“Miguel, be advised by an elderly soldado. Get you back to Toledo city, sell your horse, which is as old as the moon, buy yourself an orange basket, take your stance at the shadiest corner of the Plaza del Toros, and be content with a modest annuity. You can then pay the true friend that addresses you the hundred crowns that are his due for launching you out of your native element into this broad and magnificent world. The sun is a good thing, so are the stars, so are the rivers and mountains, so is yonder palace of the Moriscoes, so is this castle that lies before us; and when you beget children you will be able to say that you have looked on all these things in your youth. But I pray you, my son, not to dwell upon them here. Return to some humbler walk, good Don; for if you adventure through these white gates flanked with grinning dragons made out of pumice stone, that sanguine and youthful spirit may get such an overthrow as will cripple it for years. At present, my young companion, you are of no account in the world. Now go your ways, like a good boy, and sell the wind-galled, curb-hocked, and bespavined old bone-bag that bears you.” “Good Sir Richard Pendragon,” I said stoutly, “I have no fear of my reception before the duke. My sword is not much, but he shall have it for his use.” “Much!” said the Englishman; “much is a large word for nothing. Get an orange basket, my son; and I pray you not to come into the presence of his grace before you have grown a beard. He is a whimsical old fellow, and yet so haughty that he might cut off your ears if you caused him to laugh excessively.” “Pray have no qualms, Sir Richard. I will speedily obtain an audience of this grandee, and will look to it that he does not laugh at me too much.” Being extremely upon my mettle, I rapped smartly with the hilt of my sword upon the massive gate. When the Englishman saw that no heed was paid to my repeated blows, he laughed in a short, dry fashion, which gave me a feeling of discomfort. “By your leave, you man of wisdom,” said he, “and advancing my poor opinion with that reserve that is its merit, I believe I spy a chain and padlock to this gate.” I was fain to confess myself puzzled when my eye fell on these accompaniments. “I am thinking, my son,” said Sir Richard, “although, to be sure, it is no more than a whim or a notion of mine, that you might be called to wait six days for an answer to your summons, for by its situation I should judge it to be a gate that is opened once a week; of a Wednesday, for the kitchen-maids to sally out at and wash their linen down below in the Tagus. And I would respectfully urge, although this again is no more than a whim or a notion, that the grand entrance is along this path half a furlong to the left; at least, if it be not so, it hath changed its place since I was here last June.”