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When by the aid of the
"chapping-out" rhyme it has been decided who should be "it," the game to
follow may be "Single Tig," "Cross Tig," "Burly Bracks Round the
Stacks," "Pussie in the Corner," "Bonnety," "The Tod and the Hounds," "I
Spy," "Smuggle the Keg," "Booly Horn," "Dock," "Loup the Frog," "Foot
and a Half," "Bools," "Pitch and Toss," or any one of another dozen, all
of which are essentially boys' games, and have no rhymes to enliven
their action. But if it is to be a game in which both sexes may equally
engage, or a game for girls alone, then almost certainly there is a
rhyme with it. Somehow girls have always been more musical than boys,
even as in their maturer years they are more frequently the subject of
song than their confreres of the sterner sex. "Peever," "Tig," and
"Skipping Rope," are indeed, so fair as I can recall at the moment,
about all of the girls' commoner games which are played without the
musical accompaniment of line and verse. Their rhyme-games, on the other
hand. are legion, and embrace "A Dis, a Dis, a Green Grass," "The Merrv-Ma
Tanzie." "The Mulberry Bush," "Carry My Lady to London," "I Dree I
Droppit It," "Loobv-Looby," and ever so many more.
Like the counting-out
rhymes, the game-rhymes are found in only slightly differing forms in
widely divided countries and places. But ever alike, they are never
quite the same. The "Merry-Ma-Tanzie," for instance, though always the
same in name, will be found with varying lines in almost ever town and
village in Scotland even. There are variants equally, I suppose, of all. |
