I spake of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth ‘scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence And portance in my travels’ history. This to hear would Catalina seriously incline, yet there is reason to think that the members of her family were less susceptible, and regarded Cervantes as an undesirable suitor. He undoubtedly was, from a mundane point of view; but the marriage took place on December 12, 1584, and next spring the First Part of _La Galatea_ (which had been licensed in the previous February) was published. It is perhaps not without significance that the volume was issued at Alcalá de Henares: it would have been more natural and probably more advantageous to publish the book at Madrid where Cervantes resided, but his name carried no weight with the booksellers of the capital, and no doubt he was glad enough to strike a bargain with his fellow-townsman Blas de Robles. Robles behaved handsomely, for he paid the author, then unknown outside a small literary circle, a fee of 1336 _reales_—say £30, equal (we are told) to nearly £150 nowadays. Perhaps some modern novelists have received even less for their first work. With this small capital the newly-married couple set up house in Madrid: the bride had indeed a small dowry including forty-five chickens, but the dowry was not made over to her till twenty months later. The marriage does not seem to have been unhappy, as marriages go; but, owing to Cervantes’s wandering existence, the pair saw little of each other till the last ten or twelve years of their married life.