Di told me about it at bedtime, the way children hand you things they have not quite finished with.
They had been down in the valley that evening, all of them and the manse children, talking about stories, and someone had brought up the Pied Piper. And Walter — Walter was eleven — had said that one day the Piper would come down the valley, playing, and he would have to follow him. Down to the shore, and away. Jem would want to go, he said; it would be an adventure. He himself would not want to. But the music would keep calling until he had to. And the girls would stay behind and wait.
Di thought it was a splendid idea and wanted to go too. Walter told her no, she would stay.
I kissed her, and said that Walter had a poet’s imagination, and put out the lamp, and forgot it.
I have remembered it since, more often than I can say. I set it down here because it belongs here, in the years when it was only a story a boy told on a summer evening — and not later, where it would belong too.