These games are quite distinct from the regular exercises in the palæstra (of which we will speak presently, as forming a regular part of education). We have only general descriptions of them, and these either by Greek scholiasts or by modern philologists. But, in spite of the sad want of practical knowledge of games shown by both, the instincts of boyhood are so uniform that we can often frame a very distinct idea of the sort of amusement popular among Greek children. For young boys, games can hardly consist of anything else than either the practising of some bodily dexterity, such as hopping on one foot, higher or longer than is easy, or throwing farther with a stone; or else some imitation of war, such as snowballing, or pulling a rope across a line, or pursuing under fixed conditions; or, lastly, the practice of some mechanical ingenuity, such as whipping a top or shooting with marbles. So far as climate or mechanical inventions have not altered our little boys’ games, we find all these principles represented in Greek games. There was the hobby- or cock-horse (κάλαμον παραβῆναι), standing or hopping on one leg (ἀσκωλιάζειν), which, as the word ἀσκός implies, was attempted on a _skin-bottle_ filled with liquid and greased; blindman’s-buff (χαλκῆ μυῖα), in which the boy cried, “I am hunting a _bracken fly_,” and the rest answered, “You will not catch it;” games of hide-and-seek, of taking and releasing prisoners, of fool in the middle, of playing at king--in fact, there is probably no simple child’s game now known which was not then in use. A few more details may, however, be interesting. There was a game called κυνδαλισμός, in which the κύνδαλον was a peg of wood with a heavy end sharpened, which boys sought to strike into a softened place in the earth so that it stood upright, and knocked out the peg of a rival. This reminds us of the pegtop-splitting which still goes on in our streets. Another, called ὀστρακίνδα, consisted of tossing an oyster-shell in the air, of which one side was blackened or moistened, and called _night_, the other _day_, or sun and rain. The boys were divided into two sides with these names, and, according as their side of the shell turned up, they pursued and took prisoners their adversaries. On the other hand, ἐποστρακισμός was making a _shell_ skip along the surface of water by a horizontal throw, and winning by the greatest number of skips. Εἰς ὤμιλλαν, though a general expression for any contest, was specially applied to tossing a knuckle-bone or smooth stone so as to lie in the centre of a fixed circle, and to disturb those which were already in good positions. This was also done into a small hole (τρόπα). They seem to have shot dried beans from their fingers as we do marbles (φρυγίνδα). They spun coins on their edge (χαλκισμός).