ook called "The Water-Babies."

Concerning the Frog that lived in a well, and how he married a King's
daughter and was changed into a beautiful Prince, there is a fairy tale
which an industrious child ought to read. The frog in the rhyme is not
nearly so lucky.

After these rhymes there come a number of riddles, of which the answers
are given. Then there are charms, which people used to think would help
in butter-making or would cure diseases. It is not generally thought now
that they are of much use, but there can be no harm in trying. Nobody
will be burned now for saying these charms, like the poor old witches
long ago. The Queen Anne mentioned on page 172 was the sister of the
other Princess who married the Prince of Orange, and she was Charley's
aunt. She had seventeen children, and only one lived to be as old as ten
years. He was a nice boy, and had a regiment of boy-soldiers.

"Hickory Dickory Dock" is a rhyme for counting out a lot of children.
The child on whom the last word falls has to run after the others in the
game of "Tig" or "Chevy." There is another of the same kind:--

"Onery
Twoery
Tickery
Tin
Alamacrack
Tenamalin
Pin
Pan
Musky Dan
Tweedleum
Twiddleum
Twenty-one
Black fish
White trout
Eery, Ory
You are out."

Most of the rhymes in this part of the book are sung in games and dances
by children, and are very pretty to see and hear. They are very old,
too, and in an old book of travels in England by a Danish gentleman, he
gives one which he heard sung by children when Charles II. was king.
They still sing it in the North of Scotland.

In this collection there are nonsense songs to sing to babies to make
them fall asleep.

Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, on page 207, were two young ladies in Scotland
long ago. The plague came to Perth, where they lived, so they built a
bower in a wood, far off the town. But their lovers came to see them in
the bower, and brought the infection of the plague, and they both died.
There is a little churchyard and a ruined church in Scotland, where the
people who died of the plague, more than two hundred years ago, were
buried, and we used to believe that if the ground was stirred, the
plague would fly out again, like a yellow cloud, and kill everybody.

There is a French rhyme like "Blue-Eye