ened a little, and
the bagpiper had gone in with them, after which it had closed again.
Only the three little ones who told the adventure had remained outside,
as if by a miracle. One was bandy-legged and could not run fast enough;
the other, who had left the house in haste, one foot shod the other
bare, had hurt himself against a big stone and could not walk without
difficulty; the third had arrived in time, but in harrying to go in with
the others had struck so violently against the wall of the mountain that
he fell backwards at the moment it closed upon his comrades.

At this story the parents redoubled their lamentations. They ran with
pikes and mattocks to the mountain, and searched till evening to find
the opening by which their children had disappeared, without being able
to find it. At last, the night falling, they returned desolate to Hamel.

But the most unhappy of all was the Town Counsellor, for he lost three
little boys and two pretty little girls, and to crown all, the people
of Hamel overwhelmed him with reproaches, forgetting that the evening
before they had all agreed with him.

What had become of all these unfortunate children?

The parents always hoped they were not dead, and that the rat-catcher,
who certainly must have come out of the mountain, would have taken them
with him to his country. That is why for several years they sent in
search of them to different countries, but no one ever came on the trace
of the poor little ones.

It was not till much later that anything was to be heard of them.

About one hundred and fifty years after the event, when there was no
longer one left of the fathers, mothers, brothers or sisters of that
day, there arrived one evening in Hamel some merchants of Bremen
returning from the East, who asked to speak with the citizens. They told
that they, in crossing Hungary, had sojourned in a mountainous country
called Transylvania, where the inhabitants only spoke German, while all
around them nothing was spoken but Hungarian. These people also declared
that they came from Germany, but they did not know how they chanced to
be in this strange country. 'Now,' said the merchants of Bremen, 'these
Germans cannot be other than the descendants of the lost children of
Hamel.'

The people of Hamel did not doubt it; and since that day they regard it
as certain that the Transylvanians of Hungary are their country folk,
whose ancestors, as children, were brought there by the rat