At the mention of her birds, the maids of honour look at each other without speaking, but the truth was told. Accordingly, when the Duchess of Terra Nueva appeared to kiss the Queen’s hand as customary, the meek spirit of Marie Louise could endure no longer, and she gave her two or three slaps on either cheek. The rage of the Duchess was unbounded, and collecting all her four hundred ladies, she went at the head of them to the King to ask for redress. Thereupon the King betook himself to the Queen, and demanded an explanation. “Señor,” she maliciously replied, “this is a longing of mine--an _antojo_,” for not only in the case of a royal lady, but in that of the humblest woman of Spain, the _antojo_ had a prescriptive right to be satisfied. So Charles II., whose soul was bent on having children, to save the succession of the crown from passing out of the House of Austria, was delighted with the _antojo_ and its significance, and declared to his queen that if she was not satisfied with the two slaps of face, she should give the Duchess two dozen more; and he checked the remonstrances of the Duchess, exclaiming, “Hold your tongue, you; these slaps on the face are daughters of the _antojo_.” The rigid etiquette of the Spanish Court was carried to such an absurd extent that whatever the King had used or touched became sacred. Hence a horse he had once crossed could never be used by any one else, on which account Philip IV. declined the gift of a fine animal, he had admired, from a Spanish nobleman, saying it would be a pity so noble a beast should ever be without a master. It is impossible to say how much not his master alone, but all Europe, owed to the spaniel whose marble effigy lies crouched at the feet of William the Silent, the great founder of the Dutch Republic, on his tomb in the church at Delft. It was this dog which saved the Prince’s life by springing forward, barking, and scratching his master’s face with his paws, when, in the night attack on the camp before Mons, a band of Spanish arquebusiers were on the point of entering the tent of William. His guards and himself were in profound sleep, and there was but just time for the Prince, after the spaniel had roused him, to mount a horse which was ready saddled, and to make his escape through the darkness. His servants and attendants lost their lives. To his dying day, Mr. Motley tells us, “the Prince ever afterwards kept a spaniel of the same race in his bed-chamber.” Alfonso VI. of Portugal, despite his wild and savage nature, had an affection for mastiffs. Hearing, by accident, that the Jesuits kept some fine specimens of those animals, he once rode over at night to the convent where the fathers resided. He had alighted from his horse, and was waiting for torches to be conducted to the kennels, when, impatient of waiting, he strolled into the streets and almost immediately he got engaged in a quarrel, whereby, instead of seeing the mastiffs, he was carried to bed wounded.