and knew what I meant, but you wanted to put me out that you might hear
me make another couple of dozen blunders."

"May be so," replied Don Quixote; "but to come to the point, what does
Teresa say?"

"Teresa says," replied Sancho, "that I should make sure with your
worship, and 'let papers speak and beards be still,' for 'he who binds
does not wrangle,' since one 'take' is better than two 'I'll give
thee's;' and I say a woman's advice is no great thing, and he who won't
take it is a fool."

"And so say I," said Don Quixote; "continue, Sancho my friend; go on; you
talk pearls to-day."

"The fact is," continued Sancho, "that, as your worship knows better than
I do, we are all of us liable to death, and to-day we are, and to-morrow
we are not, and the lamb goes as soon as the sheep, and nobody can
promise himself more hours of life in this world than God may be pleased
to give him; for death is deaf, and when it comes to knock at our life's
door, it is always urgent, and neither prayers, nor struggles, nor
sceptres, nor mitres, can keep it back, as common talk and report say,
and as they tell us from the pulpits every day."

"All that is very true," said Don Quixote; "but I cannot make out what
thou art driving at."

"What I am driving at," said Sancho, "is that your worship settle some
fixed wages for me, to be paid monthly while I am in your service, and
that the same he paid me out of your estate; for I don't care to stand on
rewards which either come late, or ill, or never at all; God help me with
my own. In short, I would like to know what I am to get, be it much or
little; for the hen will lay on one egg, and many littles make a much,
and so long as one gains something there is nothing lost. To be sure, if
it should happen (what I neither believe nor expect) that your worship
were to give me that island you have promised me, I am not so ungrateful
nor so grasping but that I would be willing to have the revenue of such
island valued and stopped out of my wages in due promotion."

"Sancho, my friend," replied Don Quixote, "sometimes proportion may be as
good as promotion."

"I see," said Sancho; "I'll bet I ought to have said proportion, and not
promotion; but it is no matter, as your worship has understood me."

"And so well understood," returned Don Quixote, "that I have seen into
the depths of thy thoughts, and know the mark thou art shooting at with
the countless shafts of thy proverbs. Look here, Sanc