=Games and Plays.= Just as with children in all ages and in all times, the children of Greece had many plays and games. The little boys and girls were in the homes together till they were seven years of age and so they played together, but apart after that. The boys of Athens, just as in other cities in older times and present times, played on the streets and pestered the passers-by and kept the guardians of the peace busy. The little girls played with their dolls, making houses for them, setting out dishes before them, hauling them in carts, and swinging them and themselves in swings. In some of their plays they were joined by the little boys and they all played in the sand and made mud-pies and had see-saws and swings and they hitched up one another and dogs and goats to carts. The children carried one another pick-a-pack and they rode stick-horses and hobby-horses and they played bob-cherry and hide-the-rope and many other such games. They rolled hoops, walked on stilts, played running and catching games, such as hide-and-seek; they played leapfrog, hopped and jumped, flew kites; they played games of forfeit, odd or even, how many fingers are held up; the older boys had the tug of war and tossed one another in blankets. In one game the boy had to hop with one foot on a skin-bottle filled with water and greased; they spun coins on the edges; they shot beans from the fingers as the modern boys do marbles; they threw up five small stones and caught them on the back of the hand, as boys do jack-stones now; they played with dice. There was a game in which a stone was to be so thrown into a circle as to knock out the stones thrown into it by the other boys and itself remain in the circle. They would sharpen one end of a heavy peg of wood and then throw it into a softened place in the earth so that it would stand upright and also knock out another's peg. They would blacken or moisten one side of an oyster-shell and would call one side _day_ and the other side _night_; then the boys would divide into two sides with these names and would take turns in tossing the shell up into the air and then note which side was up when it fell to the ground; the winning side would then pursue the others and take prisoners. The boys, then as now, found great sport with tops, playing in the house as well as in the street. They had different kinds of tops, among them being a humming-top. The Greek boy would tie a long string to the leg of a beetle and then let it loose and guide its flying by holding to the string; sometimes the boys would fix a wax splinter to the beetle's tail and then light it before letting him loose. The children played blind man's buff. They would bandage a boy's eyes, who would then go about calling out, "I am hunting a brazen fly." This would be answered by the others with, "You will hunt, but you won't catch it." They would then run about and strike him with whips till he caught one, who would then be blindfolded.