beautiful book you can imagine; the liveliest, the cleverest, the most interesting book you could hope for. I have worked on it for a long time, and it has nearly worn out my mind.
Now, I don’t claim that Don Quixote, about whom this story is told, is a perfect knight. Like all of us, he has his weaknesses and his faults. He also, though, possesses a type of nobility that is rare among men of today. Permit me to tell you his story.
The book was weird. The first chapter started out with a bunch of poems, each about a different character. Some were about knights, some about sorceresses, some sounded like love poems. It took me a while to get through them. Then I finally got to the story.
Somewhere in Spain, in a place called La Mancha, a strange gentleman once lived. I call him strange because of the way he dressed, the way he talked, and the things he did. He wore an old wool shirt and velvet pants, with brightly colored stockings. He seemed to be about fifty years old. Perhaps the strangest thing about him is that he said he was a knight, and rode around on an old horse, claiming to be a knight.
No one knows where he got this idea. They think he probably got it from reading too many books about knights of old. He bought every book he could find about knights, and kept them in his room. He lived alone, and was cared for by a woman who was his housekeeper. His only family was his niece, who lived nearby. Seeing how often he pretended he was a knight, both his housekeeper and his niece often tried to get the books away from him. They never succeeded.
The first few chapters told how Don Quixote would put on an old suit of armor he had gotten somewhere, grab a wooden pole, and start riding his horse off into the countryside telling everyone that he was a knight. Some of the people he met laughed at him. Some didn’t know what to do when they saw him. He seemed silly; I felt sorry for him.
When I was just about to start the fourth chapter, I suddenly heard a loud noise right outside the door. It sounded as if men were arguing.
“Let the whole world declare that there is no maiden more beautiful and more virtuous than my lady, Dulcinea del Toboso!”
It sounded like an old man talking. Another, younger voice answered. “Sir Knight, we do not know who this lady is. If you’ll show her to us, we will gladly tell you how beautiful we think she is.”
It didn’t sound like Mr. March. Maybe someone else wanted to look at the knight books here. I put the book down and walked over to open the door. When I did, I almost fell over backwards. Instead of the stairs I had come up, the door opened onto a dirt road going through an open field with huge trees on either side. I looked all around to find the stairs, but they weren’t there. Only the road.
In the road were five or six men riding horses and pulling mules behind them. It looked as though the mules were carrying bundles of cloth and other things that the men were taking somewhere to sell. In the middle of the road another man, just about the strangest looking man I had ever seen, was blocking their way. He was also riding a horse but, instead of being big and strong like the salesmen’s, his horse was old and skinny. I had seen lots of people in Boise, but I had never seen anyone like him.
The man had on a suit of armor that was rusty in several places. On his head he wore some sort of a hat or a helmet that looked as if it were made of paper maché. All I could see of the man was his face. He looked as though he was about fifty or sixty years old, and he had a scraggly, grey beard. His eyes were blue, but the white parts were sort of red. He had a bruise on one of his cheeks and a black eye. He was holding a wooden pole that looked like a big broomstick, only he was pointing it at the salesmen.
“No,” he answered, “I won’t show her to you, because if I did, then it would be obvious that she is the most beautiful maiden in all the land. You must swear that she is most beautiful without the opportunity to cast your gaze upon her. Any who fail to do so must do battle with me. I will fight you one by one or all at once, it matters not!”
If this guy was going to try and fight six other guys all at once, he was going to be beaten pretty badly. It was clear he wasn’t a very good fighter. He was lucky just staying on his horse with all that rusty armor on.
“Sir Knight,” replied the leader of the salesmen, “I beg that you will at least show us a picture of this maiden, because it is not right to ask us to swear to the beauty of someone we have never even seen. I mean, what would happen if we swore she was beautiful and it turned out she was ugly, with watery eyes and a hump in her back?”
“Her eyes do not drip, you vile scoundrels! And she doesn’t have a hump-back. You shall pay for the blasphemy you have uttered regarding the fair Dulcinea. Prepare to do battle!”
With these words the knight (at least I assume he was a knight) lowered his lance (at least I think it was supposed to be a lance) and charged right at the leader of the salesmen. If the knight’s horse hadn’t stumbled and fallen, I suspect the salesman would have been run through. The knight fell off and rolled over two or three times. Every time he tried to get up, he was so tangled up in his shield, his lance, and his armor that he fell down again. After several tries, he simply lay down and yelled at the merchants, “Don’t run away, you cowards! Stay and fight! It’s not my fault that I lie here, but rather the fault of my horse.”
The leader of the salesmen finally lost his patience. He got down off his horse, grabbed the stick out of the knight’s hand, and broke it in two over his knee. He took one of the pieces and began to hit the knight with it.
There wasn’t anyone around to help. Even though the man with the stick was much bigger than me, I couldn’t just sit back and watch him beat the old guy to a pulp. I ran over and grabbed his arm. “Leave him alone! You can’t beat up an old man just ’cause he says some things you don’t like.”
The salesman looked at me for a while as though he was going to hit me. I put my arm in front of my face, but he dropped the stick and got back on his horse. He began to ride away, shaking his head and mumbling to himself. The other men followed him, laughing.
I looked around to see if I could find the door from the library, so I could get Mr. March to help this poor old man. There wasn’t any door! There wasn’t any library. There wasn’t anything, but trees and the dirt road. How the heck did I get here? Where was the library? And how was I going to get someone to help the old man? I guess it was up to me.
The old knight tried to get up off the ground, but after that guy beat him up, there was no way he was going to get up by himself. He finally gave up trying, and, of all things, began singing a song.
“Oh, where are you, my lady,
That you grieve not for my plight?
Either you know not of it
Or else you are faithless and light.”
I looked down at the knight. “Are you all right?”
“Ah, fair sir, of course I am all right. I may be bruised and battered, but I don’t think I have been wounded. Help me off with this armor so I can check.”
I helped him get the top half of his armor off. Then he was able to stand, and he looked all over himself.
“No, it is as I suspected. I have done the most famous deeds of chivalry in defense of the honor of my lady, Dulcinea, and have been protected by her blessing from the infliction of a serious wound. Did you witness, sir, how I banished those evil knights?”
“You mean the salesmen you were arguing with?”
“No, sir, not salesmen, they were evil knights, dressed in the blackest of armor, who had come from a distant land to do harm to my lady Dulcinea. I was able to thrash them soundly and send them back to where they came from.”
Him, thrash them? What was he talking about? He hadn’t even touched them. They were the ones who had thrashed him.
“Excuse me, sir… I mean, Sir Knight, but I think you’ve got things mixed up. It looked as though they thrashed you. And they weren’t knights. I think they were just salesmen on their way to market.”
At this the knight got red in the