Unable to move a limb, he turned to his usual remedy. He would search his books for a scene like his own and call it to mind. What his madness brought back to him was the old ballad of Valdovinos and the Marquis of Mantua, the tale of a knight cut down by a sword in the mountains. Children all knew it, young men were not ignorant of it, and old men even believed it.
It suited his present plight exactly, he thought. So, as if in great pain, he started rolling about in the dirt, reciting in a feeble voice the words the wounded knight in the forest was said to have spoken. “Where art thou, my lady, that my pain grieveth thee not? Either thou knowest it not, my lady, or thou art false and faithless.”
He kept on with the ballad until he reached the lines that go, “O noble Marquis of Mantua, liege lord and uncle of mine.” Just then a farmer from his own village happens to pass that way, coming home after taking a load of wheat to the mill.