A great, big brother,
And a little brother, too,
A big bell tower,
And a temple and a show,
And little baby wee, wee,
Always wants to go.
The following rhyme explains itself: The nurse knocks on the forehead, then touches the eye, nose, ear, mouth and chin successively, as she repeats:
Knock at the door,
See a face,
Smell an odor,
Hear a voice,
Eat your dinner,
Pull your chin, or
Ke chih, ke chih.
Tickling the child's neck with the last two expressions.
We have in English a rhyme:
If you be a gentleman,
As I suppose you be,
You'll neither laugh nor smile
With a tickling of your knee.
I had tried many months to find if there were any finger, face or body games other than those already given. Our own nurse insisted that she knew of none, but one day I noticed her grabbing my little girl's knee, while she was saying:
One grab silver,
Two grabs gold,
Three don't laugh,
And you'll grow old.
There is no literature in China, not even in the sacred books, which is so generally known as their nursery rhymes. These are understood and repeated by the educated and the illiterate alike; by the children of princes and the children of beggars; children in the city and children in the country and villages, and they produce like results in the minds and hearts of all. The little folks laugh over the Cow, look sober over the Little Orphan, absorb the morals taught by the Mouse, and are sung to sleep by the song of the Little Snail.
Sometimes however they, like children in other lands, are skeptical as to the reality of the stories told in the songs. Thus I remember once hearing our old nurse telling a number of stories and singing a number of songs to the little folk in the nursery. They had accepted one after another the legends as they rolled off the old woman's tongue, without question, but pretty soon she gave them a version of a Wind Song which aroused their incredulity. She sang: