Het Loo, or The Grove, was the favorite palace of Wilhelmina’s father, William III, and of his grandfather, William I, the first King of the Netherlands. A steam tram operates upon rather uncertain schedule between the railway station at Apeldoorn and Het Loo, but a much more pleasant method of consuming the time, if only between trains, is to drive by carriage out the long avenue, returning through the parks of Apeldoorn. The peasants of the surrounding country are of purely agricultural proclivities, and their land seems more like real farm land than the lower level portions of the Netherlands. Apeldoorn itself lies in the district known as the Veluwe, a territory between the Yssel and the Zuyder Zee, in places as much as three hundred feet above the level of the ocean and, with few exceptions, the highest in Holland. Parts of it, however, are so sandy and sterile that the ground is available after complete fertilization mainly for the cultivation of tobacco. Zutphen, a few miles below Apeldoorn, was the first city in the east to offer any speakable resistance against the Spaniards during the war of independence, and there still stands the gateway, called the Nieuwstadtspoort, through which Don Frederic of Toledo, the son of the notorious Duke of Alva, forced an entrance into the town on the 16th day of November, 1572. Mons and Mechlin having been captured and promptly sacked, Alva had repaired to Nymwegen, leaving Don Frederic to conquer the provinces in the north and east--preferably by force, for they were a bloodthirsty lot, those Spaniards. A seeming lack of patriotism on the parts of the cities which had already submitted, too enthusiastically perhaps, to the Spaniards, gave these international marauders little excuse to resort to their usual heinous methods of effecting subjugation. When Zutphen, therefore, offered a feeble and half-hearted resistance against the troops of Frederic of Toledo, and the fact was reported to his father, the commander in chief and arch brigand of the whole depredating crew, he promptly sent orders to his son to enter the city and kill every man and burn every house to the ground. According to Motley, “the Duke’s command was almost literally obeyed. Don Frederic entered Zutphen, and without a moment’s warning put the whole garrison to the sword. The citizens next fell a defenseless prey; some being stabbed in the streets, some hanged on the trees which decorated the city, some stripped stark naked and turned out into the fields to freeze to death in the wintry night. As the work of death became too fatiguing for the butchers, five hundred innocent burghers were tied two and two, back to back, and drowned like dogs in the river Yssel. A few stragglers who had contrived to elude pursuit at first, were afterwards taken from their hiding-places and hung upon the gallows by their feet, some of which victims suffered four days and nights of agony before death came to their relief.”