Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/251

 Rh a book of historical documents, the latter the Codex Statutorum. Now it is important to note that he went away satisfied with the evidence set before him in 1567, because, eighteen years later, Franz Müller copied the Brade into a new book, and the old one, that inspected by Wier, which dated from 1350, and contained memoranda relating to yet earlier times, disappeared, as Hameln things have a trick of doing. The Donat, also held to be a transcript of one gone before, begins with the thirteenth century. Good Pastor Herr made a translation of it in the eighteenth, but that, de more, has vanished. In the Donat we have examples of dates being accompanied by a reference to the "Outgoing", and perhaps these may be the instances which impressed themselves on Wier. It so, the fact must be regretted, for they have been denounced as interpolations and forgeries by competent judges. The handwriting of the entries and of the memorial date are said to differ, and that of the latter to be of the sixteenth century. The Brade does contain a paragraph anent the children, and that, for many reasons, it is important I should quote. It may be Englished thus: "In the year 1284, on the day of John and Paul, on the 26th day of the month of June, 130 children, born in Hameln, were brought out of the town by a piper,, dressed in many colours, led through the Osterthor to the Koppen by Calvary, and lost." To this effect are all the inscriptions I have ever seen, or ever read of anybody else seeing in "Hamelin Town" itself, always excepting the verses in the Passionale which run "omnes eos vivos Calvaria sorpsit, that may be the result of poetical licence; the sober prose gloss attached to them does not venture beyond "qui intraverunt montem Calvarium".

But what of the rats? Yes, what of the rats? When did they creep into the story? I believe our friend Wier was the first to assert in print that the Piper was actuated