(The months).
Thirty birds on every bough;
(The days).
Eggs enough for each I trow—
(The hours).
Four-and-twenty in each nest.
Hurry up and guess the rest.
Little stammerers and lispers had their tongues exercised in difficult sound combinations, like our “Three grey geese in a green field grazing.” This one is very old, though I give it in a modern form: “Meiner Mutter Magd macht mir mein Mus mit meiner Mutter Mehl.”
The ceremony of “being put to bed” was not very different in mediæval nurseries from what it is to-day. Mediæval children, like their modern counterparts, probably got cross with sleep, and were naughty, and would not say their prayers or go to bed. And mediæval nurses had to threaten them with the “Wolf,” or the “Man,” the great bogies of the period; and, when they had captured their small refractory charges, they had to coax them into good humour again with rhymes about their little bare toes, or their ten small fingers, like our “this is the one that went to the market.” One comes across these rhymes in grave books of German erudition with the oddest effect.