Y BOYS
GAMES PLAYED BY GIRLS
THE TOYS CHILDREN PLAY WITH
BLOCK GAMES--KINDERGARTEN
CHILDREN'S SHOWS AND ENTERTAINMENTS
JUVENILE JUGGLING
STORIES TOLD TO CHILDREN

THE NURSERY AND ITS RHYMES

It is a mistake to suppose that any one nation or people has exclusive
right to Mother Goose. She is an omnipresent old lady. She is Asiatic
as well as European or American. Wherever there are mothers,
grandmothers, and nurses there are Mother Gooses,--or; shall we say,
Mother Geese--for I am at a loss as to how to pluralize this old dame.
She is in India, whence I have rhymes from her, of which the following
is a sample:

Heh, my baby! Ho, my baby!
See the wild, ripe plum,
And if you'd like to eat a few,
I'll buy my baby some.

She is in Japan. She has taught the children there to put their fingers
together as we do for "This is the church, this is the steeple," when
she says:

A bamboo road,
With a floor-mat siding,
Children are quarrelling,
And parents chiding,

the "children" being represented by the fingers and the "parents" by
the thumbs. She is in China. I have more than 600 rhymes from her
Chinese collection. Let me tell you how I got them.

One hot day during my summer vacation, while sitting on the veranda of
a house among the hills, fifteen miles west of Peking, my friend, Mrs.
C. H. Fenn, said to me:

"Have you noticed those rhymes, Mr. Headland?"

"What rhymes?" I inquired.

"The rhymes Mrs. Yin is repeating to Henry."

"No, I have not noticed them. Ask her to repeat that one again."

Mrs. Fenn did so, and the old nurse repeated the following rhyme, very
much in the tone of, "The goblins 'll git you if you don't look out."

He climbed up the candlestick,
The little mousey brown,
To steal and eat tallow,
And he couldn't get down.
He called for his grandma,
But his grandma was in town,
So he doubled up into a wheel,
And rolled himself down.

I asked the nurse to repeat it again, more slowly, and I wrote it down
together with the translation.

Now, I think it must be admitted that there is more in this rhyme to
commend it to the public than there is in "Jack and Jill." If when that
remarkable young couple went for the pail of water, Master Jack had
carried it himself, he would have been entitled to some credit for
gallantry, or if in cracking his crown he had fallen so as to preven