With this permission, which Don Quixote would have taken even had they not granted it, he approached the chain and asked the first for what offences he was now in such a sorry case.

He made answer that it was for being a lover.

“For that only?” replied Don Quixote; “why, if for being lovers they send people to the galleys I might have been rowing in them long ago.”

“The love is not the sort your worship is thinking of,” said the galley slave; “mine was that I loved a washerwoman’s basket of clean linen so well, and held it so close in my embrace, that if the arm of the law had not forced it from me, I should never have let it go of my own will to this moment; I was caught in the act, there was no occasion for torture, the case was settled, they treated me to a hundred lashes on the back, and three years of gurapas besides, and that was the end of it.”