DENMARK: Plum the Great

Say "Plum!" to a Dane and he will think of butter—vital Danish export.

Eccentric Harald Plum has long been Copenhagen's butter Croesus. The boom of a cannon across the harbor came to mean merely that he was through business for the day and had sailed out to Plum Island, to chomp voraciously through a rich dinner topped with pastry and champagne.

Plum's first coups were not in butter but small arms. During the War he sold some thousands of Danish recoil rifles, grew vain, secretly published an anonymous biography of himself crammed with pictures of Balkan and European royalties, implying that...

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