" 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.
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