Page:Devil stories - an anthology.djvu/302

 NOTES alter ego, has the souls, in the Dance of Death, march off to hell to a merry tune on his violin. Death appears as a musician also in the Piper of Hamlin. In this legend, well known to the English world through Browning's poem "Pied Piper of Hamelin" (1843) and Miss Peabody's play The Piper (1909), the rats are the human souls, which Death charms with his music into following him. In the Middle Ages the soul was often represented as leaving the body in the form of a mouse. The soul of a good man comes out of his mouth as a white mouse, while at the death of a sinner the soul escapes as a black mouse, which the devil catches and brings to hell. Mephistopheles, it will be recalled, calls himself "the lord of rats and mice" (Faust, 1, 1516). Devil-Death has inherited this wind instrument from the goat-footed Pan.

"The Devil is more busy in the convents," we are told by J. K. Huysmans in his novel En route (1895), "than in the cities, as he has a harder job on hand."

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