DON QUIXOTE

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allow him to speak until he had risen. The prodigious scarecrow obeyed,
and standing up, removed the veil from his face and disclosed the most
enormous, the longest, the whitest and the thickest beard that human eyes
had ever beheld until that moment, and then fetching up a grave, sonorous
voice from the depths of his broad, capacious chest, and fixing his eyes
on the duke, he said:

"Most high and mighty senor, my name is Trifaldin of the White Beard; I
am squire to the Countess Trifaldi, otherwise called the Distressed
Duenna, on whose behalf I bear a message to your highness, which is that
your magnificence will be pleased to grant her leave and permission to
come and tell you her trouble, which is one of the strangest and most
wonderful that the mind most familiar with trouble in the world could
have imagined; but first she desires to know if the valiant and never
vanquished knight, Don Quixote of La Mancha, is in this your castle, for
she has come in quest of him on foot and without breaking her fast from
the kingdom of Kandy to your realms here; a thing which may and ought to