One question to ask. "Why didn't Beto get to mark the happy guess true?" A good answer says: a guess is not the record. You can like one best, and still write "nobody knows".

One thing to do at the table. Take a story your family tells and pull it into two piles, the way Beto takes apart his bell: the old piece, and the parts that were added later. Which pile has the lesson in it?

Make a two-column page. In ink, list what the oldest account of a legend says. In pencil, list what later tellings added. For Hamelin, the pencil column is long.

The grown-up layer. The oldest written account, the Lüneburg manuscript of about 1440 to 1450, has a well-dressed stranger who crossed the bridges in 1284 and 130 children who followed his pipe and were lost. There are no rats and no unpaid bill; those first appear around 1559, in the Zimmern chronicle. A church window of about 1300, destroyed in 1660, is known only from descriptions, and a 1384 line in the town records ("a hundred years since our children left") is known from later writers. What happened to the children is not agreed. This book leaves the sad part in, gently, because the town did.