plight they travelled, man and beast hanging their heads with
fatigue, when they saw on the road, coming towards them, a great
multitude of lights, bobbing up and down, as if all the stars of heaven
were shifting their places. Neither Don Quixote nor Sancho felt much at
their ease at this strange spectacle, and both pulled up their beasts,
and waited trembling. Even Don Quixote feared he knew not what, and the
hair stood up on his head, in spite of his valour, as he said to Sancho:

'There lies before me, Sancho, a great and perilous adventure, and one
in which I must bear a stout heart.'

'It seems to be an adventure of phantoms,' whispered Sancho fearfully,
'which never was to my liking.'

'Whatever phantoms they be,' answered the knight, 'they shall not touch
a hair of your head,' replied Don Quixote soothingly. 'If they mocked at
you in the inn, it was for reason that I could not leap the fence. But
here, where the ground is open, I can lay about me as I will.'

'And what if they bewitch you, as they did that other time?' asked the
squire. 'How much will the open ground profit you then'?

'Trust to me,' replied Don Quixote, 'for my experience is greater than
yours'; and Sancho said no more.

They stood a little on one side watching the lights approaching, and
soon they saw a host of men clad in white riding along the road. The
squire's teeth chattered at the sight of them, and his terror increased
when he was able to make out that the moving stars were flaming torches
which men in white shirts carried in their hands, and that behind them
followed a litter draped in black. After the litter came six other men
dressed in black and mounted on mules. And Sancho had no doubt that he
saw before him shadows from the next world.

Though Don Quixote's heart quailed for a moment at the strangeness of
the vision, he soon recalled his valour. In an instant his fancy had
changed the litter into a bier, and the occupant into a knight who had
been done to death by foul means, and whom he was bound in honour to
avenge. So he moved forward to the middle of the road, and cried in a
loud voice:

'Proud knights, whoever you may be, stand and give me account of
yourselves, and tell me who it is that lies in that bier. For either you
have done an ill deed to some man, or else a wrong has been done to
you.'

'Pardon me, fair sir,' answered the foremost of the white-shirted men,
'but we are in haste, and the inn is far. We have n