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Updated: May 1, 2025
As they descended the hill and met some peasants with their goats who asked for charity, Bonaparte told a story which the present circumstances brought to his recollection, that when he was crossing the Great St. Bernard, previously to the battle of Marengo, he had met a goatherd, and entered into conversation with him.
In this book the scene of the tale is laid on the Kyffhäuser, and with the exception of such embellishments as the keen tongue of Dame van Winkle and a few others, the incidents in the adventures of Peter Claus the Goatherd are absolutely the same as those of Rip van Winkle. Of all the variants of this type it is in China that we find the one most resembling it.
As they were eating they suddenly heard a loud noise and the sound of a bell that seemed to come from among some brambles and thick bushes that were close by, and the same instant they observed a beautiful goat, spotted all over black, white, and brown, spring out of the thicket with a goatherd after it, calling to it and uttering the usual cries to make it stop or turn back to the fold.
So he fetched from the armoury four shields and four helmets and eight spear. And he and the servants, Eumaeus and Philoetius, armed themselves. Also Ulysses, when his arrows were spent, donned helmet and shield, and took a mighty spear in each hand. But Melanthius, the goatherd, crept up to the armoury and brought down there from twelve helmets and shields, and spears as many.
Great banquet halls, where kings and queens once feasted, still stand as silent witnesses of a gay bygone court life; but never in any château or palace among them all was feast more thoroughly enjoyed than this impromptu dinner in the garden, where a little goatherd was the only guest. It was an enchanted spot to Jules, made so by the magic of Joyce's wonderful gift of story-telling.
"That," said the goatherd, "sounds like what one reads in the books of the knights-errant, who did all that you say this man does; though it is my belief that either you are joking, or else this gentleman has empty lodgings in his head." "You are a great scoundrel," said Don Quixote, "and it is you who are empty and a fool.
The goatherd leads the eldest of the flock, and the rest follow in docile order and stop as he stops to ask at the doors if milk is wanted. When he happens to have an order, one of the goats is haled, much against her will, into the entry of a, house, and there milked, while the others wait outside alone, nibbling and smelling thoughtfully about the masonry.
When he asked them if they would like to hear a true story, they were all anxious to have him tell it to them. Only Sancho Panza withdrew, that he might get a chance to load himself brimful of food; for he had heard his master once say that a knight errant's squire should eat until he could hold no more. The goatherd began his story, after having told the goat to lie down beside him.
Here the goatherd brought his song to an end, and though Don Quixote entreated him to sing more, Sancho had no mind that way, being more inclined for sleep than for listening to songs; so said he to his master, "Your worship will do well to settle at once where you mean to pass the night, for the labour these good men are at all day does not allow them to spend the night in singing."
He was a goatherd from San Benedetto in Alpi, he told us, and had played truant for the day, walking over the stony hills for some sixteen or twenty miles and intending to return the same road at night. His name was Ercole; and that, as I told him, was as it should be.
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