Algiers deposed to all the facts above stated and to a great deal more
besides. There is something touching in the admiration, love, and
gratitude we see struggling to find expression in the formal language of
the notary, as they testify one after another to the good deeds of
Cervantes, how he comforted and helped the weak-hearted, how he kept up
their drooping courage, how he shared his poor purse with this deponent,
and how "in him this deponent found father and mother."

On his return to Spain he found his old regiment about to march for
Portugal to support Philip's claim to the crown, and utterly penniless
now, had no choice but to rejoin it. He was in the expeditions to the
Azores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the war
returned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the manuscript
of his pastoral romance, the "Galatea," and probably also, to judge by
internal evidence, that of the first portion of "Persiles and
Sigismunda." He also brought back with him, his biographers assert, an
infant daughter, the offspring of an amour, as some of them with great
circumstantiality inform us, with a Lisbon lady of noble birth, whose
name, however, as well as that of the street she lived in, they omit to
mention. The sole foundation for all this is that in 1605 there certainly
was living in the family of Cervantes a Dona Isabel de Saavedra, who is
described in an official document as his natural daughter, and then
twenty years of age.

With his crippled left hand promotion in the army was hopeless, now that
Don John was dead and he had no one to press his claims and services, and
for a man drawing on to forty life in the ranks was a dismal prospect; he
had already a certain reputation as a poet; he made up his mind,
therefore, to cast his lot with literature, and for a first venture
committed his "Galatea" to the press. It was published, as Salva y Mallen