DON QUIXOTE

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young girls, those that the needle, embroidery cushion, and spinning
wheel usually afford, and if to refresh my mind I quitted them for a
while, I found recreation in reading some devotional book or playing the
harp, for experience taught me that music soothes the troubled mind and
relieves weariness of spirit. Such was the life I led in my parents'
house and if I have depicted it thus minutely, it is not out of
ostentation, or to let you know that I am rich, but that you may see how,
without any fault of mine, I have fallen from the happy condition I have
described, to the misery I am in at present. The truth is, that while I
was leading this busy life, in a retirement that might compare with that
of a monastery, and unseen as I thought by any except the servants of the
house (for when I went to Mass it was so early in the morning, and I was
so closely attended by my mother and the women of the household, and so
thickly veiled and so shy, that my eyes scarcely saw more ground than I
trod on), in spite of all this, the eyes of love, or idleness, more
properly speaking, that the lynx's cannot rival, discovered me, with the
help of the assiduity of Don Fernando; for that is the name of the