k;
And when your back begins to smart,
It's like a penknife in your heart;
And when your heart begins to bleed,
You're dead, and dead, and dead, indeed.

139

The first stanza of this jingle was long
attributed to Longfellow as an impromptu made
on one of his children. He took occasion to
deny this, as well as the authorship of the
almost equally famous "Mr. Finney had a
turnip." The last two stanzas bear evidence of
a more sophisticated origin than that of real
nursery rhymes. Mr. Lucas, in his _Book of
Verses for Children_, gives two different
versions of these stanzas.

JEMIMA

There was a little girl, and she had a little curl,
Right down the middle of her forehead,
When she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad, she was horrid.

One day she went upstairs, while her parents, unawares,
In the kitchen down below were occupied with meals,
And she stood upon her head, on her little truckle-bed,
And she then began hurraying with her heels.

Her mother heard the noise, and thought it was the boys,
A playing at a combat in the attic,
But when she climbed the stair and saw Jemima there,
She took and she did whip her most emphatic!

140

The following was one of the favorite
"toy-book" texts of the eighteenth century.
These little books generally had a crude
woodcut and one stanza of text on a page. It
can be seen how easily this story lends itself
to illustration. Each stanza is a chapter, and
the story-teller could continue as long as his
inventiveness held out. In one edition there
are these additional lines:

"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 a-skipping."

MOTHER HUBBARD AND HER DOG

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard,
To get her poor dog a bone;
But when she came there,
The cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.

She went to the baker's
To buy him some bread;
But when she came back,
The poor dog was dead.

She went t