The dame made a curtsey, the dog made a bow,
The dame said, "Your servant," the dog said "Bow-wow."
But some editions have an additional rhyme on the dame's going for fish; and the edition at South Kensington has the verse:—
[Pg 41] Old Mother Hubbard sat down in a chair,
And danced her dog to a delicate air;
She went to the garden to buy him a pippin,
When she came back the dog was skipping.
In the edition of Rusher, instead of "the dog made a bow," we read "Prin and Puss made a bow."
In Halliwell's estimation the tale of Mother Hubbard and her dog is of some antiquity, "were we merely to judge," he says, "of the rhyme of laughing to coffin in the third verse."
She went to the undertaker's to buy him a coffin,
When she came back the poor dog was laughing.
But it seems possible also that the author of the poem had running in his mind a verse containing this rhyme, which occurs already in the Infant Institutes of 1797, where it stands as follows:—
There was a little old woman and she liv'd in a shoe,
She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.
She crumm'd 'em some porridge without any bread
And she borrow'd a beetle, and she knock'd 'em all o' th' head.
Then out went the old woman to bespeak 'em a coffin
And when she came back she found 'em all a-loffing.
This piece contains curious mythological allusions, as we shall see later.
It may be added that the nursery collection of 1810 (p. 37) contains the first verse only of Mother Hubbard, which favours the view expressed by Halliwell, that the compiler of the famous book did not invent the subject nor the metre of his piece, but wrote additional verses to an older story.