seemed to me as if I were directed in turn to all points of the compass; and I thought then, and have thought ever since, that there is something in the atmosphere of Hameln which tends to bewilderment and suggests enchantment. I sometimes felt there as if I were the victim of a spell; and maybe some tricksy Ariel was making me his sport. The fact that I and my companions spoke as barbarians had possibly something to do with the difficulties; then, too, certain of the people appealed to may have fancied we were in quest of the Klüt, the hill to which Pietsch led his followers on the festal day; and others may not have known—as at the outset I did not—that what is now called the Bassberg was, according to some, the mediaeval Koppen. Koppen is suggestive of heads, and Dr. Otto Meinardus, Royal Archivist at Berlin, who has bestowed much research on the records of his native Hameln, believes that the scene of the Disappearance was the two-headed Teutberg, which commands the Hildesheim and Hanover roads, and bars the end of the Weser valley,[1] This would be a far cry for the little children; but the Bassberg is within a stroll from the town, and I have but little doubt that I meditated on its summit on the occasion of my third hunt at Hameln. I am not as easily convinced as were the writer and the illustrator of a pleasant paper in the Magazine of Art[2]; the hill was pointed out to them from a distance, they seem to have gone by instinct to the proper knoll, and (to quote) "we pitched at once on the spot where we felt sure the laughing children had disappeared; a huge wild rose-bush, glowing with scarlet hips, was growing there. It must have been a lovely sight of flowers some months before. We gathered a bunch of the scarlet fruit as a memory of our visit. There
- ↑ Neues Material zur Geschichte dcr Rattenfängersage, in Zeitschrift des historischen Vereins für Niedersachsen, 1885, p. 267.
- ↑ Hameln, the Town of the Pied Piper or "Der Rattenfänger" (vol. for 1890, p. 192), by Katharine M. Macquoid.
