on foot and on horseback, pinched with hunger, choked with thirst, and exposed to all the injuries of the air and all the inconveniences in the world.”—­“I have nothing to do with all this,” cried the innkeeper; “pay your reckoning, and don’t trouble me with your foolish stories of a cock and a bull; I can’t afford to keep house at that rate.”—­“Thou art both a fool and a knave of an innkeeper,” replied Don Quixote, and with that clapping spurs to Rozinante, and brandishing his javelin at his host, he rode out of the inn without any opposition, and got a good way from it, without so much as once looking behind him to see whether his squire came after him.

The knight being marched off, there remained only the squire, who was stopped for the reckoning.  However, he swore he would not pay a cross; for the selfsame law that acquitted the knight acquitted the squire.  This put the innkeeper into a great passion, and made him threaten Sancho very hard, telling him if he would not pay him by fair means, he would have him laid by the heels that moment.  Sancho swore by his master’s knighthood he would sooner part with his life than his money on such an account; nor should the squires in after ages ever have occasion to upbraid him with giving so ill a precedent, or breaking their rights.

As ill luck would have it, there happened to be in the inn four Segovia clothiers, three Cordova pointmakers, and two Seville hucksters, all brisk, gamesome, roguish fellows; who agreeing all in the same design, encompassed Sancho, and pulled him off his ass, while one of them went and got a blanket.  Then they put the unfortunate squire into it, and observing the roof of the place they were in to be somewhat too low for their purpose, they carried him into the back yard, which had no limits but the sky, and there they tossed him for several times together in the blanket, as they do dogs on Shrove Tuesday.  Poor Sancho made so grievous an outcry all the while that his master heard him, and imagined those lamentations were of some person in distress, and consequently the occasion of some adventure; but having at last distinguished the voice, he made to the inn with a broken gallop; and finding the gates shut, he rode about to see whether he might not find some other way to get in.  But he no sooner came to the back-yard wall, which was none of the highest, when he was an eyewitness of the scurvy trick that was put upon his squire.  There he saw him ascend and descend, and frolic and caper in the air with so much nimbleness and agility, that it is thought the knight himself could not have forborne laughing, had he been anything less angry.  He did his best to get over the wall, but alas, he was so bruised, that he could not so much as alight from his horse.  This made him fume and chafe, and vent his passion in a thousand threats and curses, so strange and various that it is impossible to repeat them.  But the more he stormed, the more they tossed and laughed; Sancho on his side begging, and howling, and threatening, and cursing, to as little purpose as his master, for it was weariness alone could make the tossers give over.  Then they charitably put an end to his high dancing, and set him upon his ass again, carefully wrapped in his mantle.