found
in these pleasant 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. And so after having
composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a
multitude of names out of his memory and fancy, he decided upon
calling him Rosinante,--to his thinking lofty, sonorous, and
significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he
now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.

Having got a name for his horse so much to his taste, he was anxious
to get one for himself, and he was eight days more pondering over this
point, till at last he made up his mind to call himself Don Quixot