demanded of him. "I looked for no less, my lord, from your High Magnificence," replied Don Quixote, "and I have to tell you that the boon I have asked and your liberality has granted is that you shall dub me knight to-morrow morning, and that to-night I shall watch my arms in the chapel of this your castle; thus to-morrow, as I have said, will be accomplished what I so much desire, enabling me lawfully to roam through all the four quarters of the world seeking adventures on behalf of those in distress, as is the duty of chivalry and of knights-errant like myself, whose ambition is directed to such deeds."
The landlord, who, as has been mentioned, was something of a wag, and had already some suspicion of his guest's want of wits, was quite convinced of it on hearing talk of this kind from him, and to make sport for the night he determined to fall in with his humor. So he told him he was quite right in pursuing the object he had in view, and that such a motive was natural and becoming in cavaliers as distinguished as he seemed and his gallant bearing showed him to be; and that he himself in his younger days had followed the same honorable calling, roaming in quest of adventures in various parts of the world, among others the Curing-grounds of Malaga, the Isles of Riaran, the Precinct of Seville, the Little Market of Segovia, the Olivera of Valencia, the Rondilla of Granada, the Strand of San Lucar, the Colt of Cordova, the Taverns of Toledo,[1] and divers other quarters, where he had proved the nimbleness of his feet and the lightness of his fingers, doing many wrongs, cheating many widows, ruining maids and swindling minors, and in short, bringing himself under the notice of almost every tribunal and court of justice in Spain; until at last he had retired to this castle of his, where he was
- ↑ The localities here mentioned were, and some of them still are, haunts of the rogue and vagabond, or, what would be called in Spain, the picaro class. The Curing-grounds of Malaga was a place outside the town where fish was dried; "the Isles of Riaran" was the slang name of a low suburb of the same city; the Precinct (compas) of Seville was a district on the river side, not far from the plaza de toros; the Little Market of Segovia was in the hollow spanned by the great aqueduct on the south side of the town; the Olivera of Valencia was a small plaza in the middle of the town; the "Rondilla of Granada" was probably in the Albayein quarter; the "Strand of San Lucar" and the "Taverns of Toledo" explain themselves sutficiently; and the "Colt of Cordova" was a district on the south side of the city, which took its name from a horse in stone standing over a fountain in its centre. As Fermin Caballero says in a queer little book called the Geographical Knowledge of Cervantes, it is clear that Cervantes knew by heart the "Mapa picaresco de España."
