Don Quixote de La Mancha (V. 1) - Paperback

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. OF THE FIRST SALLY THE INGENIOUS DON QUIXOTE MADE FROM BU VILLAGE. As soon as these dispositions were made, he would no longer defer putting his design in execution; being the more strongly excited thereto by the mischief he thought his delay occasioned in the world; such and so many were the grievances he proposed to redress, the wrongs he intended to rectify, the exorbitances to correct, the abuses to reform, and the debts to discharge. And, therefore, without making any one privy to his design, or being seen by any body, one morning before day (which was one of the hottest in the month of July), he armed himself cap-a-pie, mounted Rocinante, adjusted his ill-composed beaver, braced on his target, grasped his fence, and issued forth into the fields at a private door of his back-yard, with the greatest satisfaction and joy, to find with how much ease he had given a beginning to his honourable enterprise. But scarce was he got into the plain, when a terrible thought assaulted him, and such as had well-nigh made him abandon his new undertaking; for it came to his remembrance, that he was not dubbed a knight, and that, according to the laws of chivalry, he neither could nor ought to enter the lists against any knight; and though he had been dubbed, still he must wear white armour, as a new knight, without any device on his shield, until he had acquired one by his prowess. These reflections staggered his resolution; but his frenzy prevailing above any reason whatever, he purposed to get himself knighted by the first person he should meet, in imitation of many others who had done the like, as he had read in the books which had occasioned his madness. As to the white armour, he proposed to scour his own, the first opportunity, in such sort that it should be whit...