But this the little one will not do upon any account; and, when she goes home to her mother, the sobs are still rising in her throat.  Neither her mother nor the doctor can understand, afterwards, why the healthy, lively child becomes rigid and blue in the face at the least fright, and loses the power to scream.

But all these diversions were colourless and tame in comparison with les grands cavalcades d’amour, in which Trofast was always one of the foremost.  Six, eight, ten, or twelve large yellow, black, and red dogs, with a long following of smaller and quite small ones, so bitten and mud-bespattered that one could scarcely see what they were made of, but yet very courageous, tails in the air and panting with ardour, although they stood no chance at all, except of getting mauled again and rolled in the mud.  And so off in a wild gallop through streets, squares, gardens, and flower-beds, fighting and howling, covered with blood and dirt, tongues lolling from mouths.  Out of the way with humans and baby-carriages, room for canine warfare and love!  And thus they would rush on like Aasgaard’s demon riders through the unhappy town. [Footnote:  Aasgaard was the ‘garth’ or home of the gods.  After the advent of Christianity, the Norse gods became demons, and it was the popular belief that they rode across the sky at night, foreboding evil.]

Trofast heeded none of the people on the street except the policemen.  For, with his keen understanding, he had long ago discerned that the police were there to protect him and his kind against the manifold encroachments of humanity.  Therefore he obligingly stopped whenever he met a policeman, and allowed himself to be scratched behind the ear.  In particular, he had a good, stout friend, whom he often met up in Aabenraa, where he (Trofast) had a liaison of many years’ standing.

When Policeman Frode Hansen was seen coming upstairs from a cellar—­a thing that often happened, for he was a jolly fellow, and it was a pleasure to offer him a half of lager-beer—­his face bore a great likeness to the rising sun.  It was round and red, warm and beaming.

But when he appeared in full view upon the pavement, casting a severe glance up and down the street, in order to ascertain whether any evil-disposed person had seen where he came from, there would arise a faint reminiscence of something that we, as young men, had read about in physics, and which, I believe, we called the co-efficient of expansion.

For, when we looked at the deep incision made by his strong belt, before, behind and at the sides, we involuntarily received the impression that such a co-efficient, with an extraordinarily strong tendency to expand, was present in Frode Hansen’s stomach.

And people who met him, especially when he heaved one of his deep, beery sighs, nervously stepped to one side.  For if the co-efficient in there should ever happen to get the better of the strong belt, the pieces, and particularly the front buckle, would fly around with a force sufficient to break plate-glass windows.