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“I think we’ve talked so much our tongues are sticking to the roofs of our mouths, but I have an unsticker hanging from my saddlebow, and it’s a pretty good one.”

And he stood up and came back in a little while carrying a large wineskin and a meat pie half a meter long, and this is not an exaggeration, because it held a white rabbit so large that Sancho, when he touched it, thought it was a goat, and not a kid, either; and when Sancho saw this, he said:

“Señor, did you bring this with you?”

“Well, what did you think?” responded the other man. “Am I by any chance a run-of-the-mill squire? I carry better provisions on my horse’s rump than a general does when he goes marching.”

Sancho ate without having to be asked twice, and in the dark he wolfed down mouthfuls the size of the knots that hobble a horse. And he said:

“Your grace is a faithful and true, right and proper, magnificent and great squire, as this feast shows, and if you haven’t come here by the arts of enchantment, at least it seems that way to me; but I’m so poor and unlucky that all I have in my saddlebags is a little cheese, so hard you could break a giant’s skull with it, and to keep it company some four dozen carob beans and the same number of hazelnuts and other kinds of nuts, thanks to the poverty of my master and the idea he has and the rule he keeps that knights errant should not live and survive on anything but dried fruits and the plants of the field.”

“By my faith, brother,” replied the Squire of the Wood, “my stomach isn’t made for thistles or wild pears or forest roots. Let our masters have their knightly opinions and rules and eat what their laws command. I have my baskets of food, and this wineskin hanging from the saddlebow, just in case, and I’m so devoted to it and love it so much that I can’t let too much time pass without giving it a thousand kisses and a thousand embraces.”

And saying this, he placed the wineskin in Sancho’s hands, who tilted it back and put it to his mouth and looked at the stars for a quarter of an hour, and when he had finished drinking, he leaned his head to one side, heaved a great sigh, and said:

“O whoreson, you damned rascal, but that’s good!”

“Do you see?” said the Squire of the Wood when he heard Sancho’s “whoreson.” “You complimented the wine by calling it whoreson.”

“And I say,” responded Sancho, “that I confess to knowing it’s no dishonor to call anybody a whoreson when your intention is to compliment him. But tell me, Señor, by the thing you love most: is this wine from Ciudad Real?”

“Bravo! What a winetaster!” responded the Squire of the Wood. “It’s from there and no place else, and it’s aged a few years.”

“You can’t fool me!” said Sancho. “You shouldn’t think it was beyond me to know about this wine. Does it surprise you, Señor Squire, that I have so great and natural an instinct for knowing wines that if I just smell one I know where it comes from, its lineage, its taste, its age, and how it will change, and everything else that has anything to do with it? But it’s no wonder, because in my family, on my father’s side, were the two best winetasters that La Mancha had in many years, and to prove it I’ll tell you a story about them. The two of them were asked to taste some wine from a cask and say what they thought about its condition and quality, and whether it was a good or bad wine. One tasted it with the tip of his tongue; the other only brought it up to his nose. The first said that the wine tasted of iron, the second that it tasted more of tanned leather. The owner said the cask was clean and the wine had not been fortified in a way that could have given it the taste of iron or leather. Even so, the two famous winetasters insisted that what they said was true. Time passed, the wine was sold, and when the cask was cleaned, inside it they found a small key on a leather strap. So your grace can see that a man who comes from that kind of family can give his opinion about matters like these.”

“That’s why I say,” said the Squire of the Wood, “that we should stop looking for adventures, and if