Boys played with them precisely as boys do now. The poet Cowper in his Tirocinium says of the of his school life: games "The little ones unbutton'd, glowing hot 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. T CHAPTER XIX FLOWER LORE OF CHILDREN In childhood when with eager eyes The season-measured years I view' d Pledg'd constancy of good. Spring sang of heaven; the summer flowers Heard my strong wish, and stay'd. They came and went, the short-lived four, 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 |