that Dapple kept up his braying. As a matter of fact he
brayed so much louder than the emaciated Rocinante could neigh that
the superstitious Sancho took it for a sign that his own good fortune
would be ever so much greater than that of his master, though he was
considerate enough to say nothing about it to him.

Night soon began to fall, and the conversation between master and
squire turned to Don Quixote's incomparable love, whom he had never
seen in the flesh, and to whose abode he was now making this
pilgrimage in the dark, that he might be blessed by her before going
into new battles.

Sancho was beginning to worry that his imagination, with which he was
not overburdened, would give out; for with every new question of his
master's he had to give a fresh answer, and he was in a deadly fear
that Don Quixote might discover that he had never been at El Toboso
with the letter to his Lady Dulcinea. Again Don Quixote asked his
squire to repeat how he had been received when he had brought her the
message of his master's penance in the wilderness, but it infuriated
him that Sancho should insist on her having been sifting wheat instead
of pearls on that occasion. The courtyard wall mentioned by his squire
must, of course, have been a portico, or corridor, or gallery of some
rich and royal palace, only Sancho's language was so limited he could
not express himself or describe things properly. Or perhaps that
infernal enchanter had been busy again, and made things appear in
different shapes before his squire's eyes.

What his master said made Sancho's thought suddenly turn to the book
which the bachelor Samson had spoken of, and he began to worry that
some enchanter might have misrepresented his true character in its
pages. He felt it his place and duty to defend himself aloud against
any such evil; and having his master as audience, he proceeded to
carry out this thought, which, however, he abandoned towards the end
in favor of a careless independence: "But let them say what they like;
naked was I born, naked I find myself. I neither lose nor gain. When I
see myself put into a book and passed on from hand to hand all over
the world, I don't care a fig. Let them say what they like of me!"

Perhaps what Sancho had just said made Don Quixote's thoughts drift
out into the world, which was now being stirred by the accounts of his
greatness, for he fell into contemplation on all the tombs and
monuments to the great men of past