In my father’s garden stands a _tree_; (The year). Upon it twelve fine _branches_ see. (The months). Thirty _birds_ on every bough; (The days). _Eggs_ enough for each I trow— (The hours). Four-and-twenty in each nest. Hurry up and guess the rest. Little stammerers and lispers had their tongues exercised in difficult sound combinations, like our “Three grey geese in a green field grazing.” This one is very old, though I give it in a modern form: “Meiner Mutter Magd macht mir mein Mus mit meiner Mutter Mehl.” The ceremony of “being put to bed” was not very different in mediæval nurseries from what it is to-day. Mediæval children, like their modern counterparts, probably got cross with sleep, and were naughty, and _would not_ say their prayers or go to bed. And mediæval nurses had to threaten them with the “Wolf,” or the “Man,” the great bogies of the period; and, when they had captured their small refractory charges, they had to coax them into good humour again with rhymes about their little bare toes, or their ten small fingers, like our “this is the one that went to the market.” One comes across these rhymes in grave books of German erudition with the oddest effect. Before the child went to sleep, of course, he or she had his or her prayers to say. Even the smallest child had to repeat the “Our Father” and the “Apostles’ Creed.” The “Hail Mary” was learned later. The great preacher, Berthold von Regensburg, says that, if a child of seven can say the Ave Maria, as well as the Pater Noster, and the Credo, “daz ist vil wunderguot,” “better than good,” as we say in Anglo-Irish. Mediæval children commissioned a bigger troup of angels “to guard their bed” than ours do, who are content with a protector for each corner:—“There are four corners on my bed.” Elizabeth claimed twelve angels when she “laid her down to sleep”: “Two at my head, two by my sides, two at my feet, two to cover me, two to waken me, two to show me the way to the Heavenly Kingdom.” And, if the mediæval child awoke in the night, there was always the night-lamp burning before the Crucifix, or the picture of the dear Mother, just as it burns in so many Catholic homes to-night!