of both squares and the middle of each line. One party, or player, had wooden pegs, the other stones, which, placed by turns in the angles, and playing alternately, they moved in such a manner as to take up each other’s “men” as they were called; and the area of the inner square was called the “pound,” in which the men taken up were impounded. He who could play three in a straight line might then take off any one of his adversary’s where he pleased, till one, having lost all his men, lost the game. These figures were by the country people called “nine men’s morris,” or “merrils,” and were so called because each party had nine men. These figures were cut upon the green turf, or leys, as they were called, or upon the grass at the end of ploughed lands, where in rainy season it never failed to happen that, in the words of Shakespeare (Midsummer Night’s Dream, act ii. sc. 2.),
“The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud.”[1]
(iii.)—Hop-frog.
This is a very curious amusement. You must bend as though about to sit on a very low stool; then spring about with your hands resting on your knees.
(iv.)—Cat-and-kitten.
The common game of “tip-cat” was so called by Dorset children. The long stick represented the “cat” and the small pieces the “kitten.”
The following interesting account of schoolboy games in a middle-class day-school in Dorset at the beginning of the present century formed the subject of a paper called “School Days in a Country School” in Longman’s Magazine for March, 1889, contributed by Mr. Edmund Gosse, from the unpublished papers of his father, the late Mr. Philip H. Gosse, F.R.S., depicting the latter’s childhood at school in Poole in 1818.
- ↑ See Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes (ed. 1831), p. 317, where the game is ully described, and an engraving of a “merelles” table also appears.
