Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/91

Rh subject upon metaphysics, ethnology, and folk-lore. None at the present day will be inclined to dispute this postulate.

He remarks with feeling that children have a haunting idea that their happy, careless life will eventually change into something more fruitful and graver. In spite of the genial haze that surrounds them they play at games that reflect somewhat the thoughts and actions of their hardworked and responsible elders. Thus boys when they spin tops and play at marbles hope to win buttons or some other sorry representatives of value. They even, proh pudor, strain after the gain of the humblest coppers at "pitch and toss," "heads or tails." The little girls who keep proudly aloof from all such vulgarities as these equally, in their turn, desire to imitate their own natural leaders. They prettily copy les petits soins of their honoured mothers, and dress and nurse a mimic icon, mystically called a doll, but which in the days of their great-grandmothers was more simply and intelligibly styled a baby. Domestic duties in anticipation exercise their well-disposed minds to the same extent as a nascent auri sacra fames weighs upon the thoughts of their more restless brothers.

The sports of boys, as being ruder, more slovenly, and more boisterous, are naturally exclusively their own. No one has ever seen girls emulate the ruder sex at leap-frog.

But there is a class of intermediate pastimes, neither too rough nor too refined, at which both sexes can meet on even ground and animate each other by their natural sympathy. We mean "blind man's buff," "puss in the corner," &c.

To begin our task, we have first to remark that Sicilian boys have all the games known to our English boys, excepting, of course, cricket and rounders.

Their games are, perhaps, enacted with more spirit and liveliness, and have more spoken formulæ and dialogue.

Sicilian boys also, with a truer feeling for what will ensure the success of their sports, in all cases that admit of it, choose a leader (capegiuco). This measure ensures not only order and good government but preserves that accuracy of tradition which a democratic administration would weaken or revolutionise.

Here are some of the Southern games.—A boy holds nuts or apricots