an tell you I
know you, for all your face is covered, and I can tell you I am up to
you, however you may hide your tricks. After all, where envy reigns
virtue cannot live, and where there is niggardliness there can be no
liberality. Ill betide the devil! if it had not been for your worship my
master would be married to the Princess Micomicona this minute, and I
should be a count at least; for no less was to be expected, as well from
the goodness of my master, him of the Rueful Countenance, as from the
greatness of my services. But I see now how true it is what they say in
these parts, that the wheel of fortune turns faster than a mill-wheel,
and that those who were up yesterday are down to-day. I am sorry for my
wife and children, for when they might fairly and reasonably expect to
see their father return to them a governor or viceroy of some island or
kingdom, they will see him come back a horse-boy. I have said all this,
senor curate, only to urge your paternity to lay to your conscience your
ill-treatment of my master; and have a care that God does not call you to
account in another life for making a prisoner of him in this way, and
charge against you all the succours and good deeds that my lord Don
Quixote leaves undone while he is shut up.

"Trim those lamps there!" exclaimed the barber at this; "so you are of
the same fraternity as your master, too, Sancho? By God, I begin to see
that you will have to keep him company in the cage, and be enchanted like
him for having caught some of his humour and chivalry. It was an evil
hour when you let yourself be got with child by his promises, and that
island you long so much for found its way into your head."

"I am not with child by anyone," returned Sancho, "nor am I a man to let
myself be got with child, if it was by the King himself. Though I am poor
I am an old Christian, and I owe nothing to nobody, and if I long for an
island, other people long for worse. Each of us is the son of his own
works; and being a man I may come to be pope, not to say governor of an
island, especially as my master may win so many that he will not know
whom to give them to. Mind how you talk, master barber; for shaving is
not everything, and there is some difference between Peter and Peter. I
say this because we all know one another, and it will not do to throw
false dice with me; and as to the enchantment of my master, God knows the
truth; leave it as it is; it only makes it worse to stir it.