Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/255

 Rh such students have collected half-a-dozen "variants" that they feel their incredulity justifiable, range their treasure in a "cycle", and account their attitude as being truly scientific!

If what is told of more than one place, cannot be told with truth of any, and what has never happened in our time never happened at all, the exodus of the Hameln innocents is in " a parlous state". We have just glanced at the musical kidnapping of Lorch and Baring-Gould also reports how Brandenburg was once visited by a man who went fiddling through the streets till he had a troop of little listeners whom he wiled to the Marienberg, which opened to enclose both him and them. Nearer home, according to Dr. Kirkpatrick in The Sea Piece, a narrative, philosophical, and descriptive poem published in 1750, a like tradition is attached to Cave Hill near Belfast, though I believe the memory of it is now grown dim.