A foretaste of it came to him when he tried to surprise the fortress of Gullberg near the present Goetaborg.  Its commander was wounded early in the fight, but his wife who took his place more than filled it.  She and her women poured boiling lye upon the attacking Danes until they lay “like scalded pigs” under the walls.  Their leader knew when he had enough and made off in haste, with the lady commandant calling after him, “You were a little unexpected for breakfast, but come back for dinner and we will receive you properly.”  She would not even let them take their dead away.  “Since God gave us luck to kill them,” she said, “we will manage to bury them too.”  They were very pious days after their own fashion, and God was much on the lips of his servants.  Troubles rarely come singly.  Soon after, King Christian met the enemy unexpectedly and was so badly beaten that for the second time he had to run for it, though he held out till nearly all his men had fallen.  His horse got mired in a swamp with the pursuers close behind.  The gay and wealthy Sir Christen Barnekow, who had been last on the field, passed him there, and at once got down and gave him his horse.  It meant giving up his life, and when Sir Christen could no longer follow the fleeing King he sat down on a rock with the words, “I give the King my horse, the enemy my life, and God my soul.”  The rock is there yet and the country folk believe that the red spots in the granite are Christen Barnekow’s blood which all the years have not availed to wash out.

They tired of fighting at last and made it up.  Sweden paid Denmark a million daler; for the rest, things stayed as they had been before.  King Christian had shown himself no mean fighter, but the senseless sacking and burning of town and country that was an ugly part of those days’ warfare went against his grain, and he tried to persuade the Swedes to agree to leave that out in future.  Gustav Adolf had not yet grown into the man he afterward became.  “As to the burning,” was his reply, “seeing that it is the usage of war, and we enemies, why we will each have to do the best we can,” which meant the worst.  Had the two kings, who had much in common, got together in the years of peace that followed, much misery might have been saved Denmark, and a black page of history might read very differently.  For those were the days of the Thirty Years’ War, in which together they might have dictated peace to harassed Europe.

Now King Christian’s ambition, his piety, for he was a sincerely religious man, as well as his jealousy of his younger rival and of the growing power of Sweden—­so mixed are human motives—­made him yield to the entreaties of the hard-pressed Protestant princes to take up alone their cause against the German Emperor.  He had tried for half a dozen years to make peace between them.  At last he drew the sword and went down to force it.  After a year of fighting Tilly and Wallenstein, the Emperor’s great generals,