moments, who goes about the country killing vermin. Coming across
an impressionable child, she tells him a preposterous tale, adapted
from the old "Pied Piper" legends, of her method of fascinating her
victims. The child, whose imagination has long dwelt on this
personage, is in fact hypnotised by her, follows her down to the
sea, and, watching her row away, turns dizzy, falls in, and is
drowned. There is nothing impossible, nothing even improbable, in
this. At the same time, there cannot be the least doubt, I think,
that in the, poet's mind the Rat-Wife is the symbol of Death, of
the "still, soft darkness" that is at once so fearful and so
fascinating to humanity. This is clear not only in the text of her
single scene, but in the fact that Allmers, in the last act, treats
her and his "fellow-traveller" of that night among the mountains,
not precisely as identical, but as interchangeable, ideas. To tell
the truth, I have even my own suspicions as to who is meant by "her
sweetheart," whom she "lured" long ago, and who is now "down where
all the rats are." This theory I shall keep to myself; it may be
purely fantastic, and is at best inessential. What is certain is
that death carries off Little Eyolf, and that, of all he was, only
the crutch is left, mute witness to his hapless lot.

He is gone; there was so little to bind him to life that he made
not even a moment's struggle against the allurement of the "long,
sweet sleep." Then, for the first time, the depth of the egoism
which had created and conditioned his little life bursts upon his
parents' horror-stricken gaze. Like accomplices in crime, they turn
upon and accuse each other--"sorrow makes them wicked and hateful."
Allmers, as the one whose eyes were already half opened, is the
first to carry war into the enemy's country; but Rita is not slow
to retort, and presently they both have to admit that their