He told the king his name, and all about his treachery, and that of Morgan le Fay.
King Arthur was sad.
"It is very hard to be deceived in a friend," he said, "but I forgive you freely. I will try to cure your wound, and sometime I shall trust you again."
"You cannot cure me," said Sir Accalon. "I am dying. Let them carry me off the field."
So he was taken to a neighboring abbey, while the people crowded about the king to congratulate him, but Arthur said:
"I am sad at heart. My victory is no comfort to me, for to-day I have lost a friend whom I believed true."
Then he called the two brothers, Sir Damas and Sir Ontzlake, and judged their cause. He decided that their property must be divided equally between them, and that they must be friends. They promised never to quarrel again. Arthur told them that they must be kind to other knights and to all people. He said that if he heard that they were not, he could come and punish them.
After this, Sir Damas gave back to the twenty knights all their money, and they went on their way rejoicing. King Arthur mounted his horse and rode over to the abbey, where he sat by the bed of Sir Accalon till the poor knight died. Then the king went back alone to his Court at Camelot.
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Miguel de Cervantes, the greatest literary genius of Spain, was born in 1547 in a small town near Madrid, and he died in 1616, the year of the death of Shakespeare. He received a fair education, and by reading he gained a thorough knowledge of the romantic poetry of Spain and Italy and of the romances of chivalry. At the age of twenty-one he went to Italy. For several years he was a soldier in the Spanish army. When he was twenty-eight years old, he was captured by pirates of Algiers and was held a prisoner for five years. When he returned to Spain, he attempted to make a living by writing dramas and romances, and later he secured an unimportant governmental position as commissary and tax-collector in Seville. In 1606 he published the first part of Don Quixote. This book immediately became very popular, but it did not bring him much money nor did it win for him the recognition of literary men. All his life he was poor, and sometimes apparently he was actually in want of food. In 1615, one year before his death, he published the second part of Don Quixote, the greatest national book of Spain.