A poor man with nothing worth stealing outwits the robbers who come for him anyway, slipping down the far side of the chimney and running for his life. It is tenser than the average nursery rhyme, though the man gets clean away.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
There was a man and he had naught,
And robbers came to rob him;
He crept up to the chimney pot,
And then they thought they had him.
But he got down on t'other side,
And then they could not find him;
He ran fourteen miles in fifteen days,
And never looked behind him.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition