DON QUIXOTE

Don Quixote remained very deep in thought, waiting for the bachelor
Carrasco, from whom he was to hear how he himself had been put into a
book as Sancho said; and he could not persuade himself that any such
history could be in existence, for the blood of the enemies he had slain
was not yet dry on the blade of his sword, and now they wanted to make
out that his mighty achievements were going about in print. For all that,
he fancied some sage, either a friend or an enemy, might, by the aid of
magic, have given them to the press; if a friend, in order to magnify and
exalt them above the most famous ever achieved by any knight-errant; if
an enemy, to bring them to naught and degrade them below the meanest ever
recorded of any low squire, though as he said to himself, the
achievements of squires never were recorded. If, however, it were the
fact that such a history were in existence, it must necessarily, being
the story of a knight-errant, be grandiloquent, lofty, imposing, grand
and true. With this he comforted himself somewhat, though it made him
uncomfortable to think that the author was a Moor, judging by the title
of "Cide;" and that no truth was to be looked for from Moors, as they are