A Thousand Trifling Matters — Don Quixote

The translator prints Hamete Benengeli's margin note doubting the Montesinos cave: Quixote would not lie, yet the adventure passes reasonable bounds, so the author writes it without affirming or denying and leaves the reader to decide.

On the road the scholar cousin counts four gains from the journey, including material for his books, the antiquity of cards from "patience and shuffle," and the source of the Guadiana. They pass a man hurrying with lances to the inn, miss the hermit's good wine, and hear Sancho mourn Camacho's wedding and Don Diego's table while they drink cheap water.

A velvet-clad page bound for the wars sings that he is off for want of pence, tells how place-hunters stripped him of liveries and bounty, and receives from Don Quixote a long speech on serving God, the king, honourable arms, and dying well. Sancho thinks a man who talks so wisely should not also report impossible cave absurdities.

At nightfall they reach the inn, which Quixote takes for a real inn rather than a castle, and he asks at once for the man with the arms promised to tell curious things tomorrow.