The Pied Piper of Hamelin

8-10 min read
18 pages

The pied piper of Hamelin, the folk tale to read aloud. He clears the rats for an agreed price, and then the town decides not to pay it.

The town of Hamelin had rats. Not a few rats — rats in the flour, rats in the cradles, rats that sat on the table and looked at you while you ate.

The townspeople went to the council and said something had to be done, and the council said something was being done, and the rats went on multiplying.

Then a man came into the square in a coat of two colours, red on one side and yellow on the other, with a pipe on a cord round his neck.

«I can clear your rats,» he said. «My price is a thousand guilders.» «Fifty thousand,» said the mayor, «if you do it.»

He went out into the middle of the street and began to play. It was not a tune anybody knew. And out of every cellar and every drain in that town the rats came — old ones and young ones, grey and brown, more of them than anyone had believed lived there.

They followed him down to the river, and into it, and the river took them, and by the middle of the afternoon there was not a rat left in Hamelin.

The man came back to the square and asked for his thousand guilders.

The mayor looked at the council and the council looked at the floor. «A thousand guilders,» said the mayor, «for an afternoon's whistling? The rats are drowned. They will not come back. Take fifty and be glad of it.»

«I was promised a thousand,» said the piper.

«And what will you do about it?» said the mayor. «Play us another tune?»

The piper went out into the street. He put the pipe to his lips, and this time the tune was different — a light one, the kind a child hums without noticing.

And out of every house in Hamelin came the children. Little ones carried by bigger ones, some still in nightshirts, all of them laughing, all of them going the same way.

The grown-ups came out after them and could not get near. They called and nobody turned round. The street was full and moving, and the piper was at the front of it, walking towards the hill outside the town.

In the side of that hill a door opened which nobody had ever seen there. The piper went in, and the children went in after him, and the door closed and was gone, and the hill was only a hill.

One boy was left on the road. He was lame and could not keep up, and he stood at the foot of the hill and cried, and he told them afterwards what he had heard through the door before it shut: a country on the other side where everything was better than here.

Hamelin looked for them. They dug at the hill. They sent men to every town within a hundred miles and offered whatever anybody wanted. They paid a great deal of money, in the end, to a great many people, and none of it was any use.

The town wrote the date on the wall of the council house, and on the church, so that it could not be argued about later: the twenty-sixth of June, and the number of children, and what they had been promised.

And the street the children walked down was renamed, and no music has ever been played in it since.

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Text source: Folk plot in the public domain (the Hamelin legend, recorded from the thirteenth century). The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Want to know where these stories come from? The articles are here

The Pied Piper of Hamelin

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