DON QUIXOTE

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from its beginning to its end, and above all man's life, and as Don
Quixote's enjoyed no special dispensation from heaven to stay its course,
its end and close came when he least looked for it. For-whether it was of
the dejection the thought of his defeat produced, or of heaven's will
that so ordered it--a fever settled upon him and kept him in his bed for
six days, during which he was often visited by his friends the curate,
the bachelor, and the barber, while his good squire Sancho Panza never
quitted his bedside. They, persuaded that it was grief at finding himself
vanquished, and the object of his heart, the liberation and
disenchantment of Dulcinea, unattained, that kept him in this state,
strove by all the means in their power to cheer him up; the bachelor
bidding him take heart and get up to begin his pastoral life, for which
he himself, he said, had already composed an eclogue that would take the
shine out of all Sannazaro had ever written, and had bought with his own
money two famous dogs to guard the flock, one called Barcino and the
other Butron, which a herdsman of Quintanar had sold him.