A street seller's cry turned nursery rhyme, urging passers-by to buy a farthing's worth of buttons. Its short, repeating lines make it easy for little voices to join in on.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Buttons, a farthing a pair!
Come, who will buy them of me?
They're round and sound and pretty,
And fit for girls of the city.
Come, who will buy them of me?
Buttons, a farthing a pair!
About this rhyme
Text confirms the refrain 'Buttons, a farthing a pair! Come, who will buy them of me?' matches a hawker's-cry structure. · Street-cry rhymes are a recognised genre in nursery-rhyme scholarship; no specific unverifiable origin is claimed here, just the genre.
This one borrows the voice of a street seller, the sing-song cry of someone hawking buttons from a tray. Rhymes like it grew out of real market cries, dressed up here for chanting rather than shopping.
Call it out the way a hawker would: loud, and rising on 'buy them of me'.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition