GAMES AND PASTIMES
The plays of children are nonsense—but very educative nonsense.
—Essay on Experience. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860.
There are no more striking survivals of antiquity than the games and pastimes of children. We have no historians of old-time child life to tell us of these games, but we can get side glimpses of that life which reveal to us, as Ruskin says, more light than a broad stare. Many of these games were originally religious observances; but there are scores that in their present purpose of simple amusement date from mediæval days.
The chronicler Froissart, in L'Espinette Amoureuse, tells of the sports of his early life, over five centuries ago:—
"In that early childish day
I was never tired to play
Games that children everyone
Love until twelve years are done.
To dam up a rivulet
With a tile, or else to let
A small saucer for a boat
Down the purling gutter float:
Over two bricks at a will
To erect a water mill.
"In those days for dice and chess
Cared we busy children less
Than mud-pies and buns to make,
And heedfully in oven bake.
Of four bricks; and when came Lent
Out was brought a complement
Of river shells from secret hold,
Estimated above gold,
To play away as I thought meet
With the children of our street."
"The children of our street" has a delightfully familiar ring. He also names many familiar games, such as playing ball, ring, prisoner's base, riddles, and blowing soap-bubbles. Top-spinning was an ancient game, even in Froissart's day, having been played in old Rome and the Orient since time immemorial.
It is interesting to note the persistent survival of games which are seldom learned from printed rules, but are simply told from child to child from year to year. On the sidewalk, in front of my house, is now marked out with chalk the lines for a game of hop-scotch and a group of children are playing it, precisely as I played it in my New England home in my childhood, and as my grandfathers and grandmothers played "Scotch-hoppers" in their day.
In a little century-old picture book, called Youthful Recreations, Scotch-hoppers is named and vaguely explained, and a note says:—
"This exercise was frequently practiced by the Greeks and Spartan women. Might it not be useful in the present day to prevent children having chilblains?"