by anger against the town-council for its repudiation of his claim as vermin-destroyer. He said it before he went to Hameln, in the third edition of De Præstigus, and after his return he repeated it, in the fourth. Now he would scarcely have done that if his version had been at variance with that current at head-quarters. That he, or we, should find the tale of civic chicanery set forth in municipal records, and engraven on public buildings, would be to expect too much of human nature. But Wier said the Piper was hired to entice away glires, dormice; and Kirchner of Fulda—he wrote[1] in 1650—spoke of the folk being plagued by mice and shrew-mice (murium soricumque agminibus), but in the meantime, 1588, Pomarius had introduced his readers to die grosse Ratzen, which infest most modern accounts of the comedy that had such tragic close.
The question as to the kind of rodent that raged at Hameln is one of much interest, though I must not do more than glance at it. Rats are rare in folk-tales, I believe, and even when there, have often been evolved out of original mice. Gubernatis has bare mention of them in his Zoological Mythology. Naturalists have taught that mus rattus, the black rat, found its way to Europe only about the beginning of the sixteenth century, and that the brown, m. decumanus, did not reach the western countries of the Continent until the middle of the eighteenth. How did either contrive to swarm at Hameln some hundreds of years before it got there? This is really the most incredible part of our story! Is Science at fault, and is Literature keener at smelling a rat than she? Mohammed Tabari[2] says that the voyagers in the Ark were put to straits by rats, so Noah passed his hand down the back of the lion, who sneezed, and the cat, which did not exist before then, leaped out of its nose, and went for the
- ↑ Quoted by Schoock.
- ↑ The authority referred to by Baring-Gould, who gives the story in Legends of Old Testament Characters, vol. i, p. 113.
