Thank you one and all for solving a mystery for me. My mother told me this limerick in 1957 when I was in junior high school, and even said it slowly enough for me to write down the whole thing. It was something she had read when she was a child and had committed it to memory. The version she gave me was from the 1927 book. Over the years I lost the handwritten copy but remembered bits and pieces. I tried searching the internet by authors and thought it sounded like something Ogden Nash or James Thurber would have writen, but could never find it. My granddaughter, who knows the computer much better than I do, found this site for me. My mom always called it The Runt, not Piddlin Pete, but everything else is the same line for line. Thank you to every one who added to this site and kept it going all these years so my granddaughter could find it for me. A 50 year old mystery is solved.