whole, he was sent to prison at Seville in September 1597. The balance against him, however, was a small one, about £26, and on giving security for it he was released at the end of the year.
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 oxtail hanging up with the landlord’s comb stuck in it, the wineskins 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.