Children -- United States; United States -- Social life and customs -- To 1775
"There was that day a great game of Foot-ball to be played.
There was another Town played against 'em as is sometimes common
in England; but they played with their bare feet, which I
thought very odd; but it was upon a broad sandy Shoar free from
Stones which made it the more easie. Neither were they so apt to
trip up one another's heels and quarrel as I have seen 'em in
England."
At the same time English boys were kicking the foot-ball around
Boston streets, and were getting themselves complained of by
game-hating Puritan neighbors, and enjoined by pragmatical
magistrates, just as they were in English towns.
Fewer games are played now by both boys and girls than in former
times, in England as well as America. In a manuscript list of games
played at Eton in 1765 are these titles: cricket, fives, shirking
walls, scrambling walls, bally cally, battledore, pegtop, peg in the
ring, goals, hop-scotch, heading, conquering cobs, hoops, marbles,
trap ball, steal baggage, puss in the corner, cat gallows, kites,
cloyster and hyer gigs, tops, humming tops, hunt the hare, hunt the
dark lanthorn, chuck, sinks, stare-caps, hurtlecap. No games are now
recognized at Eton save cricket, foot-ball, and fives. Racquet and
hockey flourished for a time. The playing of marbles was abandoned
about 1820, and top-spinning about 1840. Top-time had always opened
ten days after the return to school after the summer holidays. Hoops
were made of stout ash laths with the bark on, and the hoop-rolling
season ended with a class fray with hoopsticks for weapons. At one
time marble-playing was prohibited in the English universities. It
is not probable that those undergraduates habitually played marble
any more than do our Princeton University men, who have a day of
marble-playing and one of top-spinning each spring.
[Illustration: Doll's Furniture, One Hundred Years Old]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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