While I eat poor,
And cry for my mother,
Whom I'll see no more.

Such a rhyme cannot but develop the pathetic and sympathetic instincts
of the child, making it more kind and gentle to those in distress.

A girl in one of the rhymes urged by instinct and desire to chase a
butterfly, gives up the idea of catching it, presumably out of a
feeling of sympathy for the insect.

Unfortunately all their rhymes do not have this same high moral tone.
They indicate a total lack of respect for the Buddhist priests. This is
not necessarily against the rhyme any more than against the priest, but
it is an unfortunate disposition to cultivate in children. There are
constant sallies at the shaved noddle of the priest. They speak of his
head as a gourd, and they class him with the tiger as a beast of prey.

Some of the rhymes illustrate the disposition of the Chinese to
nickname every one, from the highest official in the empire to the
meanest beggar on the street. One of the great men of the present
dynasty, a prime minister and intimate friend of the emperor, goes by
the name of Humpbacked Liu. Another may be Cross-eyed Wang, another
Club-footed Chang, another Bald-headed Li. Any physical deformity or
mental peculiarity may give him his nickname. Even foreigners suffer in
reputation from this national bad habit.

A man whose face is covered with pockmarks is ridiculed by children in
the following rhyme, which is only a sample of what might be produced
on a score of other subjects:

Old pockmarked Ma,
He climbed up a tree,
A dog barked at him,
And a man caught his knee,
Which scared old Poxey
Until he couldn't see.

A well-known characteristic of the Chinese is to do things opposite to
the way in which we do them. We accuse them of doing things backwards,
but it is we who deserve such blame because they antedated us in the
doing of them. We shake each other's hands, they each shake their own
hands. We take off our hats as a mark of respect, they keep theirs on.
We wear black for mourning, they wear white. We wear our vests inside,
they wear theirs outside. A hundred other things more or less familiar
to us all, illustrate this rule. In some of their nursery rhymes
everything is said and done on the "cart before the horse" plan. This
is illustrated by a rhyme in which when the speaker heard a disturbance
outside his door he discovered it was because a "dog had been bitte