For these dignities he made the poor butt suffer. On one occasion the
kingly joker had a brace of bear cubs laid in Gundling's bed, and the
drunken historian tossed in between them, with little heed of the danger
to which he exposed the poor victim of his sport. On another occasion,
when Gundling grew sullen and refused to leave his room, the king and
his boon companions besieged him with rockets and crackers, which they
flung in at the open window. A third and more elaborate trick was the
following. The king had the door of Gundling's room walled up, so that
the drunken dupe wandered the palace halls the whole night long, vainly
seeking his vanished door, getting into wrong rooms, disturbing sleepers
to ask whither his room had flown, and making the palace almost as
uncomfortable for its other inmates as for himself. He ended his journey
in the bear's den, where he got a severe hug for his pains.
Such were the ideas of royal dignity, of art, science, and learning, and
of wit and humor, entertained by the first King of Prussia, the
coarse-mannered and brutal-minded progenitor of one of the greatest of
modern monarchs.
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