Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/248

 240 magistracy was accustomed to write together on its public documents: "in the year of Christ and in that of the going out of the children," etc. Moreover, care is taken to this day that there should be a perpetual memorial of the event, for the sound of a drum [tympanum] is never allowed in that street along which the children went forth, and even if a bride be led from it, there must be no music till she has passed out, nor are dances performed there. In consequence of this the street is actually called Burgeloscstrass"—or, as Meinardus corrects, Bungelosestrasse, or Drumless Street, Bunge signifying Trommel. In 1634 Richard Vestegan writes that "no Ostery" is "to be there holden."

There is a Bungelose, or Bungenlos (the name is variously spelt) Street now at Hameln in which no kind of music is permitted, excepting that which steals in through the air, as I have heard it do, from some player otherwhere. I thought I had caught the burghers napping; but no; the notes were for the enlivenment of an adjacent street, and no by-law could forbid them to creep over and through the houses into the lane sacred to a never-forgotten grief. That the Bungelosestr. was not invented, as some have suggested, in the middle of the sixteenth century, to furnish a substantial background to the Pied Piper is evident, since Dr. Meinardus's discovery of a document at Hameln, in which, under the date Friday, the 16th of September 1496, occurs the phrase "uppe der bungehelosenstrate". It is, of course, open to anyone to say that an odd, because probably corrupt, name was pressed into the service of our legend. My own doubt hovers, rather, over the point that a tuneless thing like a drum should be taken as the representative musical instrument, in a case