"IsaacTaylorHeadland-TheChineseBoyAndGirl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Headland Isaac Taylor)

conversation with old nurses or servants, personal friends,
teachers, parents or children, or foreign children who had
been born in China and had learned rhymes from their
nurses, I continued to gather them during the entire
vacation, and when autumn came I had more than fifty of the
most common and consequently the best rhymes known
in and about Peking.

A few months after I returned to the city a circular was
sent around asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese
Folklore, published by Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the
Italian legation, which, on examination, proved to be exactly
what I wanted. He had collected about two hundred and
fifty rhymes, had made a literal--not metrical--translation
and had issued them in book form without expurgation.

Others learned of my collection, and rhymes began to come
to me from all parts of the empire. Dr. Arthur H. Smith,
the well-known author of "Chinese Characteristics" gave
me a collection of more than three hundred made in Shantung,
among which were rhymes similar to those we had
found in Peking. Still later I received other versions of these
same rhymes from my little friend, Miss Chalfant, collected
in a different part of Shantung from that occupied by Dr.
Smith. I then had no fewer than five versions of

"This little pig went to market,"

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.