Chapter LXXVIII: Puddock, Mousie, and Ratton

_Source._--Kirkpatrick Sharpe's _Ballad Book_, 1824, slightly anglicised.

_Parallels._--Mr. Bullen, in his _Lyrics from Elizabethan Song Books_, p. 202, gives a version, "The Marriage of the Frog and the Mouse," from T. Ravenscroft's _Melismata_, 1611. The nursery rhyme of the frog who would a-wooing go is clearly a variant of this, and has thus a sure pedigree of three hundred years; _cf._ "Frog husband" in my List of Incidents, or notes to "The Well of the World's End" (No. xli.).