A counting rhyme built entirely around fingers and toes, twenty of each between hands and feet. Works best said while actually counting along on a child's own hands.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Every lady in this land
Has twenty nails, upon each hand
Five, and twenty on hands and feet:
All this is true, without deceit.
About this rhyme
Traditional
This is a catch, not a story. Read straight through, it seems to say every lady has twenty nails on each hand, which is the joke. The trick is where you stop. Put the pauses in the right places and it comes right: twenty nails in all, five on each hand, and twenty counting hands and feet together. It is an old riddle dressed to fool a careless reader, and it sits in the Mother Goose books unsigned.
Save this for a child old enough to count and to enjoy being tricked. Read it once at speed, wrong, and wait for the objection. Then work it out together, counting real nails on fingers and toes until the numbers behave. It suits a child who likes a puzzle more than a picture. A quiet way into a little counting.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition