It would be strange if children who exhibit so much inventive talent did not contrive new games; and we find accordingly that in many families a great part of the amusements of the children are of their own devising. The earliest age of which the writer has authentic record of such ingenuity is two and a half years.
Considering the space which our Indian tribes occupy in the imagination of young Americans, it is remarkable that the red man has no place whatever in the familiar and authorized sports. On the other hand, savage life has often furnished material for individual and local amusements.
Near the country place of a family within our knowledge was a patch of brushwood containing about forty acres, and furnishing an admirable ground for savage warfare. Accordingly, a regular game was devised. The players were divided into Indians and hunters, the former uttering their war-cry in such dialect as youthful imagination regarded as aboriginal. The players laid ambushes for each other in the forest, and the game ended with the extermination of one party or the other. This warfare was regulated by strict rules, the presentation of a musket at a fixed distance being regarded as equivalent to death.
In a town of Massachusetts, some thirty years since, it was customary for the school-girls, during recess, to divide themselves into separate tribes. Shawls spread over tent-poles represented Indian lodges, and a girl always resorted to her allotted habitation. This was kept up for the whole summer, and carried out with such earnestness that girls belonging to hostile tribes, though otherwise perfectly good friends, would often not speak to each other for weeks, in or out of school.
In the same town was a community of "Friends," or "Quakers." It was the custom for children of these to play at meeting. Sitting about the room on a "First-day" gathering, one of them would be moved by the spirit, rise, and exhort in the sing-song tone common to the meeting-house. There was a regular formula for this amusement—a speech which the children had somewhere heard and found laughable: "My de-ar friends, I've been a thinking and a thinking and a thinking; I see the blinking and the winking; pennyroyal tea is very good for a cold."
A young lady of our acquaintance, as a child, invented a game of pursuit, which she called Spider and Fly. The Flies, sitting on the house-stairs, buzzed in and out of the door, where they were exposed to the surprise of the Spider. The children of the neighborhood still maintain the sport, which is almost the exact equivalent of a world-old game whose formula is given in our collection.
We need not go on to illustrate our thesis. But it remains true that the great mass of the sports here presented are not merely old, but have existed in many countries, with formulas which have passed from generation to generation. How are we to reconcile this fact with the quick invention we ascribe to children?
The simple reason why the amusements of children are inherited is the same as the reason why language is inherited. It is the necessity of general currency, and the difficulty of obtaining it, which restricts the variation of one and of the other. If a sport is familiar only to one locality or one set of children, it passes away as soon as the youthful fancy of that region grows weary of it. Besides, the old games, which have prevailed and become familiar by a process of natural selection, are usually better adapted to children's taste than any new inventions can be; they are recommended by the quaintness of formulas which come from the remote past, and strike the young imagination as a sort of sacred law. From these causes, the same customs have survived for centuries through all changes of society, until the present age has involved all popular traditions, those of childhood as of maturity, in a general ruin.