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, he met the former in
a decisive battle at Lutter-am-Baremberg. King Christian's army was
beaten and put to rout. He himself fled bareheaded through the
forests of the Hartz Mountains, pursued by the enemy's horsemen. It
was hardly necessary for the Emperor to make him promise as the
price of peace to keep out of German affairs thenceforth. His allies
had left him to fight it out alone. All their fine speeches went for
nothing when it came to the test, and King Christian rode back to
Denmark, a sadder and wiser man. It was left to Gustav Adolf, after
all, to teach the German generals the lesson they needed.

In the years of peace before that unhappy war, Danish trade and
Danish culture had blossomed exceedingly, thanks to the wisdom, the
clever management, and untiring industry of the King. He built
factories, cloth-mills, silk-mills, paper-mills, dammed the North
Sea out from the rich marshlands with great dikes, taught the
farmers profitable ways of tilling their fields; for he was a
wondrous manager for whom nothing was too little and nothing too
big. He kept minute account of his children's socks and little
shirts, and found ways of providing money for his war-ships and for
countless building schemes he had in hand both in Denmark and
Norway. For many of them he himself drew the plans. Wherever one
goes to this day, his monogram, which heads this story, stares at
him from the splendid buildings he erected. The Bourse in Copenhagen
and the Round Tower, the beautiful palace of Rosenborg, a sort of
miniature of his beloved Frederiksborg which also he rebuilt on