Nicholas Garland writes: "There are many snatches of songs and lines of poetry which lodge in your memory, and that you find running through your head when you're not thinking of anything much. They are companionable, like old friends. I don't remember how I learned a couple of the verses included here; probably I picked them up at school. A year or so ago, I looked them up on the internet and found that they, and two other verses like them, had been included in "The Poet's Tongue", an anthology edited by W.H. Auden and John Garrett. They were not exactly as I remembered them, but perhaps, like folk songs, they never have existed in a fixed version. Auden and Garrett do not say anything about their origin, but at the end of the four verses add the words "and so ad infinitum ..." I wrote down and illustrated the two I remembered, and began inventing the rest."