Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/238

 230 being warned by their elders against Pipers, as perils peculiar to the district, they may have planted their feet firmly and looked about for the police. In 1887 photographs of the beguiler abounded; not of course of the original Bunting, but of a well-fed burgher who personated him in June 1884, when Hameln made the best of her loss by celebrating that most famous incident in her history with pageant, speech, and pleasantry, thus causing, as somebody has observed, a tragedy to be the motive of a festival. Two days the revels lasted: on the first, Herr Pietsch stood out and piped, and a multitude of children dressed in grey, with rat- like masks and india-rubber tails, swarmed after him; on the second, his music gathered little ones, in old-world garb, and he led them to a quasi-"Koppenberg"—but, like the King of France's army, "they all marched back again"! Julius Wolff, who has woven a charming poem out of the Rattenfanger story, was there, and so was Victor Nessler the Alsatian composer, whose very popular opera is for the most part a musical rendering of Wolff It were vain to speculate how many shades of other Hameln-stricken authors were hovering around. I think this festival may have quickened Holbe, the sculptor's remarkable figure, of which I have a miniature reproduction here; as also a photograph which shows the expression of subtle malignancy far better than the cast. At the time of my visits the town sought money to have this figure erected in the Pferdemarkt. A companion statuette was of Gertrude, the fisher-girl, who was Singuf's—so Wolff calls him—love. The pair are already honoured in the fountain here represented.

When I came to seek for the Koppel, or Koppenberg, where the children of 1284 are said to have vanished, it