Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/494

462 BOOK only until some one should sing more sweetly and powerfully than they.

The Piper This mysterious spell belongs also to the Piper of Hameln, who, wroth at being cheated of his promised recompense for piping away into the Weser the rats which had plagued the city/ returns to take an unlooked-for vengeance. No sooner is a note of his music heard than there is throughout the town a sound of pattering feet, all the children of the town hurrying to listen to the strange melody. The musician goes before them to a hill rising above the Weser, and as they follow him into a cavern, the door in the mountain-side shuts fast, and their happy voices are heard no more. According to one version none were saved but a lame boy, who remained sad and cheerless because he could not see the beautiful land to which the piper had said that he was leading them. At Brandenburg the plague from which the piper delivers the people is a host of ants, whom he charms into the water. The promised payment is not made, and when he came again, all the pigs followed him into the lake — a touch borrowed probably from the narrative of the miracle at Gadara. In this myth there is a triple series of incidents. Failing to receive his recompense the second year for sweeping away a cloud of crickets, the piper takes away all their ships. In the third year all the children vanish as from Hameln, the unpaid toil of the piper having been this time expended in driving away a legion of rats.

The Erl- The idea of music as charming away souls from earth is common to all these legends, and this notion is brought out more fully not only in Gothe's ballad of the Erlking, who charms the child to death in his father's arms, but also in superstitions still prevalent among certain classes of people in this country, who believe that the dying hear the sound of sweet music discoursing to them of the happy land far away.^

The idea of the shrubs and trees as moved by the harping of

' This tale at once carries us to the sively to the god near whom it was Sminthian worship of Apollon. Smin- placed ; accordingly he refers the myth thos, it is said, was a Cretan word for a without hesitation to Apollon as the mouse, and certain it is that a mouse was deliverer from those plagues of mice placed at the foot of the statues of tlie which have been dreaded or hated as a sun-god in the temples where he was terrible scourge, and which even now worshipped under this name. But the draw German peasants in crowds to the story accounted for this by saying that churches to fall on their knees and pray the mouse was endowed with the gift of God to destroy the mice. — Griechische prophecy, and was therefore put by the Gotterlehre, i. 482. But the Hindu side of the deity who was possessed of Ganesa, as well as the Hellenic Apollon, the profound wisdom of Zeus himself. is represented as crushing the mouse. — This in the opinion of Welcker is a mere Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, ii. 68. inversion, which assigned to the mouse * Gould, Curious Alj/ths, second an attribute which had belonged exclu- series, 160. king.