I do not attempt to explain the episode of the rats, beyond saying that the story is not uncommon, that there is to this day a “Ratfanger’s Haus” in the ancient town of Hamelin, and that according to the original legend the piper was accused of sorcery. Any man who studied the habits of rats and learned how to catch them did so in peril of being accused of sorcery; and quite likely Browning, writing for children, made the mayor and corporation more ridiculous by saying that they had spent all their money in gluttony and could not pay the rat-catcher his fee. “A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!” With what shuddering delight did we hear the absurd and obese old mayor brave the vengeance of the piper in those awful words. How could he ever have had the courage to do it? The real legend of Hamelin says that the piper was accused of being a sorcerer. But it is the children who most interest us to-day. We must find a motive which could excuse an atrocious crime and hold it for righteousness. That motive we find in the Crusades; and it has been often suggested that in the “Children’s Crusade” we find the real foundation of the episode. Although we nowadays number the Crusades in a charming regularity and order, probably the people who took part in them did not realise that they were anything but episodes in a furious and weary struggle which, up to 1212 at least, had had little more result than disaster and destruction. Children saw their fathers dragged away to the East, and, lost in a gloomy fog of war and despair, mostly disappear for ever. Their mothers and their priests told them that daddy had gone to get back the tomb of Christ and save it from wicked men; and the world was sunk in misery and poverty and despair; up to 1212 at least, the war had had no further result than the capture of Acre in 1191, the elevation of Saladin to a pinnacle of romantic glory, the barbarous quarrels among Christians, and the frightful attack upon Constantinople which had led to the destruction in hideous circumstances of that once glorious city in 1204. In 1212 the grown men of Europe had become heartily sick of the weary struggle, and it occurred to the clergy that, since it seemed likely that the tomb of Christ could never be recovered by sinful men—and if you read Gibbon you will see that many of the Crusaders were exceedingly sinful, Cross and all—it was only right to try if the innocence of little boys might not be able to prevail over the powers of evil. It is not suggested that the clergy really encouraged the “Children’s Crusade,” though some people seem to think that they did. All the authorities that Hecker was able to consult show that the saner of the clergy were as much horrified by this result of the neurasthenia of the time as the parents.