[Footnote 1:  From traditions, with rhymes from Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin.]

Once I made a pleasure trip to a country called Germany; and I went to a funny little town, where all the streets ran uphill.  At the top there was a big mountain, steep like the roof of a house, and at the bottom there was a big river, broad and slow.  And the funniest thing about the little town was that all the shops had the same thing in them; bakers’ shops, grocers’ shops, everywhere we went we saw the same thing,—­big chocolate rats, rats and mice, made out of chocolate.  We were so surprised that after a while, “Why do you have rats in your shops?” we asked.

“Don’t you know this is Hamelin town?” they said.  “What of that?” said we.  “Why, Hamelin town is where the Pied Piper came,” they told us; “surely you know about the Pied Piper?” “What about the Pied Piper?” we said.  And this is what they told us about him.

It seems that once, long, long ago, that little town was dreadfully troubled with rats.  The houses were full of them, the shops were full of them, the churches were full of them, they were everywhere.  The people were all but eaten out of house and home.  Those rats,

    They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
      And bit the babies in the cradles,
    And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
      And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
    Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
    Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
    And even spoiled the women’s chats
      By drowning their speaking
      With shrieking and squeaking
    In fifty different sharps and flats!

At last it got so bad that the people simply couldn’t stand it any longer.  So they all came together and went to the town hall, and they said to the Mayor (you know what a mayor is?), “See here, what do we pay you your salary for?  What are you good for, if you can’t do a little thing like getting rid of these rats?  You must go to work and clear the town of them; find the remedy that’s lacking, or—­we’ll send you packing!”

Well, the poor Mayor was in a terrible way.  What to do he didn’t know.  He sat with his head in his hands, and thought and thought and thought.

Suddenly there came a little rat-tat at the door.  Oh! how the Mayor jumped!  His poor old heart went pit-a-pat at anything like the sound of a rat.  But it was only the scraping of shoes on the mat.  So the Mayor sat up, and said, “Come in!”

And in came the strangest figure!  It was a man, very tall and very thin, with a sharp chin and a mouth where the smiles went out and in, and two blue eyes, each like a pin; and he was dressed half in red and half in yellow—­he really was the strangest fellow!—­and round his neck he had a long red and yellow ribbon, and on it was hung a thing something like a flute, and his fingers went straying up and down it as if he wanted to be playing.