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 entertainment of the child.
A second difficulty in making such a collection is that of getting unobjectionable rhymes. While the Chinese classics are among the purest classical books of the world, there is yet a large proportion of the people who sully everything they take into their hands as well as every thought they take into their minds. Thus so many of their rhymes have suffered. Some have an undertone of reviling. Some speak familiarly of subjects which we are not accustomed to mention, and others are impure in the extreme.
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