Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHILDREN'S RHYME-GAMES. 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 far 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 Merry-Ma-Tanzie," "The Mulberry Bush," " Carry My Lady to London," " I Dree I Droppit It," " Looby-Looby," and ever so many more. Like the counting-out rhymes, the game-rhymes are found in only slightly differing forms in widely dividedcountries 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 every town and village in Scotland even. There are variants equally, I suppose, of all. " Merry-ma-tanzie " is solely a girls' game, of which boys, however, may be interested spectators. The counting-out rhyme having put one in the centre, the rest join hands in a ring about ...