DON QUIXOTE

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to Spain. To checkmate him Cervantes drew up a series of twenty-five
questions, covering the whole period of his captivity, upon which he
requested Father Gil to take the depositions of credible witnesses before
a notary. Eleven witnesses taken from among the principal captives in
Algiers deposed to all the facts above stated and to a great deal more
besides. There is something touching in the admiration, love, and
gratitude we see struggling to find expression in the formal language of
the notary, as they testify one after another to the good deeds of
Cervantes, how he comforted and helped the weak-hearted, how he kept up
their drooping courage, how he shared his poor purse with this deponent,
and how "in him this deponent found father and mother."

On his return to Spain he found his old regiment about to march for
Portugal to support Philip's claim to the crown, and utterly penniless
now, had no choice but to rejoin it. He was in the expeditions to the
Azores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the war
returned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the manuscript