, and putting in practice himself all that he had read of as
being the usual practices of knights-errant; righting every kind of
wrong, and exposing himself to peril and danger from which, in the issue,
he was to reap eternal renown and fame. Already the poor man saw himself
crowned by the might of his arm Emperor of Trebizond at least; and so,
led away by the intense enjoyment he found in these pleasant fancies, he
set himself forthwith to put his scheme into execution.

The first thing he did was to clean up some armour that had belonged to
his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in a corner
eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished it as
best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it had no
closed helmet, nothing but a simple morion. This deficiency, however, his
ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind of half-helmet of pasteboard
which, fitted on to the morion, looked like a whole one. It is true that,
in order to see if it was strong and fit to stand a cut, he drew his
sword and gave it a couple of slashes, the first of which undid in an
instant what had taken him a week to do. The ease with which he had
knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and to guard against that
danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron on the inside until he
was satisfied with its strength; and then, not caring to try any more
experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a helmet of the most
perfect construction.

He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which, with more quartos than a
real and more blemishes than the steed of Gonela, that "tantum pellis et
ossa fuit," surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus of Alexander or the
Babieca of the Cid. Four days were spent in thinking what name to give
him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse
belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own,
should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as
to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and
what he then was; for it was only reasonable that, his master taking a
new character, he should take a new name, and that it should be a
distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new order and calling
he was about to follow. And so, after having composed, struck out,
rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of his
memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him R