lmost 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