DON QUIXOTE

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It was as he journeyed from town to town collecting the king's taxes,
that he noted down those bits of inn and wayside life and character that
abound in the pages of "Don Quixote:" the Benedictine monks with
spectacles and sunshades, mounted on their tall mules; the strollers in
costume bound for the next village; the barber with his basin on his
head, on his way to bleed a patient; the recruit with his breeches in his
bundle, tramping along the road singing; the reapers gathered in the
venta gateway listening to "Felixmarte of Hircania" read out to them; and
those little Hogarthian touches that he so well knew how to bring in, the
ox-tail hanging up with the landlord's comb stuck in it, the wine-skins
at the bed-head, and those notable examples of hostelry art, Helen going
off in high spirits on Paris's arm, and Dido on the tower dropping tears
as big as walnuts. Nay, it may well be that on those journeys into remote
regions he came across now and then a specimen of the pauper gentleman,
with his lean hack and his greyhound and his books of chivalry, dreaming
away his life in happy ignorance that the world had changed since his
great-grandfather's old helmet was new. But it was in Seville that he