But she did not feel at all homesick nor tired nor afraid; for the Piper's fife seemed to keep them all in excellent spirits, and she found herself wondering what she would do when they came to the fabled hill-side,--for she never doubted they would go there. On they went, faster and faster, the Piper behind them playing all the while. She saw the broad river; and all the children shouted, "Die Weser." One little flaxen-haired girl told her they were nearing Hamelin. "It used to have a big wall around it, with twenty towers and a large fort; but that was all blown up by the French, years and years ago," she explained. "But it has a chain-bridge," she remarked proudly,--"a chain-bridge that stretches quite across the Weser." Doris was just about to say: "Why, that's nothing! We have a huge suspension bridge in New York;" but the words seemed to twist themselves into a different form, and the memory of home to melt away, and she found herself murmuring, "Ach, so?" quite like the rest of the little Teutons. But at length the fife ceased playing, and the children stopped. There they were in quaint old Hamelin, with its odd wooden houses, and its old Munster that was all falling to ruin, and its rosy-cheeked children, who did not seem to notice the new-comers at all. "We must be invisible," thought Doris; and indeed they were. Then the Pied Piper came forward and beckoned them on, and softly they followed him to the very hill-side, that opened, as Doris knew it would, and they found themselves in a vast hall. A low rumbling startled Doris for a moment, but then she knew it was only the hill-side closing upon them. She seemed to hear a faint cry as the last sound died, away, and was tempted to run back, for she feared some child had been hurt; but her companion said,-- "It can't be helped, dear; he _always_ gets left outside, and then he weeps. You see he is lame, and he cannot keep up with us." So Doris knew it was the self-same little lad of whom Browning had written in his story of the Piper. What a chattering there was, to be sure; and what a crowd was gathered about the Piper at the farther end of the hall! Every once in a while all the children would laugh so loudly that the very ceiling shook. It was such a merry throng. "Tell me," said Doris to her little neighbor,--"tell me, are you always so gay here? Do you never quarrel? and have you really lived in this hillside all this long, long time,--ever since the Piper first came to Hamelin five hundred years ago?" "Ja, wohl," replied the girl, nodding her flaxen head. "We are always so happy; we never quarrel; therefore we are ever young, and what thou callest five hundred years are as nothing to us. Ah! we are well cared for here, and the Piper teaches us, and we him; and we play and frolic and sometimes travel, 'und so geht's.'" "But what can you teach _him_?" asked Doris, wondering.