Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 06 (1929-06).djvu/61

understand, I think, what that strange mental aberration called "spider fear" is like. . . .

For I saw that thing which ran along the floor of the Grand Hotel ballroom like a maimed spider—I saw it go under that conch-shell. And it did not come out as it went in. . . .

The Mouse Legend

AS YOU journey along the Rhine near Bingen, you are shown what is called the Mouse Tower on a rocky islet in the river, and are told its legend. Hatto II, a mediæval prelate who became Archbishop of Mainz in 968, was said once to have ordered the burning of a barn in which a number of poor people were confined for stealing grain during a famine. As the barn burned, he humorously likened their cries to the squeaking of mice. Thereafter he began to be tormented by a plague of mice, which finally overran his whole palace. To escape them, he built this tower on the island and fled there for refuge; but the mice appeared there and multiplied, growing bolder, until they fell upon him, killed him and picked his bones.

This is one of those legends found in slightly varying form in many places, all being told for the truth and believed. The story of Popiel, King of Poland, is similar. Some of his subjects complained of his acts; he summoned the leading murmurers to his palace, poisoned them and had them flung into a lake. He then gave a jubilatory banquet; but during the feast, myriads of mice issued from the bodies of the slain men, and rushing to the palace, attacked the king and his family. Popiel took refuge within a circle of fire, but the mice broke through it; he then fled to an island castle, but they followed, killed and ate him.

Another story is of the Freiherr von Guttingen, of Switzerland, who, during a famine, shut his poorer tenants up in a barn and burned them, comparing their shrieks to the cries of mice. When the avenging mice came down upon him, he fled to his castle in the Lake of Constance, but they swam after him and devoured him. The castle then sank into the lake, where it may still be seen if the water is sufficiently clear and unruffled.

The Worthsee, in Bavaria, is also called the Mouse Lake. A count of Seefeld, who was punished here, starved his famishing poor in a dungeon. When the mice followed him to his island castle, he had his bed suspended by chains from the ceiling, but they swarmed down the chains and devoured him alive.

There are several other such legends. Sometimes the avenging animals are toads in the story instead of rats and mice.