"That may be," replied Sancho, "but there is a difference between riding a-horseback and being laid athwart like a sack of rubbish."
"Have done with your replies," exclaimed Don Quixote, "and rise as well as thou art able and sit me on top of thine ass, and let us depart hence before the night comes and overtakes us in this wilderness."
Then Sancho, with thirty groans and sixty sighs and a hundred and twenty curses, lifted up Rozinante—who if he had had a tongue would have complained louder than Sancho himself—and after much trouble set Don Quixote on the ass. Then tying Rozinante to his tail, he led the ass by the halter, and proceeded as best he could to where the highroad seemed to lie.
And Fortune, which had guided their affairs from good to better, led him on to a road on which, he spied an inn, which to his annoyance and Don Quixote's joy must needs be a castle. Sancho protested that it was an inn, and his master that it was a castle; and their dispute lasted so long that they had time to arrive there before it was finished; and into this inn or castle Sancho entered without more parley with all his team.
The innkeeper, seeing Don Quixote laid athwart of the ass, asked Sancho what ailed him. Sancho answered that it was nothing, only that he had fallen down from a rock, and had bruised his ribs somewhat. The innkeeper's wife was by nature charitable, and she felt for the sufferings of others, so she hastened at once to attend to Don Quixote, and made her daughter, a comely young maiden, help her in taking care of her guest. There was also serving in the inn an Asturian woman, broad-cheeked, flat-pated, with a snub nose, blind of one eye and the other not very sound. This young woman, who was called Maritornes, assisted the daughter, and the two made up a bed for Don Quixote in a garret which had served for many years as a straw-loft. The bed on which they placed him was made of four roughly planed boards on two unequal trestles; a mattress which, in thinness, might have been a quilt, so full of pellets that if they had not through the holes shown themselves to be wool, they would to the touch seem to be pebbles. There was a pair of sheets made of target leather; and as for the coverlet, if any one had chosen to count the threads of it he could not have missed one in the reckoning.
On this miserable bed did Don Quixote lie, and presently the hostess and her daughter plastered him over from head to foot, Maritornes holding the candle for them.
While she was plastering him, the hostess, seeing that he was in places black and blue, said that it looked more like blows than a fall. Sancho, however, declared they were not blows, but that the rock had many sharp points, and each one had left a mark; and he added: "Pray, good mistress, spare some of that tow, as my back pains are not a little."
"In that case," said the hostess, "you must have fallen, too."
"I did not fall," said Sancho Panza, "but with the sudden fright I took on seeing my master fall, my body aches as if they had given me a thousand blows, and I now find myself with only a few bruises less than my master, Don Quixote."
"What is this gentleman's name?" asked Maritornes.