worship eat anything all that time, senor?" asked the
cousin.

"I never touched a morsel," answered Don Quixote, "nor did I feel hunger,
or think of it."

"And do the enchanted eat?" said the cousin.

"They neither eat," said Don Quixote; "nor are they subject to the
greater excrements, though it is thought that their nails, beards, and
hair grow."

"And do the enchanted sleep, now, senor?" asked Sancho.

"Certainly not," replied Don Quixote; "at least, during those three days
I was with them not one of them closed an eye, nor did I either."

"The proverb, 'Tell me what company thou keepest and I'll tell thee what
thou art,' is to the point here," said Sancho; "your worship keeps
company with enchanted people that are always fasting and watching; what
wonder is it, then, that you neither eat nor sleep while you are with
them? But forgive me, senor, if I say that of all this you have told us
now, may God take me--I was just going to say the devil--if I believe a
single particle."

"What!" said the cousin, "has Senor Don Quixote, then, been lying? Why,
even if he wished it he has not had time to imagine and put together such
a host of lies."

"I don't believe my master lies," said Sancho.

"If not, what dost thou believe?" asked Don Quixote.

"I believe," replied Sancho, "that this Merlin, or those enchanters who
enchanted the whole crew your worship says you saw and discoursed with
down there, stuffed your imagination or your mind with all this rigmarole
you have been treating us to, and all that is still to come."

"All that might be, Sancho," replied Don Quixote; "but it is not so, for
everything that I have told you I saw with my own eyes, and touched with
my own hands. But what will you say when I tell you now how, among the
countless other marvellous things Montesinos showed me (of which at
leisure and at the proper time I will give thee an account in the course
of our journey, for they would not be all in place here), he showed me
three country girls who went skipping and capering like goats over the
pleasant fields there, and the instant I beheld them I knew one to be the
peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, and the other two those same country girls
that were with her and that we spoke to on the road from El Toboso! I
asked Montesinos if he knew them, and he told me he did not, but he
thought they must be some enchanted ladies of distinction, for it was
only a few days before that they had made their appea