To some such litigious proceeding Cervantes was probably the victim. It has been said that this disaster happened at Toboso, on account of a sarcasm he had uttered against a woman, and that her relations thus avenged her. The common and the probable notion, however, is that the inhabitants of the village of Argamasilla de Alba threw him into prison, being incensed against him, either because he claimed the arrears of tithes due to the grand prior of San Juan, or because he interfered with their system of irrigation, by turning aside a portion of the waters of the Guadiana, for the purpose of preparing saltpetre. To this day they show in Argamasilla de Alba an old house called Casa de Medrano, which immemorial tradition declares to have been the prison of Cervantes. It seems likely that he was confined for some time; and he was forced to have recourse to his uncle don Juan Barnabé de Saavedra, a citizen of Alcazar de San Juan, asking for protection and assistance. We are told that the expressions of a letter written by Cervantes to this uncle are remembered, and that it began with these words: "Long days and short but sleepless nights wear me out in this prison, or rather let me call it cavern." In record of his ill-treatment here, he at the same time placed the residence of Don Quixote, in Argamasilla de Alba and refrained from mentioning the name, saying, "In a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recollect." It is impossible here not to remember the beautiful image of lord Bacon, that calamity acts on the high-minded as the crushing of perfumes, pressing the innate virtue out of each: for in this prison Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote." When we consider the ill-fortune that pursued him--his military career, which left him maimed and unrewarded--his captivity in Algiers, where he exerted a spirit of resistance sublime in its fearlessness and its risks, and whence he returned a beggar--his life spent as a sort of clerk where he gained his scanty daily bread, at the mercy of the arbitrary and litigious ministers of Spanish justice--and that he endured all the distresses incident to straitened means and friendlessness; when we consider that the end of all was to throw him into a squalid prison in an obscure village, where he must have felt all hopes, not only of advancement, but of attaining the means of existence, fail him--where in a dreary cavern-like chamber he passed long days and sleepless nights, weary and worn out:--when we think that he was now fifty-six years of age, a period when the fire of life burns dim--and then, when we compare all these sad depressing circumstances with the very outset of "Don Quixote," we feel that there must have been something divine in the spirit of this man, which could place a soul within the ribs of death, and vivify darkness and suffering with so animated a creation.