"Ay," said Sancho; "it must be that some of your worship's shrewdness
sticks to me; land that, of itself, is barren and dry, will come to yield
good fruit if you dung it and till it; what I mean is that your worship's
conversation has been the dung that has fallen on the barren soil of my
dry wit, and the time I have been in your service and society has been
the tillage; and with the help of this I hope to yield fruit in abundance
that will not fall away or slide from those paths of good breeding that
your worship has made in my parched understanding."

Don Quixote laughed at Sancho's affected phraseology, and perceived that
what he said about his improvement was true, for now and then he spoke in
a way that surprised him; though always, or mostly, when Sancho tried to
talk fine and attempted polite language, he wound up by toppling over
from the summit of his simplicity into the abyss of his ignorance; and
where he showed his culture and his memory to the greatest advantage was
in dragging in proverbs, no matter whether they had any bearing or not
upon the subject in hand, as may have been seen already and will be
noticed in the course of this history.

In conversation of this kind they passed a good part of the night, but
Sancho felt a desire to let down the curtains of his eyes, as he used to
say when he wanted to go to sleep; and stripping Dapple he left him at
liberty to graze his fill. He did not remove Rocinante's saddle, as his
master's express orders were, that so long as they were in the field or
not sleeping under a roof Rocinante was not to be stripped--the ancient
usage established and observed by knights-errant being to take off the
bridle and hang it on the saddle-bow, but to remove the saddle from the
horse--never! Sancho acted accordingly, and gave him the same liberty he
had given Dapple, between whom and Rocinante there was a friendship so
unequalled and so strong, that it is handed down by tradition from father