The Bold Knight of the Mirrors — Don Quixote

The night after the cart of Death, Don Quixote and Sancho eat under shady trees and replay the missed spoils of the play-actors' cart. Sancho prefers the foals he chose to a crown that might never have been gold; Quixote answers with a long praise of actors as mirrors of human life, then compares the world to a comedy and a chess game where death strips every rank back to equality. Sancho returns the compliment with proverbs about dung on barren soil, and Quixote laughs because his squire's wit is genuinely improving.

They sleep among the oaks; the author digresses on the legendary friendship of Rocinante and Dapple. Don Quixote wakes to armour rattling nearby and finds a knight who has dismounted to nurse love-sick thoughts. The stranger tunes a lute and sings a sonnet to the ungrateful Casildea de Vandalia, boasting that he has forced every knight in La Mancha to call her the world's most beautiful woman.

Quixote breaks in: he is of La Mancha and has never confessed any such thing to the prejudice of Dulcinea. The two knights, both claiming to be miserable lovers, sit sociably on the hard ground as if dawn will not require broken heads. Their squires withdraw to swap talk in squire style, leaving the masters to the story of their loves.