proceeded to Don Quixote’s house, at the door of which they found his housekeeper and niece, whom the news of his arrival had already reached. It had been brought to Teresa Panza, Sancho’s wife, as well, and she with her hair all loose and half naked, dragging Sanchica her daughter by the hand, ran out to meet her husband; but seeing him coming in by no means as good case as she thought a governor ought to be, she said to him, “How is it you come this way, husband? It seems to me you come tramping and footsore, and looking more like a disorderly vagabond than a governor.”
“Hold your tongue, Teresa,” said Sancho; “often ‘where there are pegs there are no flitches;’ let’s go into the house and there you’ll hear strange things. I bring money, and that’s the main thing, got by my own industry without wronging anybody.”
“You bring the money, my good husband,” said Teresa, “and no matter whether it was got this way or that; for, however you may have got it, you’ll not have brought any new practice into the world.”
Sanchica embraced her father and asked him if he brought her anything, for she had been looking out for him as for the showers of May; and she taking hold of him by the girdle on one side, and his wife by the hand, while the daughter led Dapple, they made for their house, leaving Don Quixote in his, in the hands of his niece and housekeeper, and in the company of the curate and the bachelor.
Don Quixote at once, without any regard to time or season, withdrew in private with the bachelor and the curate, and in a few words told them of his defeat, and of the engagement he was under not to quit his village for a year, which he meant to keep to the letter without departing a hair’s breadth from it, as became a knight-errant bound by scrupulous good faith and the laws of knight-errantry; and of how he thought of turning shepherd for that year, and taking his diversion in the solitude of the