as they were gone they both of them came in to Don
Quixote, and said the niece, "What's this, uncle? Now that we were
thinking you had come back to stay at home and lead a quiet respectable
life there, are you going to get into fresh entanglements, and turn
'young shepherd, thou that comest here, young shepherd going there?' Nay!
indeed 'the straw is too hard now to make pipes of.'"

"And," added the housekeeper, "will your worship be able to bear, out in
the fields, the heats of summer, and the chills of winter, and the
howling of the wolves? Not you; for that's a life and a business for
hardy men, bred and seasoned to such work almost from the time they were
in swaddling-clothes. Why, to make choice of evils, it's better to be a
knight-errant than a shepherd! Look here, senor; take my advice--and I'm
not giving it to you full of bread and wine, but fasting, and with fifty
years upon my head--stay at home, look after your affairs, go often to
confession, be good to the poor, and upon my soul be it if any evil comes
to you."

"Hold your peace, my daughters," said Don Quixote; "I know very well what
my duty is; help me to bed, for I don't feel very well; and rest assured
that, knight-errant now or wandering shepherd to be, I shall never fail
to have a care for your interests, as you will see in the end." And the
good wenches (for that they undoubtedly were), the housekeeper and niece,
helped him to bed, where they gave him something to eat and made him as
comfortable as possible.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

OF HOW DON QUIXOTE FELL SICK, AND OF THE WILL HE MADE, AND HOW HE DIED

As nothing that is man's can last for ever, but all tends ever downwards
from its beginning to its end, and above all man's life, and as Don
Quixote's enjoyed no special dispensation from heaven to stay its course,
its end and close came when he least looked for it. For-whether it was of
the dejection the thought of his defeat produced, or of heaven's will
that so ordered it--a fever settled upon him and kept him in his bed for
six days, during which he was often visited by his friends the curate,
the bachelor, and the barber, while his good squire Sancho Panza never
quitted his bedside. They, persuaded that it was grief at finding himself
vanquished, and the object of his heart, the liberation and
disenchantment of Dulcinea, unattained, that kept him in this state,
strove by all the means in their power to cheer him up; the bachelor
bidding him