Page:The Chinese Boy and Girl.djvu/17

Rh "Ha, you know those children's songs, do you?"

"Yes, do you know any?"

"Lots of them," he answered.

"Lots of them" is a favorite expression with the Chinese.

"Tell me some."

"Did you ever hear this one?"

I at once dismounted and wrote it down, and promised him five hundred cash apiece for every new one he could give me. In this way, going to and from the city, in 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