After reading so many romances he desired naively to escape with his
very body from the intolerable reality of things. He wished to meet, eye
to eye, the valorous giant Brandabarbaran, Lord of Arabia, whose armour
is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose shield, strapped to his arm,
is the gate of a fortified city. Oh, amiable and natural weakness!
Oh, blessed simplicity of a gentle heart without guile! Who would not
succumb to such a consoling temptation? Nevertheless, it was a form of
self-indulgence, and the ingenious hidalgo of La Mancha was not a
good citizen. The priest and the barber were not unreasonable in their
strictures. Without going so far as the old King Louis-Philippe, who
used to say in his exile, "The people are never in fault"--one may admit
that there must be some righteousness in the assent of a whole village.
Mad! Mad! He who kept in pious meditation the ritual vigil-of-arms by
the well of an inn and knelt reverently to be knighted at daybreak by
the fat, sly rogue of a landlord has come very near perfection. He
rides forth, his head encircled by a halo--the patron saint of all lives
spoiled or saved by the irresistible grace of imagination. But he was
not a good citizen.

Perhaps that and nothing else was meant by the well-remembered
exclamation of my tutor.

It was in the jolly year 1873, the very last year in which I have had a
jolly holiday. There have been idle years afterward, jolly enough in a
way and not altogether without their lesson, but this year of which
I speak was the year of my last school-boy holiday. There are other
reasons why I should remember that year, but they are too long to state
formally in this place. Moreover, they have nothing to do with that
holiday. What has to do with the holiday is that before the day on which
the remark was made we had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, the