in him; a child might persuade him that it is night at noonday; and for this simplicity I love him as the core of my heart, and I can’t bring myself to leave him, let him do ever such foolish things.”
“For all that, brother and señor,” said he of the Grove, “if the blind lead the blind, both are in danger of falling into the pit. It is better for us to beat a quiet retreat and get back to our own quarters; for those who seek adventures don’t always find good ones.”
Sancho kept spitting from time to time, and his spittle seemed somewhat ropy and dry, observing which the compassionate squire of the Grove said, “It seems to me that with all this talk of ours our tongues are sticking to the roofs of our mouths; but I have a pretty good loosener hanging from the saddlebow of my horse,” and getting up he came back the next minute with a large bota of wine and a pasty half a yard across; and this is no exaggeration, for it was made of a house rabbit so big that Sancho, as he handled it, took it to be made of a goat, not to say a kid, and looking at it he said, “And do you carry this with you, señor?”
“Why, what are you thinking about?” said the other; “do you take me for some paltry squire? I carry a better larder on my horse’s croup than a general takes with him when he goes on a march.”
Sancho ate without requiring to be pressed, and in the dark bolted mouthfuls like the knots on a tether, and said he, “You are a proper trusty squire, one of the right sort, sumptuous and grand, as this banquet shows, which, if it has not come here by magic art, at any rate has the look of it; not like me, unlucky beggar, that have nothing more in my alforjas than a scrap of cheese, so hard that one might brain a giant with it, and, to keep it company, a few dozen carobs and as many more filberts and walnuts; thanks to the austerity of my master, and the idea he has and the rule he follows, that knights-errant must not live or sustain themselves on anything except dried fruits and the herbs of the field.”