Now isn't that stupid? Every one knows hop-scotch time is not in the winter when the ground is rough and frozen or wet with snow and when chilblains are rife. It is a game for the hard, solid earth, or a sunny pavement.
The variants of tag have descended to us and are played to-day, just as they were played when Boston and New York streets were lanes and cowpaths. The pretty game, "I catch you without green," mentioned by Rabelais, is well known in the Carolinas, whither it was carried by French Huguenot immigrants, who retained many of their home customs as well as their language for so long a time. Stone-tag and wood-tag took the place in America of the tag on iron of Elizabeth's day. Squat-tag and cross-tag have their times and seasons, and in Philadelphia tell-tag is also played. Pickadill is a winter sport, a tag played in the snow. Another tag game known as poison, or stone-poison, is where the player is tagged if he steps off stones. The little books on etiquette so frequently read in the seventeenth century, and quoted in other pages of this book, have this severe injunction, "Tread not pomposely on pebblestones for it is the art of a fool." A man who was not a fool, one Dr. Samuel Johnson, was swayed in his walk by similar notions.
"Scotch Hoppers," from Juvenile Games for the Four Seasons
Honey pots still is played by American children. Halliwell says the "honey pot" was a boy rolled up in a certain stiff position. I have seen it played by two girls carrying a third in a "chair" made by crossing hands. In a popular little book of the last century called Juvenile Pastimes, or Sports for Four Seasons, the illustration shows girls playing it. The explanatory verse reads:—
"Carry your Honey pot safe and sound
Or it will fall upon the Ground."
A truly historic game taught by children to each other, is what is called cats-cradle or cratch-cradle. One player stretches a length of looped cords over the extended fingers of both hands in a symmetrical form. The second player inserts the fingers and removes the cord without dropping the loops in a way to produce another figure. These various figures had childish titles. If Hone's derivation of the game and its meaning is true, cratch-cradle is the correct name. A cratch was a grated crib or manger. The adjustment of threads purported to represent the manger or cradle wherein the infant Saviour was laid by his Virgin Mother. As little girls "take off" the cradle they say, "criss-cross, criss-cross." This like the criss-cross row in the hornbook was originally Christ's cross.
