The next enterprise was with a barber, who carried his new brass basin on his head, so that it suggested to Don Quixote the famous helmet of Mambrino.  Accordingly, he bore down upon the barber, put him to flight, and possessed himself of the basin, which he wore as a helmet.  More serious was the following adventure, when Don Quixote released from the king’s officers a gang of galley slaves, because they assured him that they travelled chained much against their will.  So gallantly did the knight behave, that he conquered the officers and left them all but dead.  Nevertheless, coming to an argument with the released convicts, whom he would have sent to his lady Dulcinea, he himself, and Sancho, too, were as mauled by the convicts as even those self-same officers.

It now came to Don Quixote that he must perform a penance in the mountains, and sending Sancho with a letter to Dulcinea, he divested himself of much of his armour and underwear, and performed the maddest gambols and self-tortures ever witnessed under a blue sky.

However, it chanced that Sancho Panza soon fell in with the curate and the barber of Don Quixote’s village, and these good friends, by a cunning subterfuge, in which a beautiful young lady played a part, got Don Quixote safely home and into his own bed.  The lady, affecting great distress, made Don Quixote vow to enter upon no adventure until he had righted a wrong done against herself; and one night, as they journeyed on this mission, a great cage was made and placed over Don Quixote as he slept, and thus, persuaded that necromancy was at work against, him, the valiant knight was borne back a prisoner to his home.

IV.—­Sancho Governs His Island

Nothing short of a prison cell could keep Don Quixote from his sallies, and soon he was on the road again, accompanied by his faithful squire.  To Sancho, who believed his master mad, and whose chief aim in life was filling his own stomach, these adventures of the Don had but one end, the governorship of the promised island.  While he thought the knight mad, he believed in him; and while he was selfish, he loved his master, as the tale tells.

It chanced that one day they came upon a frolicsome duke and duchess who had heard of their adventures, and who instantly set themselves to enjoy so rare a sport as that offered by the entertainment of the knight and his squire.  The Don was invited to the duke’s castle as a mighty hero, and there treated with all possible honour; but some tricks were played upon him which were certainly unworthy of the duke’s courtesy.  Nevertheless, this visit had the happiest culmination, since it was from the hands of the duke that Sancho at last received his governorship.  Making pretence that a certain town on his estate, named Barataria, was an island, the duke dispatched Sancho to govern it; and after an affecting farewell with his master, who gave him the wisest possible advice on the subject of statecraft, Sancho set out in a glittering cavalcade to take up his governorship, with his beloved Dapple led behind.