class="c8">My Pretty Maid,

127   Can ye Sew Cushions? 127   Hush-a-ba Birdie, Croon, 129   Dance to your Daddie, 129   Katie Beardie, 132   The Miller's Dochter, 133   Hap and Row, 133   How Dan, Dilly Dow, 134   Crowdie, 135   Whistle, whistle, Auld Wife, 136   The Three Little Pigs, 137   Cowe the Nettle early, 138   The Wren's Nest, 140   Robin Redbreast's Testament, 141 Children's Humour and Quaint Sayings, 143 Schoolroom Facts and Fancies, 163 Children's Stories, 182   Blue Beard, 184   Jack and the Bean-Stalk, 191   The Babes in the Wood, 205   Jack the Giant Killer, 210   Little Red Riding Hood, 229   Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper, 233   Puss in Boots, 243   Whittington and his Cat, 249   Beauty and the Beast, 259   The Sleeping Beauty, 274

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RHYMES OF THE NURSERY.

Writing on the subject of nursery rhymes more than half a century ago, the late Dr. Robert Chambers expressed regret because, as he said, "Nothing had of late been revolutionised so much as the nursery." But harking back on the period of his own childhood, he was able to say, with a feeling of satisfaction, that the young mind was then "cradled amidst the simplicities of the uninstructed intellect; and she was held to be the best nurse who had the most copious supply of song, and tale, and drollery, at all times ready to soothe and amuse her young charges. There were, it is true, some disadvantages in the system; for sometimes superstitious terrors were implanted, and little pains were taken to distinguish between what tended to foster the evil and what tended to elicit the better feelings of infantile nature. Yet the ideas which presided over the scene," he continues, "and rung through it all the day in light gabble and jocund song, were simple, often beautiful ideas, generally well expressed, and unquestionably suitable to the capacities of children.... There was no philosophy about these gentle dames; but there was generally endless kindness, and a wonderful power of keeping their little flock in good humour. It never occurred to them that children were anything but children—'Bairns are just bairns,' my old nurse would say—and they never once thought of beginning to make them men and women while still little more