ll let them go free and filled with admiration at
his magnanimity, his generous disposition, and his unusual conduct, and
inclined to regard him as an Alexander the Great rather than a notorious
robber.

One of the squires observed in his mixture of Gascon and Catalan, "This
captain of ours would make a better friar than highwayman; if he wants to
be so generous another time, let it be with his own property and not
ours."

The unlucky wight did not speak so low but that Roque overheard him, and
drawing his sword almost split his head in two, saying, "That is the way
I punish impudent saucy fellows." They were all taken aback, and not one
of them dared to utter a word, such deference did they pay him. Roque
then withdrew to one side and wrote a letter to a friend of his at
Barcelona, telling him that the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, the
knight-errant of whom there was so much talk, was with him, and was, he
assured him, the drollest and wisest man in the world; and that in four
days from that date, that is to say, on Saint John the Baptist's Day, he
was going to deposit him in full armour mounted on his horse Rocinante,
together with his squire Sancho on an ass, in the middle of the strand of
the city; and bidding him give notice of this to his friends the Niarros,
that they might divert themselves with him. He wished, he said, his
enemies the Cadells could be deprived of this pleasure; but that was
impossible, because the crazes and shrewd sayings of Don Quixote and the
humours of his squire Sancho Panza could not help giving general pleasure
to all the world. He despatched the letter by one of his squires, who,
exchanging the costume of a highwayman for that of a peasant, made his
way into Barcelona and gave it to the person to whom it was directed.

CHAPTER LXI.

OF WHAT HAPPENED DON QUIXOTE ON ENTERING BARCELONA, TOGETHER WITH OTHER
MATTERS THAT PARTAKE OF THE TRUE RATHER THAN OF THE INGENIOUS

Don Quixote passed three days and three nights with Roque, and had he
passed three hundred years he would have found enough to observe and
wonder at in his mode of life. At daybreak they were in one spot, at
dinner-time in another; sometimes they fled without knowing from whom, at
other times they lay in wait, not knowing for what. They slept standing,
breaking their slumbers to shift from place to place. There was nothing
but sending out spies and scouts, posting sentinels and blowing the
matches of harquebus