264 



ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 



On such occasions his majesty would pretend to be 

 asleep ; but if his assailant insisted on waking him, he 

 would look up, not at the cur, but at the cur's master : 

 " Couldn't you save me the necessity of demeaning 

 myself?" 



Down-town he had sometimes been attacked by a 

 junta of street-dogs, but it wasn't quite easy to scare 

 him. When he crouched for a spring there was some- 

 thing in his look that rarely failed to make the front 

 ranks unpopular, and the allies generally retreated in 

 time to save their vertebrae. " I wouldn't mind pitting 

 him against any two dogs in Holland," his master told 

 me, " but there is one thing I am afraid of: he has a 

 weak spot, a bad scar under his left jaw, and by the way 

 he fights I see that he knows it. Against one dog he 

 can hold his own in spite of that, but two — if one of 

 them should manage to collar him from the left, I do 

 not know what mightn't happen. There is a dog in 

 Groningen, they say, can beat him," he added in a confi- 

 dential whisper, " a butcher-dog from Helderdam, but, 

 unless he is the devil himself, I guess Klaas knows a 

 trick or two that will stop their bragging." 



At home the Koning passed the larger part of the 

 day behind the Kacheloven, the great brick stove that 

 still warms the dwelling of the orthodox Hollander, and 

 burglars could have abstracted the rugs from under his 

 very nose. Klaas never interfered in domestic affairs, 

 and even disdained to beg for soup-bones : he knew 



