t fancies, he set himself forthwith to put his scheme into
execution.

The first thing he did was to clean up some armor that had belonged to
his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in a
corner, eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and
polished it as best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it;
that it had no closed helmet, nothing but a simple morion. This
deficiency, however, his ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind
of half-helmet of pasteboard which, fitted on to the morion, looked
like a whole one. It is true that in order to see if it was strong and
fit to stand a cut he drew his sword and gave it a couple of slashes,
the first of which undid in an instant what had taken him a week to
do. The ease with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him
somewhat, and to guard against that danger he set to work again,
fixing bars of iron on the inside until he was satisfied with its
strength; and then, not caring to try any more experiments with it, he
passed it and adopted it as a helmet of the most perfect construction.

He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which with more quartos than a
real and more blemishes than the steed of Gonela, that "_tantum pellis
et ossa fuit_" surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus of Alexander or
the Babieca of the Cid. Four days were spent in thinking what name to
give him; because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a
horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his
own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt
it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a
knight-errant, and what he then was; for it was only reasonable that,
his master taking a new character, he should take a new name, and that
it should be a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new
order and calling he was about to follow.

II

OF HOW DON QUIXOTE DIED[47]

As nothing that is man's can last forever, but all tends ever downward
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