It wasn’t the rats that caught my imagination when I first heard the tale as a child. It wasn’t all the lost children. It wasn’t the man in the pied coat that haunted me.
It was the pipe.
And when I met James so many, many years later and we happened upon a discussion of the old folk tale, starting with all of the historical basis for the legend, we stopped for a moment, laughed, and then he said the words that echoed my own thoughts.
It wasn’t the rats that caught his imagination when he first heard the tale as a child. It wasn’t all the lost children. It wasn’t the man in the pied coat that haunted him.
It was the pipe.
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