"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.

A second difficulty in making such a collection is that of
getting unobjectionable rhymes. While the Chinese classics
are among the purest classical books of the world, there
is yet a large proportion of the people who sully everything
they take into their hands as well as every thought they take
into their minds. Thus so many of their rhymes have suffered.

Some have an undertone of reviling. Some speak
familiarly of subjects which we are not accustomed to
mention, and others are impure in the extreme.

A third difficulty in making a collection of Chinese nursery
lore is greater than either the first or the second,--I refer to
the difficulty of a metrical rendition of the rhymes. I have
no doubt my readers can easily find flaws in my translations
of Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes published during the past
year. It is much easier for me to find the flaws than the
remedies. Many of the words used in the original have no
written character or hieroglyphic to represent them, while