For baby to eat."

I at once dismounted and wrote it down, and promised him five hundred
cash apiece for every new one he could give me. In this way, going to
and from the city, in conversation with old nurses or servants,
personal friends, teachers, parents or children, or foreign children
who had been born in China and had learned rhymes from their nurses, I
continued to gather them during the entire vacation, and when autumn
came I had more than fifty of the most common and consequently the best
rhymes known in and about Peking.

A few months after I returned to the city a circular was sent around
asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese Folklore, published by
Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the Italian legation, which, on
examination, proved to be exactly what I wanted. He had collected about
two hundred and fifty rhymes, had made a literal--not
metrical--translation and had issued them in book form without
expurgation.

Others learned of my collection, and rhymes began to come to me from
all parts of the empire. Dr. Arthur H. Smith, the well-known author of
"Chinese Characteristics" gave me a collection of more than three
hundred made in Shantung, among which were rhymes similar to those we
had found in Peking. Still later I received other versions of these
same rhymes from my little friend, Miss Chalfant, collected in a
different part of Shantung from that occupied by Dr. Smith. I then had
no fewer than five versions of

"This little pig went to market,"

each having some local coloring not found in the other, proving that
the fingers and toes furnish children with the same entertainment in
the Orient as in the Occident, and that the rhyme is widely known
throughout China.

These nursery rhymes have never been printed in the Chinese language,
but like our own Mother Goose before the year 1719, if we may credit
the Boston story, they are carried in the minds and hearts of the
children. Here arose the first difficulty we experienced in collecting
rhymes--the matter of getting them complete. Few are able to repeat the
whole of the

"House that Jack built"

although it has been printed many times and they learned it all in
their youth. The difficulty is multiplied tenfold in China where the
rhymes have never been printed, and where there have grown up various
versions from one original which the nurse had, no doubt, partly
forgotten, but was compelled to complete for the entert