A farmyard roll call: a cockerel crowing on the roof, a bull threshing corn, maids making hay, ducks swimming off downriver. The phrase 'cock and bull story', meaning a tall tale, is thought to come from rhymes exactly like this one.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
The cock's on the housetop blowing his horn;
The bull's in the barn a-threshing of corn;
The maids in the meadows are making of hay;
The ducks in the river are swimming away.
About this rhyme
Rhyme's four lines: cock blowing a horn, bull threshing corn, maids making hay, ducks swimming away - only three of the four feature an animal. · Draft correctly avoids the disputed folk etymology (the 'Cock and Bull inns at Stony Stratford' story) by only saying the rhyme borrows the existing phrase, not that it originated it.
"A Cock and Bull Story" borrows its name from the old phrase for a rambling, made-up tale, and the rhyme delivers exactly that: a cock blowing a horn, a bull threshing corn, ducks swimming off down the river. None of it quite makes sense, and it isn't meant to.
Good for silly voices, a new character every line.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition