This, indeed, was known to me chiefly from my
first reading in _Don Quixote,_ of the terrific combat between the
squire of the Biscayan ladies whose carriage the knight of La Mancha
stopped after his engagement with the windmills. In their exchange of
insults incident to the knight's desire that the ladies should go to
Toboso and thank Dulcinea for his delivery of them from the necromancers
he had put to flight in the persons of two Benedictine monks, "'Get
gone,' the squire called, in bad Spanish and worse Biscayan, 'Get gone,
thou knight, and Devil go with thou; or by He Who me create . . . me
kill thee now so sure as me be Biscayan,'" and when the knight called
him an "inconsiderable mortal," and said that if he were a gentleman he
would chastise him: "'What! me no gentleman?' replied the Biscayan. 'I
swear thou be liar as me be Christian. . . . Me will show thee me be
Biscayan, and gentleman by land, gentleman by sea, gentleman in spite of
Devil; and thou lie if thou say the contrary.'"
It is a scene which will have lived in the memory of every reader, and I
recurred to it hopefully but vainly in San Sebastian, where this fiery
threefold gentleman might have lived in his time.
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