There were wonderful tales of gnomes and kobolds, of the strange adventures of the charcoal-burners in lonely forests, of water-sprites and dwarfs. But none of all these made quite as great an impression on me as one which Meta called "The Man with the Pan-pipes," a story which, much to my surprise, I found years after in a well-known poem called "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." It was the very same story as to the facts, with just a few differences; for instance, the man in the poem is not described as playing on pan-pipes, but on some other kind of pipe. But though it is really the same, it seems quite, quite different from the story as I heard it long ago. In the poem there is a wonderful brightness and liveliness, and now and then even fun, which were all absent in Meta's tale. As she told it, it was strangely dark and mysterious. I shall never forget how I used to shiver when she came to the second visit of the piper, and described how the children slowly and unwillingly followed him—how he used to turn round now and then with a glance in his grim face which made the squeal of the pipes still more unearthly. There was no beauty in his music, no dancing steps were the children's whom he dragged along by his power; "they just had to go," Meta would say. And when she came to the mysterious ending, my questions were always the same.
"Are they still there—shut up in the cave?" I would ask.
Meta supposed so.
"Will they never come out—never, never?" I said.
She shook her head.
"And if they ever did," I said, "would they be grown-up people, or quite old like—like that man you were telling me about. Rip—Rip—"
"Rip van Winkle," she said.
"Yes, like Rip van Winkle, or would they have stayed children like the boy the fairies took inside the hill to be their servant?"