It would be tedious to enumerate the quarrels, jealousies, and feuds that agitated these kingdoms during the early years of the fourteenth century; to note in detail the trouble they caused to the Hanseatic traders, and the need they awoke among them of holding together in as close an alliance at home as they had hitherto done abroad. It was necessary to be ever wakeful and mistrustful; and to watch jealously for the faintest signs of an infringement of privileges. In 1326 a lad of some twelve summers, whose memory was destined to be handed down to posterity as that of a hero of romance, ascended the throne of Denmark. In allusion to the famous fable about the election of a king of the frogs, an old writer speaks of this event as a choice by the frogs of the stork as ruler instead of the log. For Waldemar, as he was called, proved indeed no log and no puppet in the hands of his ambitious barons. As a mere youth he gave evidence of his strength and determination, and under his ægis Denmark acquired great wealth and consideration, and would have attained to yet more had not Waldemar, with mistaken judgment, drawn the reins too tight, until from a wise ruler he became a despot. It was his aim and policy to nationalize his country, to drive away the foreigners who utilized it for their warlike and commercial ends. He found it small and distracted with dissensions; after twenty years' rule he could point to marked success and change, for he had made Denmark respected and feared at home and abroad. History knows him as Waldemar III.,[6] story and song as Waldemar Atterdag, a nickname that well expresses the salient points of his character. For the name of Atterdag, which means "there is yet another day," refers to the king's constant habit of using this expression in the sense that if to-day a goal is not reached, it is not therefore unattainable, that a man must wait, never despair, and never lose sight of his aim. And Waldemar for his part never did. He pursued his purposes with a strenuousness and a patience, which contrasted favourably with the vacillating attitude of his princely northern contemporaries, and which was only matched and finally surpassed by the same strenuous and patient policy on the part of the Baltic towns, and especially on the part of Lübeck, their astute and diplomatic leader. Nor was it only good aims that the king followed with such persistence. He was an implacable, a relentless enemy, who never forgot an injury, and who waited with cruel calmness the day of vengeance.