62 J. B. CLELAND. 
If we drop the pyrpiadas the remaining pupiddwv prpras, 
a myriad of myriads, would furnish one hundred millions, 
a number not wholly inadmissible.’? Now the Greek for 
a mouse or rat is pts, pds, whilst the Latin is mus, 
murts. It occurred to me that the redundant pvpidsus, with 
its stem mur, might be a punning reference—a failing to 
which I believe some of these old authors were inclined— 
to rats and mice having also succumbed. On referring the 
matter to Professor Darnley Naylor, of Adelaide, he sug- 
gested that, if any manuscript showed puptwv (for pupids), 
then it would be quite conceivable that pupiwv was a cor- 
ruption of puvov, ie., ten thousand times ten thousand 
rats. He added, however, that this was the vainest guess- 
work without the original to which to refer, and this he 
was unable at the time to do, as he was away on a holiday. 
The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, so graphically 
embodied in verse by Robert Browning, is, I am inclined to 
think, a legendary reference to an outbreak of plague. 
‘“‘The Pyed Piper’’! was promised a reward if he would 
‘drive the rats and mice out of Hamelin (Westphalia). This 
he did, for he gathered them together by his pipe, and then 
drowned them in the river. As the people refused to pay 
him, he next led the children to Koppelberg Hill, where 
130 of them perished (July 22nd, 1376). Does not this 
‘suggest that the rats and mice, which were evidently nu- 
merous, contracted plague, which nearly or quite exter- 
minated them? Metaphorically they were piped together 
and drowned in the river. Following on the disappearance 
of the rats, there was a heavy mortality in human beings, 
in this case in children, due to their contracting the plague 
from the rats, and they, likewise, metaphorically followed 
the Piper as the rats had done, and passed to eternity 
‘‘through the wondrous portal that opened wide in the 
+Rev. Dr. Brewer, Dict. of Phrase and Fable. 
