Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/258

 250 by the hill, and it was probably fostered by the misreading of Calvaria, a praying-station, as cavaria, a hollow place or cave, of which I saw an instance during the preparation of this paper. The historical nursemaid, who beheld things from afar, must be answerable for something—"I know that girl, she comes fra' Sheffield"—whilst the blind boy and the mute would add their quota to the wonder.

Whither Piper and children went, when they vanished from sight of the two watchers, into the Koppenberg, it is at this time impossible to determine. The leader gained a start, gained it in a day when electricity could not head a fugitive, and had everything but the number of the convoy in his favour. It is as likely as not that the wily fellow doubled as soon as the lie of the land furthered his purpose, came down to the river and, by pre-arrangement, was able to use it as a silent highway, on which the children passed easily with the current to some district beyond the hue and cry. Once at Bremen there were, what Samuel Johnson might call "potentialities" of evasion, on which I need not dwell.

In 1650, Kirchner, a Jesuit, stated on the alleged authority of a Transylvanian chronicle that the folk of Siebenburge came of the kidnapped Hamelners, and spoke their tongue. The theory had been referred to by Verstegan nearly half a century before Kirchner's Musurgia Universalis appeared, but he discredited it, attributed the likeness of language to Saxon colonisation of Transylvania by Charles the Great, and seems to have known nothing of the chronicler relied on by the later writer. "Some doe report", says Verstegan, "that there are divers found among the Saxons in Transilvania that have the like surnames unto the Burgers of Hamel, and will thereby seem to infer that this jugler or pied piper might by negromancy have transported them thither; but this carrieth