Page 18 - Green Butterfly 1

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But years and years afterward, when the fat old rat who swam across the river was a grandfather, his children used to ask him, “What made you follow the music, Grandfather?” and he used to tell them, “My dears, when I heard that tune I thought I heard the moving aside of pickle-tub boards, and the leaving ajar of preserve cupboards, and I smelled the most delicious old cheese in the world, and I saw sugar barrels ahead of me; and then, just as a great yellow cheese seemed to be saying, ‘Come, bore me’—I felt the river rolling o’er me!”
And in the same way the people asked the little lame child, “What made you follow the music?” “I do not know what the others heard,” he said, “but I, when the Piper began to play, I heard a voice that told of a wonderful country hard by, where the bees had no stings and the horses had wings, and the trees bore wonderful fruits, where no one was tired
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That was all the people ever knew. The children never came back. All that was left of the Piper and the rats was just the big street that led to the river, so they called it the Street of the Pied Piper.
or lame, and children played all day; and just as the beautiful country was but one step away—the mountain closed on my playmates, and I was left alone.”
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