“Five or ten can play, one has to hide wile the Others hide. If he sees you you have to come out of your Crib & twig & get home. The one that hides can only come a little way from home—to get home you have to run and touch the piller or Post where he was hiding”.
Point is like I spy; but you need a lamp-post for it. Monkey in the wood is the same kind of game, but without a lamp-post; FORTY and INNER AND OUTER are other hide-and-seek games. Or hunting sports like WIDDY, which you play in winter to get warm with. There are different ways of playing WIDDY; one is this:
“Say there’s ten of you, one is widdy, that’s Hee. He runs after the others till he catches his one then there’s two that must hold hands then they run after the eight till they catch another and so on till there all cort and the last one to be cawt is widdy for next go”.
Or you can make WIDDY into a hopping game. One is “he”, they all gather round him and sing—
Widdy Widdy way, I shan’t play,
Kick your post and run away—
and then he kicks his lamp-post and hops after them on one leg. I don’t know what “Widdy” means, but I should think that all these hunting “he” games are rather old (other “he” games are sometimes new). Fishing (or FAG-OUT) is another of them, and COALER another, and LAST ONE HOME another.
To play DELIVER UP THOSE GOLDEN JEWELS (or DELIVER UP THE BLACK PUDDING) you need confederates. You go up to a soft boy and say “Let’s have a game of Deliver up those Golden Jewels and you shall be judge.” So the softy gets very keen about being judge, and sits down “in Court” on a step or somewhere; then they lead up the prisoner who is in the know, you know, and they ask him a lot of sham questions; and as soon as the judge says “Therefore deliver up them golden jools”, the prisoner—no, I can’t tell you any more about that game. It’s rather rude. None of our boys are caught at it more than once—not at playing the judge, at least. There are other games of this sort, like WHITE MICE and HIGH TREASON and THREE GOLDEN BALLS and FARMER LEFT HIS HAT BEHIND and SCORING and RUNNING TOO FAST and HIDE AND SEEK (not the usual kind); they can all be played in a respectable fashion, but the worst of it is, they generally aren’t. Another is called P.....E. That’s worse. I can’t say anything whatever about it except that you need good confederates and a boy who is quite new to the quarter. And some of them are still worse; not at all nice, in fact. If you want to find out about them, you must come yourself and talk to a few of our rough chaps. You might ask them about TOUCHING THE KING’S SCEPTRE. If you can get that out of them, you can get anything....
FOOTNOTES:
[A] The French “Vingt-et-un.”