urier;
and those who were carrying on the joke against Sancho, putting their
heads together, arranged how he was to be dismissed from the
government. Sancho spent the afternoon in drawing up certain
ordinances relating to the good government of what he fancied the
island.... He reduced the prices of shoes, boots, and stockings, but
of shoes in particular, as they seemed to him to run extravagantly
high. He established a fixed rate for servants' wages, which were
becoming recklessly exorbitant. He laid extremely heavy penalties upon
those who sang lewd or loose songs either by day or night. He decreed
that no blind man should sing of any miracle in verse unless he could
produce authentic evidence that it was true; for it was his opinion
that most of those the blind men sing are trumped up, to the detriment
of the true ones. He established and created an _alguacil_ of the
poor, not to harass them, but to examine them and see whether they
really were so; for many a sturdy thief or drunkard goes about under
cover of a make-believe crippled limb or a sham sore. In a word, he
made so many good rules that to this day they are preserved there, and
are called _The constitutions of the great governor Sancho Panza_.

THE ENDING OF ALL DON QUIXOTE'S ADVENTURES

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

As nothing that is man's can last forever, 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 take heart and
get up to begin his pastoral life; for which he himself, he said, had
already composed an eclogue that would take the shine out of all
Sannazaro[A] had ever written, and had bought with his own money two
famous dogs to guard the flock, o