Don Quixote - Part II - Page 36/129

It is by rugged paths like these they go

That scale the heights of immortality,

Unreached by those that falter here below."

"Woe is me!" exclaimed the niece, "my lord is a poet, too! He knows

everything, and he can do everything; I will bet, if he chose to turn

mason, he could make a house as easily as a cage."

"I can tell you, niece," replied Don Quixote, "if these chivalrous

thoughts did not engage all my faculties, there would be nothing that I

could not do, nor any sort of knickknack that would not come from my

hands, particularly cages and tooth-picks."

At this moment there came a knocking at the door, and when they asked who

was there, Sancho Panza made answer that it was he. The instant the

housekeeper knew who it was, she ran to hide herself so as not to see

him; in such abhorrence did she hold him. The niece let him in, and his

master Don Quixote came forward to receive him with open arms, and the

pair shut themselves up in his room, where they had another conversation

not inferior to the previous one.