s. For the preservation of many folk
tales that we have, English-speaking peoples
are indebted to the scholarly antiquarian James
Orchard Halliwell (afterwards
Halliwell-Phillips, 1820-1889), who in the year
1842 edited a collection of _The Nursery Rhymes
of England_ for the Percy Society. He followed
it a few years later with _Popular Rhymes and
Nursery Tales_. They have long been regarded as
the basic books in their field. These two
collections were reprinted as _Nursery Rhymes
and Tales_. This one-volume edition is the one
referred to in the following pages. Halliwell
should be remembered as the first person to
collect in a scientific way the folk literature
of England. He gathered these rhymes and tales
from the mouths of the folk, from chapbooks,
and from many other sources and endeavored to
tell them as they had been told by the folk.

"The Old Woman and Her Pig" is perhaps the most
familiar of all nursery stories. It belongs to
the type of story known as the "accumulative,"
of which "The House That Jack Built" is the
purest model. In such a story there is a
constant repetition of the plot, with an
addition or slight change at each repetition,
until at the end there is a quick unwinding
which carries us back to the initial situation
and solves the difficulty with which the story
started. Halliwell gives two versions of this
particular story. It is so widespread that many
slight variations would be expected in
successful retellings of it. The traditional
version which follows seems to be the favorite
with primary teachers. It introduces at the
sixth stage the attractive rhyme "I see by the
moonlight, etc.," which originally formed part
of another nursery tale.

THE OLD WOMAN AND HER PIG

Once upon a time, an old woman was sweeping her little house, when, to
her great joy, she found a silver sixpence.

"What," said she, "shall I do with this little sixpence? I think I will
go to market and buy a pig." So the next day, she went to market, and
bought a nice little white pig. She tied a string to one of the pig's
legs, and began to drive him home.

On the way, the old woman and her pig came to a stile, and she sai