Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/257

 Rh or S. John Baptist's, Eve should bear the blame, as three nights had passed between them and the fresh morn of the festival of S. John and S. Paul—Roman brothers, and Martyrs— when the Piper piped his summons, and the joy of many households sped away. Nothing more than childish curiosity and excitement, freedom from suspicion, carelessness of consequences, was wanted to produce the effect. Very ordinary causes brought about a kind of Kinderausgang in London in 1643; it led Howell the traveller and letter-writer to relate the Hameln story to his correspondent. He prefaces it thus: "I saw such prodigious things daily done these few Years past, that I had resolved with myself to give over wondering at anything, yet a passage happened this Week that forced me to wonder once more, because it is without parallel. It was that some odd Fellows went skulking up and down London Streets, and with Figs and Raisins allured little Children, and so purloined them away from their Parents and carried them a Ship-board far beyond the Sea, where, by cutting their Hair, and other Devices, they so disguised them that their own Parents could not know them." Given another Age, and a chronicler of different temperament, and these embodiments of diabolic craft had, like the Pied Piper, painted a moral and adorned a tale, as Diabolus himself.

Do I presume too much in hoping that, thus far, you are all with me? I expect to be asked with some sign of sarcasm whether the going into the Koppen is also to be regarded as a natural occurrence. Certainly not, if into must needs imply subterranean entry; but I take it in the sense in which it is familiar to us in the New Testament and out of it, when "into a mountain" denotes no more than exterior or superficial access, and I stagger not. Love of the marvellous and misapprehension were parents of the fancy that Bunting and his audience were actually absorbed