to thee worth knowing, asking, and learning; neither adding nor falsifying to give me pleasure, nor yet curtailing lest you should deprive me of it.”
“Señor,” replied Sancho, “if the truth is to be told, nobody copied out the letter for me, for I carried no letter at all.”
“It is as thou sayest,” said Don Quixote, “for the notebook in which I wrote it I found in my own possession two days after thy departure, which gave me very great vexation, as I knew not what thou wouldst do on finding thyself without any letter; and I made sure thou wouldst return from the place where thou didst first miss it.”
“So I should have done,” said Sancho, “if I had not got it by heart when your worship read it to me, so that I repeated it to a sacristan, who copied it out for me from hearing it, so exactly that he said in all the days of his life, though he had read many a letter of excommunication, he had never seen or read so pretty a letter as that.”