Can You Solve This Old-Timey Riddle? #7

Gammer Gurton’s Garland was the title of a landmark collection of nursery rhymes first published in England in the early 1780s. Compiled by an English antiquary named Joseph Ritson, the book gives us the earliest known records of many favorite childhood rhymes, including “Goosey, Goosey Gander” and “There was an Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe.” Early versions of the likes of “Jack and Jill went up the Hill,” “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” and “Hey Diddle Diddle” were also included.

In the early 1800s, however, a new edition of Gammer Gurton was published; appended to it was a series of puzzles called Toby Tickle’s Collection of Riddles, said to have been written by a “Peter Puzzlecap, Esq.” Whether these riddles were Ritson’s work too is unclear, but whoever Peter Puzzlecap might have been, he was nevertheless responsible for setting the rhyming riddle below. Can you figure it out?

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