And so he leads them away to Koppelberg Hill, and ‘Lo, as they reached the mountain side, A wondrous portal opened wide, As if a cavern were suddenly hollowed; And the Piper advanced and the children followed. And when all were in, to the very last, The door in the mountain side shut fast.’ [Sidenote: Myths of death and the other world.] This too is a myth of death. It is astonishing when we come to examine into the origin of popular tales how many we find that had at first a funeral character. This Piper hath indeed a magic music which none can disobey, for it is the whisper of death; he himself is the soul-leading Hermes (the wind, the piper), or at least Odin, in the same office. But the legend is, in part at any rate, Slavonic; for it is a Slavonic notion which likens the soul to a mouse.[130] When we have got this clue, which the modern folk-lore easily gives us, the Odinic character of the Piper becomes very apparent. Nay, in this particular myth we can almost trace a history of the meeting of two peoples, Slavonic and German, and the junction of their legends. Let us suppose there had been some great and long-remembered epidemic which had proved peculiarly fatal to the children[131] of Hameln and the country round about. The Slavonic dwellers there--and in prehistoric times some Slavs were to be found as far west as the Weser--would speak of these deaths mythically as the departure of the mice (_i.e._ the souls), and perhaps, keeping the tradition, which we know to be universally Aryan, of a water-crossing, might tell of the mice as having gone to the water. Or further, they might feign that these souls were led there by a piping wind-god: he, too, is the common property of the Aryan folk. Then the Germans coming in, and wishing to express the legend in their mythological form, would tell how the same Piper had piped away all the _children_ from the town. So a double story would spring up about the same event. The Weser represents one image of death, and might have served for the children as well as for the mice: to make the legend fuller, however, another image is selected for them, the dark, ‘concealed’ place, namely, Hel, or the cave of Night and Death.