Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/259

 Rh but little appearance of truth, because it would have been almost as great a wonder unto the Saxons of Transilvania to have had so many strange children brought among them they knew not how, as it were to those of Hamel to lose them; and they could not but have kept memory of so strange a thing, if indeed any such thing had there hapened."

It is not unlikely, I think, that some relic, real or supposed, of the children found in Siebenberge in the Hameln district may have given colour to the belief that they had been traced to Siebenbürge in Transylvania. So a certain correspondence led Schoock to imagine that he had found the epitaph of the Pied Piper in S. Laurence's, Padua. The memorial had been erected by the German nation, and the subject of it, a Transylvanian named Valentine Graeirus or Bacfort, had died at the age of forty-nine in 1524; but as his "rare skill in pipe-playing" had led to his being "admired as another Orpheus", no one could doubt—so thought Schoock—that he was the performer usually credited to 1284!

After all this, is it not somewhat startling to learn, from Mrs. Gerard's Land beyond the Forest, that the story of the juvenile immigrants is still credited in Transylvania? The journey is said to have been performed through subterranean passages, and the Almesche Höhle, in the north-east of the country, is pointed out as being the place where the travellers reissued to the light of day. At the village of Nadesch the arrival of the German ancestors is annually commemorated, but I do not feel sure that they are supposed to have come from Hameln, though Mrs. Gerard so expresses herself that I think it not unlikely such may be the case. On a particular day all the lads dress up as pilgrims and assemble round a flag. Headed by an old man, they go about the streets in procession singing psalms, stopping to dance and to refresh themselves at intervals. When questioned, they say, "Thus came our forefathers,