c. Will your
worship let me sleep, and not worry me about whipping myself? or you'll
make me swear never to touch a hair of my doublet, not to say my flesh."

"O hard heart!" said Don Quixote, "O pitiless squire! O bread
ill-bestowed and favours ill-acknowledged, both those I have done thee
and those I mean to do thee! Through me hast thou seen thyself a
governor, and through me thou seest thyself in immediate expectation of
being a count, or obtaining some other equivalent title, for I-post
tenebras spero lucem."

"I don't know what that is," said Sancho; "all I know is that so long as
I am asleep I have neither fear nor hope, trouble nor glory; and good
luck betide him that invented sleep, the cloak that covers over all a
man's thoughts, the food that removes hunger, the drink that drives away
thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that tempers the heat,
and, to wind up with, the universal coin wherewith everything is bought,
the weight and balance that makes the shepherd equal with the king and
the fool with the wise man. Sleep, I have heard say, has only one fault,
that it is like death; for between a sleeping man and a dead man there is
very little difference."

"Never have I heard thee speak so elegantly as now, Sancho," said Don
Quixote; "and here I begin to see the truth of the proverb thou dost
sometimes quote, 'Not with whom thou art bred, but with whom thou art
fed.'"

"Ha, by my life, master mine," said Sancho, "it's not I that am stringing
proverbs now, for they drop in pairs from your worship's mouth faster
than from mine; only there is this difference between mine and yours,
that yours are well-timed and mine are untimely; but anyhow, they are all
proverbs."

At this point they became aware of a harsh indistinct noise that seemed
to spread through all the valleys around. Don Quixote stood up and laid
his hand upon his sword, and Sancho ensconced himself under Dapple and
put the bundle of armour on one side of him and the ass's pack-saddle on
the other, in fear and trembling as great as Don Quixote's perturbation.
Each instant the noise increased and came nearer to the two terrified
men, or at least to one, for as to the other, his courage is known to
all. The fact of the matter was that some men were taking above six
hundred pigs to sell at a fair, and were on their way with them at that
hour, and so great was the noise they made and their grunting and
blowing, that they deafened the ears of