This Crusade shows the great danger to which child-nature may be subjected in times of great excitement and teaches the need of the careful guarding of children from such. In this Crusade it is estimated that more than thirty thousand children never saw their homes after leaving. In all near a hundred thousand children went from their homes, leaving sixty thousand sorrowing families behind them. Perhaps not one of these children who returned home came back with the purity with which he or she started. =Other Child-pilgrimages.= "The _second children's pilgrimage_ falls only twenty-five years later; so that the assumption of a morbid excitability of the child-world at all this time appears to be justified. It was confined to the city of Erfurt, and the phenomenon was very transient, but not the less presents all the distinctive marks of a religious convulsion, and exhibited more of disease than other child-pilgrimages, as far at least as has come down to posterity. On the 15th July, 1237, there assembled, unknown to their parents, more than 1,000 children, left the town by the Löber Gate, and wandered, dancing and leaping, by the Steigerwald to Armstadt. A congress such as this, as if by agreement, resembles an instinctive impulse as in animals, when, for instance, swallows and storks collect for their migration; the same phenomenon has doubtless taken place in all children's pilgrimages, it was also remarked by eye-witnesses of the first of them, in a manner characteristic of the Middle Ages. It was not till the next day that the parents learned the occurrence, and they fetched their children back in carts. No one could say who had enticed them away. Many of them are said to have continued ill some time after, and in particular to have suffered from trembling of the limbs, perhaps also from convulsions. The whole affair is obscure, and so little account has been taken of it by contemporaries, that the chronicles only speak of the fact, and say nothing of its causes. The only probable conjecture is that the many noisy and pompous festivities connected with the canonization of St. Elizabeth, the Landgravine of Thuringia, had excited in the child-world of Erfurt this itch for devotion, which sought to relieve itself by displays of spinal activity. For this child-pilgrimage is in very near proximity to the Dancing Mania.