went to

"scate" on Fresh Pond, and that two boys, named Maxwell and Eyre, fell in and were drowned.

Advertisements of men's and boys' skates and of "Best Holland Scates of Different Sizes," show a

constant demand and use. In an invoice of "sundry merchandise" to Weathersfield, Connecticut, in the year 1763, are twelve pair "small brass scates, @3/-£3, 16/." I do not know the age of the skates shown opposite page 346. No date less than a hundred years ago is ever willingly assigned

to

to such relics. ones shown on

They are similar in shape to the page 349, in the illustration taken from a book for children entitled Children's Sports, published a century ago, which ends its dissertation on skating with this sensible advice:

""Tis true it looks exceeding nice

To see boys gliding on the ice,
And to behold so many feats
Perform'd upon the sliding skates,
But before you venture there
Wait until the ice will bear,

For want of this both young and old

Have tumbled in, - got wet and cold."

It was not until October, 1771, that a pleasurefilled item appeared, Boys' Marbles."

Pretty Little Pocket Book are these lines:

66 MARBLES

"Knuckle down to your Taw.

Aim well, shoot away.

Keep out of the Ring,

You'll soon learn to Play.

In The

MORAL

"Time rolls like a Marble,

And drives every State.

Then improve each Moment,

Before its too late."

Boys

Boys played with them precisely as boys do now. The poet Cowper in his Tirocinium says of the games of his school life :

"The little ones unbutton'd, glowing hot
Playing our games and on the very spot
As happy as we once, to kneel and draw

The chalky ring, and knuckle down at taw.”

The terms used were the same as those heard to-day in school yards: taws, vent, back-licks, rounces, dubs, alleys, and alley-taws, agates, bull'seyes, and commoneys. Jackstones was an old English game known in Locke's day as dibstones. Other names for the game were chuckstones, chuckie-stones, and clinches. The game is precisely the same as was played two centuries ago; it was a girl's game then it is a girl's game now. Battledores and Shuttles were advertised for sale in Boston in 1761; but they are far older than that. Many portraits of children show battledores, as that of Thomas Aston Coffin. All books of children's games speak of them. It was, in fact, a popular game, and deemed a properly elegant exercise for decorous young misses

to indulge

in.

CHAPTER XIX

T

FLOWER LORE OF CHILDREN

In childhood when with eager eyes

The season-measured years I view'd
All, garb'd in fairy guise

Pledg'd constancy of good.

Spring sang of heaven; the summer flowers
Bade me gaze on, and did not fade;
Even suns o'er autumn's bowers

Heard my strong wish, and stay'd.

They came and went, the short-lived four,
Yet, as their varying dance they wove,
To my young heart each bore

Its own sure claim of love.

-7. H. Card. Newman, 1874.

HE records of childish flower lore contained

in this chapter are those of my own childhood; but they are equally the records of the customs of colonial children, for these games and rhymes and plays about flowers have been preserved from generation to generation of New England children. The transmission of this nature lore

has

has been as direct and unaltered in the new world as in Great Britain. Some of these customs, such as the eating of hollyhock cheeses and the blowing of dandelion clocks, came originally, as have other play usages, from England; many were varied in early years by different conditions in the new world, by local fitness and suggestion.

One chapter in Mr. Newell's book upon the Games of American Children dwells upon the conservatism of children. The unquestioning reception of play formulas, which he proves, extended to the flower rhymes and lore which I have recollected and herein set down. These inherited customs are far dearer to children than modern inventions. There is a quaintness of expression, a sentiment of tradition, that the child feels without power of formulating.

If the paradise of the Orientals is a garden, so was a garden of old-fashioned flowers the earthly paradise for a child: the long sunny days brought into life so many delightful playthings to be made through the exercise of that keen instinct of all children, destructiveness. Each year saw the fresh retelling and teaching of child to child of happy flower customs almost intuitively, or through the "knowledge never learned at schools," that curious subtle system of transmission which everywhere exists

among