nd 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. And the piper, in turn, is the classic
Hermes or Orpheus, the counterpart of the Finnish Wainamoinen and the
Sanskrit Gunadhya. His wonderful pipe is the horn of Oberon, the lyre of
Apollo (who, like the piper, was a rat-killer), the harp stolen by
Jack when he climbed the bean-stalk to the ogre's castle. [18] And the
father, in Goethe's ballad, is no more than right when he assures his
child that the siren voice which tempts him is but the rustle of the
wind among the dried leaves; for from such a simple class of phenomena
arose this entire family of charming legends.

But why does the piper, who is a leader of souls (Psychopompos), also
draw rats after him? In answering this we shall have occasion to note
that the ancients by no means shared that curious prejudice against the
brute creation which is indulged in by modern anti-Darwinians. In many
countries, rats and mice have been regarded as sacred animals; but in
Germany they were thought to represent the human soul. One story out of
a hundred must suffice to illustrate this. "In Thuringia, at Saalfeld, a
servant-girl fell asleep whilst her companions were shelling nuts. They
observed a little red mouse creep from her mouth and run out of the
window. One of the fellows present shook the sleeper, but could not wake
her, so he moved her to another place. Presently the mouse ran back to
the former place and dashed about, seeking the girl; not finding her,
it vanished; at the same moment the girl died." [19] This completes the
explanation of the piper, and it also furnishes the key to the horrible
story of Bishop Hatto.

This wicked prelate lived on the bank of the Rhine, in the middle of
which stream he possessed a tower, now pointed out to travellers as the
Mouse Tower. In the year 970 there was a dreadful famine, and people
came from far and near craving sustenance out of the Bishop's ample and
well-filled granaries. Well, he told them all to go into the barn, and
when they had got in there, as many as could stand, he set fire to the
barn and burnt them all up, and went home to eat a merry supper. But
when he arose next morning, he heard that an army of rats had eaten all
the corn in his granaries, and was now advancing to storm the palace.
Looking from his window, he saw the roads and fields