Indeed, at this season I was more than ever persuaded that the Englishman was unhinged. Yet when I expressed this opinion to the Count of Nullepart he merely laughed heartily. And if I ventured to address any kind of remonstrance to Sir Richard Pendragon he would deride me in such terms that I was obliged to hold my peace. No sooner had we come into Castile, the enemy’s kingdom, than what I was forced to regard as Sir Richard’s distemper took a more palpable form. At a small rustic place, a three days’ journey from France, he insisted that we should assume the guise of peasants, and should consign our horses to the keeping of the proprietor of the local venta. To my astonishment, he himself set the example we were to copy. Doffing his magnificent canary-coloured doublet and all the rest of the bedizenments he had acquired at Paris, even to the cockado in his bonnet, he habited himself entirely in the garb of a peasant, so that, making allowance for his bulk and his stature, I doubt whether “the sainted lady his mother” would have known him. By what means he had contrived such a disguise, and whence he had obtained it we were unable to learn. In some places it was mightily close to the skin; in others it was burst open; and further he had sought out similar attire for the Count of Nullepart and myself. Perhaps it were well to state that on my own part I had no intention to submit to this unseemliness, because I could only regard the whole matter as a distemper of the brain. Yet when, to my great surprise, I saw the worshipful Count of Nullepart tricked out in this vulgar garb, with his handsome face and shapely limbs emerging out of the rude clothes of a clown, I was obliged to yield my dignity, since, whatever the whimsicality of my companions, my youth rendered me no more than a cadet in the service I had embraced. All the same, nothing could have exceeded the disgust with which I doffed my fine clothes from Paris, which were so admirably proper to the figure of a gentleman, and exchanged them for the coarsest and most ill-fitting suit in which it has ever been my lot to invest my person. I was equally reluctant to part with Babieca, my honest horse. I mentioned to my friends the distress such an act would cause me, whereon it appeared that Sir Richard Pendragon shared these feelings in the matter of his singular beast Melanto, and the Count of Nullepart partook of them also in respect of his palfrey that was called Monsieur. Therefore by the address of these two strange persons, who certainly in this particular did not appear to be so whimsical as they were in others, the keeper of the venta was persuaded to hold them in his stable against the time when we should send for them again.