ure it was to fall in with you who go in search of adventures."

"Things do not all happen in the same way," answered Don Quixote; "it all
came, Sir Bachelor Alonzo Lopez, of your going, as you did, by night,
dressed in those surplices, with lighted torches, praying, covered with
mourning, so that naturally you looked like something evil and of the
other world; and so I could not avoid doing my duty in attacking you, and
I should have attacked you even had I known positively that you were the
very devils of hell, for such I certainly believed and took you to be."

"As my fate has so willed it," said the bachelor, "I entreat you, sir
knight-errant, whose errand has been such an evil one for me, to help me
to get from under this mule that holds one of my legs caught between the
stirrup and the saddle."

"I would have talked on till to-morrow," said Don Quixote; "how long were
you going to wait before telling me of your distress?"

He at once called to Sancho, who, however, had no mind to come, as he was
just then engaged in unloading a sumpter mule, well laden with provender,
which these worthy gentlemen had brought with them. Sancho made a bag of
his coat, and, getting together as much as he could, and as the bag would
hold, he loaded his beast, and then hastened to obey his master's call,
and helped him to remove the bachelor from under the mule; then putting
him on her back he gave him the torch, and Don Quixote bade him follow
the track of his companions, and beg pardon of them on his part for the
wrong which he could not help doing them.

And said Sancho, "If by chance these gentlemen should want to know who
was the hero that served them so, your worship may tell them that he is
the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, otherwise called the Knight of the
Rueful Countenance."

The bachelor then took his departure.

I forgot to mention that before he did so he said to Don Quixote,
"Remember that you stand excommunicated for having laid violent hands on
a holy thing, juxta illud, si quis, suadente diabolo."

"I do not understand that Latin," answered Don Quixote, "but I know well
I did not lay hands, only this pike; besides, I did not think I was
committing an assault upon priests or things of the Church, which, like a
Catholic and faithful Christian as I am, I respect and revere, but upon
phantoms and spectres of the other world; but even so, I remember how it
fared with Cid Ruy Diaz when he broke the chair of the am