and through that door all, save a lame boy, passed and were never seen
again.

From this old story probably came the proverb about paying the piper;
and it is one of many stories which turn on the magical power of a voice
or a sound to draw men, women, and children to their doom. These very
interesting stories are not like the stories which are made up just to
please people and help them pass away the time; they are different forms
of one story--the story of the wind, told by people who thought that the
wind was not what we call a force but a person, and that when he called
those who heard must follow if he chose; for "the piper is no other than
the wind, and the ancients held that in the wind were the souls of the
dead."

If every time we think of a force we should think of a person, we should
see the world as the men and women who made the myths saw it. Everything
that moved, or made a sound, or flashed out light, or gave out heat was
a person to them; they could not think of the wind rushing through the
trees or the storm devastating the fields without out imagining someone
like themselves, only more powerful, behind the uproar and destruction,
any more than we can see a lantern moving along the road at night
without thinking instinctively that somebody is carrying it.

Our idea of the world is scientific because it is based on exact though
by no means complete knowledge; the myth-makers' idea of the world was
poetic because, with very incomplete knowledge, they could not imagine
how anything could be done unless it was done as they did things. When
the black clouds gather on a summer afternoon and roll up the sky in
great, terrifying masses, and the lightning flashes from them and the
crash of the thunder fills the air and the rain beats down the crops, we