hough from reasonable
conjectures it seems plain that he was called Quixana. This, however,
is of but little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to
stray a hair's breadth from the truth in the telling of it.

You must know then that the above-named gentleman, whenever he was at
leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to
reading books of chivalry with such ardor and avidity that he almost
entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the
management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and
infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillage-land to buy books
of chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get.
But of all there were none he liked so well as those of the famous
Feliciano de Silva's composition, for their lucidity of style and
complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in
his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found
passages like:--"The reason of the unreason with which my reason is
afflicted, so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your
beauty;" or again:--"The high heavens, that of your divinity divinely
fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your
greatness deserves." Over conceits of this sort the poor gentleman
lost his wits, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and
worm the meaning out of them; what Aristotle himself could not have
made out or extracted, had he come to life again for that special
purpose. He was not at all easy about the wounds which Don Belianis
gave and took, because it seemed to him that, great as were the
surgeons who had cured him, he must have had his face and body covered
all over with seams and scars. He commended however the author's way
of ending his book with the promise of that interminable adventure;
and many a time was he tempted to take up his pen and finish it
properly as is there proposed, which no doubt he would have done, and
made a successful piece of work of it too, had not greater and more
absorbing thoughts prevented him.

Many an argument did he have with the curate of his village (a learned
man, and a graduate of Siguenza) as to which had been the better
knight, Palmerin of England or Amadis of Gaul. Master Nicholas the
village barber, however, used to say that neither of them came up to
the Knight of Phoebus, and that if there was any could compare with
_him_ it was Don Galaor, the