At length they reached Marseilles and found the Mediterranean as blue as ever and as treacherous. Two shipowners met them while they were wondering why the sea had not even a tide, far less showed signs of opening for little boys. Let us give these shipowners their glorious names; they were William Porcus and Hugh Ferreus. They welcomed the boys and joined in their services, behaving, to the boys’ eyes, as true Christians. Stephen rejoiced in them, for all through the south of France he had met nothing but robbers and most unchristian men. William the Pig and Iron-hearted Hugo offered to take them to Palestine on shipboard for sheer love of God, as it seemed unlikely that the sea would open to give them passage as Stephen had promised. The little boys filled seven large ships and set forth joyfully and with cheerful shouts, singing hymns of victory. Two of the ships were wrecked in a storm off St. Pierre’s Rock, near Sardinia, and every boy on board was drowned. They were the lucky ones, because in time the survivors reached a strange and savage land which was not Holy, but was Egypt, where black men came on board and bought them all as slaves; and not one of those little boys ever reached France again. The usual stories were set afoot that some of them had been martyred rather than turn Moslem; but all that is known for certain is that eighteen years later seven hundred of them were still alive—but no longer little boys. It does not require much knowledge of Egypt to picture the tree of knowledge of which those little boys had been forced to eat. The extraordinary thing is that neither French nor German boys seem to have known of the deeds of the others. The only light in the gloom is that the free-thinking Emperor Frederick II afterwards laid hands upon William and Hugo and hanged them ingloriously with several other scoundrels. Probably he did this on general principles, and not on account of the little boys. Of course the frightful episode of the Children’s Crusade is merely an instance of the extraordinary suggestibility of children. You can do anything with a little boy if you work upon his imagination and subject him to “mass-suggestion.” I believe that the date in the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” is that of the dancing neurasthenia when it attacked that town; the rat episode is a distorted recollection of some rat-legend attributed to Hamelin but which may have referred to other places; the theft of the children refers to the German branch of the Children’s Crusade, whose Hamelin members crossed the Koppelberg to reach Cologne. And the leader’s name was Nicholas—Old Nick? Some Epidemics of Social Importance