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The last surviving example of a Kølbert (Castor Animalis Kølbricus) came swimming into a guesthouse on the Danish Riviera in Esbjerg after a flood in 1959, where it inadvertently hid itself in the establishment's root cellar. Whilst it was in the middle of gorging itself on the potatoes and parsnips, however, the hotel's owner, Miss Svennevig, in a moment of quite uncharacteristic rashness, dealt the animal a deadly blow with her broom, which sent the poor dumb creature on its final journey. After closer inspection through her half-moon reading glasses, she realised that she had made her first ever mistake and the full proportions of that error. In spite of a quick thinking phone call to a local professor specialising in water-seeking armadillos - which revealed amongst other things that the animal possessed hitherto overlooked standards of personal hygiene - their efforts at resuscitation had to be abandoned. Given her ubiquitous respect for cleanliness, and enriched with her new professorial knowledge, Miss Svennevig decided right there and then to have the animal stuffed. In this way the dumb animal could become the whole team's mascot.

With well-practised finger movements Mr. Ascanius stuffed the animal shortly after its tragic demise. Not long afterwards, however, the beast unfortunately had to be placed under a three month quarantine as Mr. Ascanius had, through an oversight, forgotten to remove his packed lunch - which he had ingeniously tried to conceal from the hungry team of waiters - and it remained in the animal's corpse. This packed lunch contained; half a round of sandwiches with mackerel in tomato sauce, a concoction of black pudding, raw onion and Italian salad, and piece of Danish brie of dubious origins. The unsuspecting animal gave off such an increasingly powerful stench that it had to be confined in isolation for the above-mentioned lengthy period.

The Kølbert is the subject of admiration and worship - to such an extent that during the luncheon serving at Dagny Jensen's sixty-fifth birthday party in 1989, it was the target of a kidnapping. Unknown assailants with more than the usual degree of cunning removed the animal from its pride of place in a glass showcase, where it sat beside Miss Andersen's pickled herrings. From a ransom demand written in halting language and enclosing the severed head of a stuffed polecat, it became apparent that the perpetrator would perform the same outrage on the Kølbert unless he received six packs of jam doughnuts and four bags of wine gums (family size) by 11.14 am on April 9th. Fearing for the animal's future, Miss Svennevig resolutely docked twenty kroner from each of the waiter's wages and personally purchased both jam doughnuts and wine gums. Shortly hereafter she ordered Mr. Elbæk to immediately undertake the peril fraught journey to The Mission Hotel's back entrance, where the exchange was to take place. Even before Mr. Elbæk could be offered a cup of tea and some sympathy on his return, the waiters had taken the artfully stuffed animal back into their midst. This was the occasion for Mr. Gade's uttering one of his two immortal sentences, "All's well that ends well". After their one and only short personnel meeting, the waiting staff decided to form the Secret Waiter Service (SWS) which promptly set about its clandestine activities in the name of righteousness. The strong smell of mackerel, black pudding, onion and brie from a nearby room soon put the SWS on the right trail. With military finesse the SWS seized a young waiter, of rural origins, in the middle of performing an ungodly act with two young virgins. Without further threat or torture than exposing the wretch to a lifelike bust of Miss Rostgaard, they succeeded in getting this heinous criminal, whose upper lip still glistened with doughnut jam, to admit his crime. Armed with his confession, the SWS placed the thieving soul in solitary confinement in Mr. Gade's private dungeon, where he remains to this day. This prompted Mr. Gade to utter his next, and thus far last, wise remark, "Nothing else matters if the end is good".

Since this awful episode, the Kølbert has been no less strictly protected than the English crown jewels or the President of America.