"In the evening, while the needles of the women flew through the stuffs, he held the pen, and on the corner of the table he put his thoughts in writing. There it was he composed the prologue of that work which had been a labor of love in the composition, and in which he employed all the force of his genius. In bringing it with him to Valladolid, he experienced alternations of hope and fear, being fully sensible that it was his masterpiece. 'Idle reader,' said he in the first page, 'you may credit my word, for I have no need to take oath, that I wish this book, child of my brain, were the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most witty that any one could imagine.' He had published nothing since the Galatea, which had appeared twenty years before and was an amiable apology for the taste of the times. The book about to be printed was a flagrant attack on the same literature." Those who despise the old books of chivalry, and have probably never opened one, are too ready to undervalue Cervantes' apprehension about bringing out his book, and the service it eventually rendered to society and literature. We recommend an indifferent individual of this way of thinking to peruse about the eighth of the contents of one of the condemned {26} volumes of Don Quixote's library, and work himself into the conviction that the body of the Spanish readers of 1603, ladies and gentlemen, not only admired such compositions more than living readers admire the most popular writings of our times, but in many instances believed the contents to be true. Let us hope that there is some mistake about the non-accommodation afforded to the seven individuals of Cervantes' family, six of whom were of gentle blood. It is easy to imagine what delightful evenings they would have enjoyed if tolerably comfortable with regard to furniture and space, the soldier-poet reading out some passages from the Don, or the Exemplary Novels, or one of his plays, and the well-bred women plying their needles, listening with interest, and occasionally breaking out into silvery laughs at the comic misfortunes of the knight, or the naive pieces of roguery of the squire. We can readily imagine the desolation of Cervantes' spirit during the troubled years of his official wanderings, his superiors urging him to grind the faces of his countrymen and fellow-subjects, and these entertaining most unfriendly feelings toward himself. The ladies of his family--where were they during this nomadic life of his, and how were they situated? Separation from their society and anxiety about their privations must have added much to the present suffering, and forebodings of things still worse, the companions of his lonely hours. A pleasant interruption to the monotony and privations of the family life must have been the appearance of the first part of the Don in 1604, and the popularity it soon attained. HIS LABORERS AND THEIR REQUITAL.