little
importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair's breadth
from the truth in the telling of it.

You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at
leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to
reading books of chivalry with such ardor and avidity that he almost
entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the
management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and
infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillage-land to buy books of
chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get.

* * * * *

In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion
that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it
was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honor as for
the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of
himself, roaming the world over in full armor and on horseback in quest
of adventures, 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 armor 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.[434-2] 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 an