This is the truth that lies behind the demure paragraph of the ordinary English biographies: “Frederick died after a long illness (which he bore with exemplary fortitude), contracted, such was his sense of duty, by prolonged exposure to the rain while reviewing his troops in the province which he had rescued from the Queen of Hungary owing to his wonderful genius.” The Children’s Crusade and “The Pied Piper” Which of us can remember a time when he did not know “The Pied Piper of Hamelin?” Which of us can remember a time when he thought it merely funny, or could not recite the joyous thing by heart like his schoolfellows? If the gliding years have stolen the detailed memory, at least they have not stolen the enormous impression that the poem made upon children; for we can still see the piper with his pin-point pupils and his light hair without tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, and his queer parti-coloured clothes: just like a Chinaman he seemed to us—like the poor mysterious “John” from whom we used to steal bananas and evoke torrents of uncouth gibberish. Perhaps he too was trying to tell us in his mildly explosive way how he had talked with the Cham of Tartary or the Nizam of Asia; perhaps he was telling us of some other mysterious potentate for whom he had contracted to bewitch vermin, though to be sure we had never observed any great love for music in him, nor did his fingers itch to do anything more than heave his stave on to his shoulders or pick out faulty vegetables for the cook. And how deliciously the piper had piped the rats from that little mediæval town: “O rats! rejoice, for the world is grown to one vast drysaltery!” We did not quite know what a drysaltery was, but to use Australian slang, it must contain things positively “bosker” to eat. The rough and tripping metre appealed to boyhood, and the queer words that we did not quite understand, though we felt that in a minute we should; such as “nuncheon” and “justling.” It seemed quite right and proper to say that salt sprinkled on a candle flame would burn green; and it savours of the “knowledge of good and evil” to know that it really burns yellow. It is good fun to try to reread the poem with a boy’s mind. But it is impossible; you cannot fully surrender yourself to the poet’s magic as a boy can, and you catch yourself wondering how much of it is really true; and, not content with the jolly way in which the story is told, you wonder whether it is “founded on fact” like so many other boys’ stories. That is the real tragedy of life, that a time comes when you cannot be contented with simple faith in good stories.