DON QUIXOTE

Back Forward Menu

with a crimping iron?" (From this we may perceive the antiquity of starch
and crimped ruffs.) Then he goes on: "Poor gentleman of good family!
always cockering up his honour, dining miserably and in secret, and
making a hypocrite of the toothpick with which he sallies out into the
street after eating nothing to oblige him to use it! Poor fellow, I say,
with his nervous honour, fancying they perceive a league off the patch on
his shoe, the sweat-stains on his hat, the shabbiness of his cloak, and
the hunger of his stomach!"

All this was brought home to Don Quixote by the bursting of his stitches;
however, he comforted himself on perceiving that Sancho had left behind a
pair of travelling boots, which he resolved to wear the next day. At last
he went to bed, out of spirits and heavy at heart, as much because he
missed Sancho as because of the irreparable disaster to his stockings,
the stitches of which he would have even taken up with silk of another
colour, which is one of the greatest signs of poverty a gentleman can
show in the course of his never-failing embarrassments. He put out the