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Occasionally, to be sure, the children insist upon books being easy to read, and refuse to find "lovely talk" in them if they are not. It was only a short time ago that I read to a little boy Browning's "Pied Piper of Hamelin." When I had finished there was a silence. "Do you like it?" I inquired. "Ye-es," replied my small friend; "it's a nice story, but it's nicer in my book than in yours.
The first of these works is founded upon Scheffel's well-known poem, and tells in artless fashion of the love of Jung Werner, the trumpeter, for the daughter of the Baron von Schönau; the second deals with the story of the Hamelin rat-catcher, which Browning has immortalised.
Be this as it may, presently the piper hit on a persuasive tune and I abandoned all thought of the Noah's ark my errand of the morning for my nephew and joined the crowd that followed him. Hamelin Town was come again. But street violins I avoid. They suggest mortgages and unpaid rent. But with the world before him why should a man turn dentist? He must have been a cruel fellow from his rattle.
Ere the troops were fully on march Quentin Durward received from an unknown hand a billet which Lady Hamelin had sent to the Countess Isabelle, mentioning that her William as she called the Wild Boar had determined, for purposes of policy, in the first action to have others dressed in his coat-armour, and himself to assume the arms of Orleans, with a bar sinister.
The Pied Piper's reed could not have stirred the Hamelin children deeper than did those Sandgate bands the heart of our domestic. Fortunately, they generally passed early in the morning when we were indoors, but one day, returning home to lunch, we heard distant strains dying away upon the Hythe Road. We hurried in.
It did not trouble us to lie Forgotten 'neath the forgetting sky. So long Sleep was our only cure That when Death piped of rest made sure, We cast our fleshly crutches down, Laughing like boys in Hamelin Town. And this we did while loving life, Yet loving more than home or wife The kindness of a world set free For countless children yet to be.
Captain Hamelin, with rare good taste, had a new post made, and the plate erected in the old spot. Another outward bound ship, the MAURITIUS, touched on the west coast in 1618, and discovered and named the Willems River, near the Northwest Cape, probably the present Ashburton. The next navigator to the South Land met with an untimely end.
There they were in quaint old Hamelin, with its odd wooden houses, and its old Munster that was all falling to ruin, and its rosy-cheeked children, who did not seem to notice the new-comers at all. "We must be invisible," thought Doris; and indeed they were.
If you cared for the artistic you could go through a salon like the Piper of Hamelin with a queue of gentlemen reaching back into the corridors of infinity. Instead of which you wear mannish clothes, do your hair in a Bath-bun, and permit men the privilege of equality. Oh, la, la! A man is no longer useful when one ceases to mystify him."
And readers of recent French literature cannot fail to remember Erokmann-Chatrian's terrible story of the wild huntsman Vittikab, and how he sped through the forest, carrying away a young girl's soul. Thus, as Tannhauser is the Northern Ulysses, so is Goethe's Erlking none other than the Piper of Hamelin.
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