When I came to my own house, for which I was forced to inquire, one of the servants opening the door, I bent down to go in (like a goose under a gate), for fear of striking my head. My wife ran out to embrace me, but I stooped lower than her knees, thinking she could otherwise never be able to reach my mouth. My daughter kneeled to ask my blessing, but I could not see her till she arose, having been so long used to stand with my head and eyes erect to above sixty feet; and then I went to take her up with one hand by the waist. I looked down upon the servants, and one or two friends who were in the house, as if they had been pygmies, and I a giant. I told my wife she had been too thrifty, for I found she had starved herself and her daughter to nothing. In short, I behaved myself so unaccountably that they were all of the captain's opinion when he first saw me, and concluded I had lost my wits. This I mention as an instance of the great power of habit and prejudice.
In a little time, I and my family and friends came to a right understanding; but my wife protested I should never go to sea any more; although my evil destiny so ordered that she had not power to hinder me, as the reader may know hereafter. In the meantime, I here conclude the Second Part of my unfortunate Voyages.
DON QUIXOTE
DON QUIXOTE DETERMINES TO BECOME A KNIGHT
By Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
At a certain village in La Mancha, of which I cannot remember the name, there lived not long ago one of those old-fashioned gentlemen who are never without a lance upon a rack, an old target, a lean horse, and a greyhound. His diet consisted more of beef than mutton; and with minced meat on most nights, lentils on Fridays, griefs and groans on Saturdays, and a pigeon extraordinary on Sundays, he consumed three quarters of his revenue; the rest was laid out in a plush coat, velvet breeches, with slippers of the same, for holidays; and a suit of the very best homespun cloth, which he bestowed on himself for working days. His whole family was a housekeeper something turned of forty, a niece not twenty, and a man that served him in the house and in the field, and could saddle a horse, and handle the pruning hook. The master himself was nigh fifty years of age, of a hale and strong complexion, lean-bodied and thin-faced, an early riser, and a lover of hunting. Some say his surname was Quixada, or Quesada (for authors differ in this particular); however, we may reasonably conjecture he was called Quixana; though this concerns us but little, provided we keep strictly to the truth in every point of this history.
You must know, then, that when our gentleman had nothing to do (which was almost all the year round), he passed his time in reading books of knight-errantry, which he did with that application and delight, that at last he in a manner wholly left off his country sports, and even the care of his estate; nay, he grew so strangely besotted with these amusements that he sold many acres of arable land to purchase books of that kind, by which means he collected as many of them as were to be had; but, among them all, none pleased him like the works of the famous Feliciano de Sylva; for the clearness of his prose and those intricate expressions with which it is interlaced, seemed to him so many pearls of eloquence, especially when he came to read the challenges, and the amorous addresses, many of them in this extraordinary style: "The reason of your unreasonable usage of my reason does so enfeeble my reason that I have reason to expostulate with your beauty." And this: "The sublime heavens, which with your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, and fix you the deserver of the desert that is deserved by your grandeur." These, and such like expressions, strangely puzzled the poor gentleman's understanding, while he was breaking his brain to unravel their meaning, which Aristotle himself could never have found, though he should have been raised from the dead for that very purpose.