The two boys who had been quarrelling came over to look at the hare, and Sancho asked one of them what their quarrel was about. He was answered by the one who had said, “Thou shalt never see it again as long as thou livest,” that he had taken a cage full of crickets from the other boy, and did not mean to give it back to him as long as he lived. Sancho took out four cuartos from his pocket and gave them to the boy for the cage, which he placed in Don Quixote’s hands, saying, “There, señor! there are the omens broken and destroyed, and they have no more to do with our affairs, to my thinking, fool as I am, than with last year’s clouds; and if I remember rightly I have heard the curate of our village say that it does not become Christians or sensible people to give any heed to these silly things; and even you yourself said the same to me some time ago, telling me that all Christians who minded omens were fools; but there’s no need of making words about it; let us push on and go into our village.”
The sportsmen came up and asked for their hare, which Don Quixote gave them. They then went on, and upon the green at the entrance of the town they came upon the curate and the bachelor Samson Carrasco busy with their breviaries. It should be mentioned that Sancho had thrown, by way of a sumpter-cloth, over Dapple and over the bundle of armour, the buckram robe painted with flames which they had put upon him at the duke’s castle the night Altisidora came back to life. He had also fixed the mitre on Dapple’s head, the oddest transformation and decoration that ever ass in the world underwent. They were at once recognised by both the curate and the bachelor, who came towards them with open arms. Don Quixote dismounted and received them with a close embrace; and the boys, who are lynxes that nothing escapes, spied out the ass’s mitre and came running to see it, calling out to one another, “Come here, boys, and see Sancho Panza’s ass figged out finer than Mingo, and Don Quixote’s beast leaner than ever.”
So at length, with the boys capering round them, and accompanied by the curate and the bachelor, they made their entrance into the town, and