Of characters the Old Town had had a full supply ever since the days when Anders Sörensen Vedel, who was a cleric attached to the Domkirke, translated Saxo Grammaticus with the Hamlet Saga into Danish from the original Latin. Being in straits for paper on which to print it, he called upon the Danish women through his friend, Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, to send their linen to the paper-mill lest the great work be lost to posterity. Vedel was a pious as well as a famous man, and it was his custom, in order to impress his children with the bitterness of the Passion, to call them into his study on Good Friday and scourge them soundly. The scourge had no longer any pertinent relation to Good Friday in our day, though it was busy enough the year round. It helped us on our way to knowledge, or was supposed to, in the school, where “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was still an article of unquestioned faith. There was an evil tradition that a king in the early part of the century had once, on a visit, expressed wonder at the number of great and learned men that had come from it, and that the Rector had told him: “We have a little birch forest near, your Majesty. It helps, it helps!” It certainly labored faithfully. As to the results--but probably it is a subject without interest to my young readers, and since their elders have lost faith in it I shall let it alone, and be glad to. [Illustration: LIAR HANS.] Liar Hans, whom I spoke of, was one of the institutions of the town, along with Maren Dragoon, the apple woman, the memory of whose early flirtation with a dragoon--she was sixty and had a beard when I knew her--was thus perpetuated, and Hop-Carolina, so called because one of her legs was shorter than the other. How and why Hans got his nickname, I don’t know. I know that he hated us, probably for yelling it at him, and that he compelled me for a long time to go armed with a horsewhip for fear of him. The Liar was a professional skinner of cats. Women wore tanned catskins in those days as we wear chamois chest protectors, with the hairy side in, and this demand Liar Hans supplied. So he went about with a sack with dead cats in it, and from this brought up his ammunition when a fight befell, as it did whenever one of the Latin School boys hove in sight. Then the air was filled with cats that went back and forth till we ran; for Hans did not know the word surrender. He cornered me once in our own street, and there ensued a mighty combat between the Liar and his cats on one side, and myself and Othello, my dog, on the other, in which my horsewhip did great execution until we fled in disorderly retreat and got wedged in the doorway, the dog and I, where Hans laid it on both of us with a cat he had by the tail. My mother’s exclamation of horror, as she came out to see what was the matter, set us free at last.