Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes

Author:Miguel De Cervantes [Cervantes, Miguel De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Knights and knighthood, Spanish & Portuguese, Fiction, Literary, Don Quixote (Fictitious character), Literary Criticism, Classics, Spain, European
ISBN: 9780060188702
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-10-08T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IV

In which Sancho Panza satisfies Bachelor Sansón Carrasco with regard to his doubts and questions, with other events worthy of being known and recounted

Sancho came back to Don Quixote’s house, and returning to their earlier discussion, he said:

“As for what Señor Sansón said about people wanting to know who stole my donkey, and how, and when, I can answer by saying that on the same night we were running from the Holy Brotherhood, and entered the Sierra Morena after the misadventurous adventure of the galley slaves, and of the dead man being carried to Segovia, my master and I rode into a stand of trees where my master rested on his lance, and I on my donkey, and battered and tired from our recent skirmishes, we began to sleep as if we were lying on four featherbeds; I was so sound asleep that whoever the thief was could come up to me, and put me on four stakes that he propped under the four sides of my packsaddle, and leave me mounted on them, and take my donkey out from under me without my even knowing it.”

“That is an easy thing to do, and nothing new; the same thing happened to Sacripante when he was at the siege of Albraca; with that same trick the famous thief named Brunelo took his horse from between his legs.”1

“Dawn broke,” Sancho continued, “and as soon as I moved, the stakes gave way and I fell to the ground; I looked for the donkey and didn’t see him; tears filled my eyes, and I began to lament, and if the author of our history didn’t put that in, you can be sure he left out something good. After I don’t know how many days, when we were traveling with the Señora Princess Micomicona, I saw my donkey, and riding him, dressed like a Gypsy, was Ginés de Pasamonte, the lying crook that my master and I freed from the chain.”

“The error doesn’t lie there,” replied Sansón, “but in the fact that before the donkey appeared, the author says that Sancho was riding on that same animal.”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” said Sancho, “except to say that either the historian was wrong or the printer made a mistake.”

“That must be the case, no doubt about it,” said Sansón, “but what happened to the hundred escudos? Are they gone?”

“I spent them for myself, and my wife, and my children, and they are the reason my wife patiently puts up with my traveling highways and byways in the service of my master, Don Quixote; if after so much time I came back home without a blanca and without my donkey, a black future would be waiting for me; if there’s any more to know about me, here I am, and I’ll answer the king himself in person, and nobody has any reason to worry about whether I kept them or didn’t keep them, spent them or didn’t spend them; if the beatings I got

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