The instant the housekeeper saw Sancho Panza shut himself in with her master, she guessed what they were about; and suspecting that the result of the consultation would be a resolve to undertake a third sally, she seized her mantle, and in deep anxiety and distress, ran to find the bachelor Samson Carrasco, as she thought that, being a well-spoken man, and a new friend of her master’s, he might be able to persuade him to give up any such crazy notion.
She found him pacing the patio of his house, and, perspiring and flurried, she fell at his feet the moment she saw him. Carrasco, seeing how distressed and overcome she was, said to her, 'What is this, mistress housekeeper? What has happened to you? One would think you heart-broken.
' 'Nothing, Señor Samson,' said she, 'only that my master is breaking out, plainly breaking out. ' 'Whereabouts is he breaking out, señora? ' asked Samson; 'has any part of his body burst?
' 'He is only breaking out at the door of his madness,' she replied; 'I mean, dear señor bachelor, that he is going to break out again (and this will be the third time) to hunt all over the world for what he calls ventures, though I can’t make out why he gives them that name.
The first time he was brought back to us slung across the back of an ass, and belaboured all over; and the second time he came in an ox-cart, shut up in a cage, in which he persuaded himself he was enchanted, and the poor creature was in such a state that the mother that bore him would not have known him; lean, yellow, with his eyes sunk deep in the cells of his skull; so that to bring him round again, ever so