For by my troth, sir, the corn is now too old to make pipes of.”  To which the housekeeper added, “And will your worship be able to endure the summer noondays, and the winter’s night frosts, and the howlings of the wolves?  No, for certain, for this is the business and duty of strong men, cut out and bred for such work almost from their swaddling bands and long clothes.  Ill for ill, it is even better to be a knight-errant than a shepherd.  Look ye, sir, take my advice, which is not given on a full meal of bread and wine, but fasting, and with fifty years over my head.  Stay at home, look after your property, go often to confession, do good to the poor; and on my soul be it if ill comes of it.”—­“Peace, daughters,” answered Don Quixote to them; “I know well what it behooves me to do.  Help me to bed, for it seems to me I am not very well; and be assured that whether I now be a knight-errant or an errant-shepherd, I shall never fail to provide whatever you shall need, as you shall see indeed.”  And the good women took him to bed, brought him something to eat, and tended him with all possible care.

As human things are not eternal, always tending downwards from their beginnings till they reach their final end, especially the lives of men, and as Don Quixote held no privilege from heaven to stay the course of his, so his end and finish arrived when he least expected it.  For whether it was from the melancholy that his defeat caused, or whether it was by the disposition of heaven that so ordered it, a fever took possession of him that confined him to his bed for six days.

All that time his friends the curate, the bachelor, and the barber, came often to see him, and his good squire Sancho Panza never stirred from his bedside.

They, conjecturing that the regret of his defeat, and his being disappointed of his desire for Dulcinea’s liberty and disenchantment, kept him in this case, essayed to divert him in all possible ways.  The bachelor begged him to pluck up a good heart, and rise, that he might begin his pastoral life, for which he had already written an eclogue, which would confound all those that Sannazaro had ever written, and that he had already bought, with his own money, two famous dogs to watch their flock, the one called Barcino, and the other Butron, that a herdsman of Quintanar had sold him.  But this had no effect on Don Quixote’s sadness.  His friends called in the doctor, who, upon feeling his pulse, did not very well like it; and said that in any case he should provide for the safety of his soul, for that of his body was in danger.  Don Quixote heard this with a calm mind, but not so his housekeeper, his niece, and his squire, who fell a-weeping bitterly, as if they already saw him dead before them.  The physician was of opinion that melancholy and vexation were bringing him to his end.  Don Quixote desired them to leave him alone, for he would sleep a little; they did so, and he slept for more than six hours straight off, as they say, so that the housekeeper and the niece thought that he would never wake.