Miguel Cervantes

THE HISTORY OF DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA
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CHAPTER XXI.

What befell Don Quixote and his company at the inn.

When they had eaten plentifully they left that place, and travelled all that day and the next without meeting anything worth notice, till they came to the inn, which was so frightful a sight to poor Sancho, that he would willingly not have gone in, but could by no means avoid it. The innkeeper, the hostess, her daughter, and Maritornes, met Don Quixote and his squire with a very hearty welcome. The knight received them with a face of gravity and approbation, bidding them prepare him a better bed than their last entertainment afforded him. "Sir," said the hostess, "pay us better than you did then, and you shall have a bed for a prince." And upon the knight's promise that he would, she promised him a tolerable bed in the large room where he lay before. He presently undressed, and being heartily crazed in body as well as in mind, he went to bed. He was scarcely got to his chamber, when the hostess flew suddenly at the barber, and catching him by the beard, "On my life," said she, "you shall use my tail no longer for a beard; pray, sir, give me my tail; my husband wants it to stick his comb into; and my tail I will have, sir." The barber surrendered the hostess her tail, with the other trinkets which he had borrowed to decoy Don Quixote out of the desert. Dorothea's beauty and Cardenio's handsome shape surprised every body. The curate bespoke supper; and the host, being pretty secure of his reckoning, soon got them a tolerable [Pg 122] entertainment. They would not disturb the knight, who slept very soundly, for his distemper wanted rest more than meat; but they diverted themselves with the hostess's account of his encounter with the carriers, and of Sancho's being tossed in a blanket. Don Quixote's unaccountable madness was the principal subject of their discourse; upon which the curate insisting and arguing that it proceeded from his reading romances, the innkeeper took him up.

"Sir," said he, "you cannot make me of your opinion; for, in my mind, it is the pleasantest reading that ever was. I have now in the house two or three books of that kind, and some other pieces that really have kept me and many others alive. In harvest-time, a great many of the reapers come to drink here in the heat of the day, and he that can read best among us takes up one of these books, and all the rest of us, sometimes thirty or more, sit round about him and listen with such pleasure that we think neither of sorrow nor care. As for my own part, when I hear the mighty blows and dreadful battles of those knights-errant, I have half a mind to be one myself, and am raised to such a life and briskness that I could frighten away old age. I could sit and hear them from morning till night." "I wish you would, husband," said the hostess; "for then we should have some rest; for at all other times (...)

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