" He put his hat on his head and went
to do it.
Notwithstanding all this and much more, when the great day came for
the Grand Review, very few people saw more of the King, or entered more
kindly into all his thoughts--or rather the thoughts that they made him
think--than Zebedee Tugwell and his wife Kezia. The place being so near
home, and the smoke of their own chimneys and masts of their smack as
good as in sight--if you knew where to look--it was natural for them to
regard the King as a stranger requiring to be taught about their place.
This sense of proprietary right is strong in dogs and birds and cows and
rabbits, and everything that acts by nature's laws. When a dog sits in
front of his kennel, fast chained, every stranger dog that comes in at
the gate confesses that the premises are his, and all the treasures they
contain; and if he hunts about--which he is like enough to do, unless
full of self-respect and fresh victuals--for any bones invested in the
earth to ripen, by the vested owner, he does it with a low tail and many
pricks of conscience, perhaps hoping in his heart that he may discover
nothing to tempt him into breach of self-respect. But now men are
ordered, in this matter, to be of lower principle than their dogs.
King George the third, who hated pomp and show, and had in his blood the
old German sense of patriarchal kingship, would have enjoyed a good talk
with Zebedee and his wife Kezia, if he had met them on the downs alone;
but, alas, he was surrounded with great people, and obliged to restrict
himself to the upper order, with whom he had less sympathy.
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