No, he would not have any men with him to be cut to pieces; he would fight by himself, answered the youngster.

“So much the better,” thought the king; “the sooner I shall get rid of him; but he must have a proper club.”

They sent for the smith; he forged a club which weighed a hundredweight.  “A very nice thing to crack nuts with,” said the youngster.  So the smith made one of three hundredweight.  “It would be very well for hammering nails into boots,” was the answer.  Well, the smith could not make a bigger one with the men he had.  So the youngster set out for the smithy himself, and made a club that weighed five tons, and it took a hundred men to turn it on the anvil.  “That one might do for lack of a better,” thought the youngster.  He wanted next a bag with some provisions; they had to make one out of fifteen oxhides, and they filled it with food, and away he went down the hill with the bag on his back and the club on his shoulder.

When he came so far that the enemy saw him, they sent a soldier to ask him if he was going to fight them.

“Yes; but wait a little till I have had something to eat,” said the youngster.  He threw himself down on the grass and began to eat with the big bag of food in front of him.

But the enemy would not wait, and commenced to fire at him at once, till it rained and hailed around him with bullets.

“I don’t mind these crowberries a bit,” said the youngster, and went on eating harder than ever.  Neither lead nor iron took any effect upon him, and his bag with food in front of him guarded him against the bullets as if it were a rampart.

So they commenced throwing bomb-shells and firing cannons at him.  He only grinned a little every time he felt them.

“They don’t hurt me a bit,” he said.  But just then he got a bomb-shell right down his windpipe.

“Fy!” he shouted, and spat it out again; but then a chain-shot made its way into his butter-can, and another carried away the piece of food he held between his fingers.

That made him angry; he got up and took his big club and struck the ground with it, asking them if they wanted to take the food out of his mouth, and what they meant by blowing crowberries at him with those pea-shooters of theirs.  He then struck the ground again till the hills and rocks rattled and shook, and sent the enemy flying in the air like chaff.  This finished the war.

When he came home again, and asked for more work, the king was taken quite aback, for he thought he should have got rid of him in the war.  He knew of nothing else but to send him on a message to the devil.

“You had better go to the devil and ask him for my ground-rent,” he said.  The youngster took his bag on his back, and started at once.  He was not long in getting there, but the devil was gone to court, and there was no one at home but his mother, and she said that she had never heard talk of any ground-rent.  He had better call again another time.