A repeating chase rhyme about a thief called Taffy who keeps raiding the narrator's larder, ending with a bone thrown at his head. One of the oldest and most reprinted nursery rhymes, though its Welsh-thief joke has not aged well.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief,
Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of beef;
I went to Taffy's house, Taffy was not home;
Taffy came to my house and stole a marrow-bone.
I went to Taffy's house, Taffy was not in;
Taffy came to my house and stole a silver pin;
I went to Taffy's house, Taffy was in bed,
I took up the marrow-bone and flung it at his head.
About this rhyme
A very old tease rhyme, built round the nickname Taffy for a Welshman, and it repeats and escalates: something stolen, a chase to his house, something else stolen. It's the pattern that carries it more than any real story, each verse doubling back on the last. Good for building up pace as it goes.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition