Of the next period of his life,--and it is the important one immediately preceding the publication of the First Part of Don Quixote,--we know even less than of the last. A uniform tradition, however, declares that he was employed by the Grand Prior of the Order of Saint John in La Mancha to collect rents due to his monastery in the village of Argamasilla; that he went there on this humble agency and made the attempt, but that the debtors refused payment, and, after persecuting him in different ways, ended by throwing him into prison, where, in a spirit of indignation, he began to write the Don Quixote, making his hero a native of the village that treated him so ill, and laying the scene of most of the knight’s earlier adventures in La Mancha. But though this is possible, and even probable, we have no direct proof of it. Cervantes says, indeed, in his Preface to the First Part, that his Don Quixote was begun in a prison;[129] but this may refer to his earlier imprisonment at Seville, or his subsequent one at Valladolid. All that is certain, therefore, is, that he had friends and relations in La Mancha; that, at some period of his life, he must have enjoyed an opportunity of acquiring the intimate knowledge of its people, antiquities, and topography, which the Don Quixote shows; and that this could hardly have happened except between the end of 1598, when we lose all trace of him at Seville, and the beginning of 1603, when we find him established at Valladolid. [129] “Se engendró en una cárcel.” Avellaneda says the same thing in his Preface, but says it contemptuously: “Pero disculpan los yerros de su Primera Parte en esta materia, el haberse escrito entre _los_ de una cárcel,” etc. A base insinuation seems implied in the use of the relative article _los_. To Valladolid he went, apparently because the court had been removed thither by the caprice of Philip the Third and the interests of his favorite, the Duke of Lerma; but, as everywhere else, there too, he was overlooked and left in poverty. Indeed, we should hardly know he was in Valladolid at all before the publication of the First Part of his Don Quixote, but for two painful circumstances. The first is an account, in his own handwriting, for sewing done by his sister, who, having sacrificed every thing for his redemption from captivity, became dependent on him during her widowhood and died in his family. The other is, that, in one of those night-brawls common among the gallants of the Spanish court, a stranger was killed near the house where Cervantes lived; in consequence of which, and of some suspicions that fell on the family, he was, according to the hard provisions of the Spanish law, confined with the other principal witnesses until an investigation could take place.[130] [130] Pellicer’s Life, pp. cxvi.-cxxxi.