b. Humpty Dumpty (page 55). This is really a riddle of the old-fashioned kind. There are many of them in English folk lore. Usually a verse was repeated and then a question asked; as, “Who was Humpty Dumpty?” The artist has answered the question for us in the picture. Possibly many people who learned the rhyme in childhood never thought of Humpty as an egg.
What answer would you give to the question, Who was Taffy (page 54)? For similar riddles, see Nancy Netticoat (Vol. I, p. 72), The Andiron (page 245) and St. Ives (page 202).
II. Some were intended to teach certain facts. For instance:
a. When children were taught the alphabet as the first step to reading, The Apple Pie (page 43) gave the letters in their order, including the obsolete “Ampersand.”
b. As children grew a little older and could begin to read what they already knew, things in which the same words were many times repeated were helpful. Two examples are The House that Jack Built (page 56) and There Is the Key of the Kingdom (page 45).
c. The numbers from one to twenty were taught by One, Two (page 41).
d. The days of the week were taught by Solomon Grundy (page 42), which with its amusing provision for repetition is sure to catch the fancy of a child and keep his thoughts on the words.
III. Some of them teach kindness to animals:
a. Dapple Gray (page 22).
b. Ladybird (page 12). This is sometimes known as ladybug, and the bug is the little, round, reddish beetle whose wings are black dotted. It is a pretty, harmless beetle that gardeners like to see around their plants. Children repeat the rhyme when they find the beetle in the house and always release it to “fly away and save its children.”