“What I am driving at,” said Sancho, “is that your worship settle some fixed wages for me, to be paid monthly while I am in your service, and that the same be paid me out of your estate; for I don’t care to stand on rewards which either come late, or ill, or never at all; God help me with my own. In short, I would like to know what I am to get, be it much or little; for the hen will lay on one egg, and many littles make a much, and so long as one gains something there is nothing lost. 504 To be sure, if it should happen (what I neither believe nor expect) that your worship were to give me that island you have promised me, I am not so ungrateful nor so grasping but that I would be willing to have the revenue of such island valued and stopped out of my wages in due promotion.”

“Sancho, my friend,” replied Don Quixote, “sometimes proportion may be as good as promotion.” 505

“I see,” said Sancho; “I’ll bet I ought to have said proportion, and not promotion; but it is no matter, as your worship has understood me.”