixteen she was most
lovely. The fame of her beauty began to spread
abroad through all the villages around—but
why do I say the villages around, merely, when it
spread to distant cities, and even made its way into
the halls of royalty and reached the ears of people
of every class, who came from all sides to see her
as if to see something rare and curious, or some wonder-working
image?
Her father watched over her and she watched over herself;
for there are no locks, or guards, or bolts that can
protect a young girl better than her own modesty.
The wealth of the father and the beauty of the daughter
led many neighbours as well as strangers to seek her
for a wife; but he, as one might well be who had the
disposal of so rich a jewel, was perplexed and unable
to make up his mind to which of her countless suitors
