Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 4).djvu/201

 Here is rather an earlier picture, from a book of nursery rhymes. The legend runs

Which probably contains a great deal of reason, since there is so little rhyme. It is a beautiful apple tree, and it would seem very wrong to disturb all those symmetrical apples, growing so regularly in order, each in its proper place. However, the grave young gentlemen in tail-coats and kneebreeches are careful to preserve the general regularity of the scene by shaking off all the apples uniformly with the stalks upward.

This picture, of a not very well fed gentleman riding a not very well fed horse past a sign-post with nothing on it, appears over the famous couplet

We print it here chiefly as throwing some light upon the interesting question as to exactly what species of animal a "cock-horse" is. It may be as well to mention that in the first of the Tom Thumb pictures, already referred to, the quadruped there depicted is by many supposed to be a hen cow.

The two little boys, who are represented in another book as playing shuttlecock near a precipice and a flower-pot, are delightful specimens of the sort of boy familiar in the pages of old goody-goody books, with frilled collars, and puffy trousers buttoned on to very short jackets. They haven't a great deal of room for their game, what with the precipice and the flower-pot, and a bee-hive, about the size of a decent cottage, close against one player's back. That boy is really in a dangerous position. It would be so easy accidentally to hit the hive, whereupon there would probably ensue a sally of infuriated bees about the size of pigeons (judging from the hive), who would set upon, murder, sting and devour boys, battledores, flower-pot, precipice and all.

From another of grandfather's picture-books comes a series of spirited pictures setting forth certain awful examples of children who meddled with fire. There is a sameness about these instructive catastrophes, as well as a certain want of preliminary detail. Boy with frilled collar and his trousers on fire throws up his arms before fireplace and shouts. Little girl with dress on fire throws up her arms in front of fireplace and shouts. Another little girl with ditto ditto, does