protested her own innocence, and that it was never with her consent that a woman of bad repute had entered her house; cried herself up for a saint, and her husband for a pattern of excellence; and called out to a servant wench to run and fetch her husband’s patent of nobility out of the chest, that she might show it to the Senor Lieutenant.  He would then be able to judge whether the wife of so respectable a man was capable of anything but what was quite correct.  If she did keep a lodging-house, it was because she could not help it.  God knows if she would not rather have some comfortable independence to live upon at her ease.  The lieutenant, tired of her volubility and her bouncing about the patent of gentility, said to her, “Sister hostess, I am willing to believe that your husband is a gentleman, but then you must allow he is only a gentleman innkeeper.”  The landlady replied with great dignity, “And where is the family in the world, however good its blood may be, but you may pick some holes in its coat?” “Well, all I have to say, sister, is, that you must put on your clothes, and come away to prison.”  This brought her down from her high flights at once; she tore her hair, cried, screamed, and prayed, but all in vain; the inexorable lieutenant carried the whole party off to prison, that is to say, the Breton, Colindres, and the landlady.  I learned afterwards that the Breton lost his fifty crowns, and was condemned besides to pay costs; the landlady had to pay as much more.  Colindres was let off scot free, and the very day she was liberated she picked up a sailor, out of whom she made good her disappointment in the affair of the Breton.  Thus you see, Scipio, what serious troubles arose from my gluttony.

Scip. Say rather from the rascality of your master.

Berg. Nay but listen, for worse remains to be told, since I am loth to speak ill of alguazil and attorneys.

Scip. Ay, but speaking ill of one is not speaking ill of all.  There is many and many an attorney who is honest and upright.  They do not all take fees from both parties in a suit; nor extort more than their right; nor go prying about into other people’s business in order to entangle them in the webs of the law; nor league with the justice to fleece one side and skin the other.  It is not every alguazil that is in collusion with thieves and vagabonds, or keeps a decoy-duck in the shape of a mistress, as your master did.  Very many of them are gentlemen in feeling and conduct; neither arrogant nor insolent, nor rogues and knaves, like those who go about inns, measuring the length of strangers’ swords, and ruining their owners if they find them a hair’s breadth longer than the law allows.[60]

[60] When Cervantes wrote this, a decree had recently been issued limiting the length of the sword.