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These games are quite distinct from the regular exercises in the palæstra (of which we will speak presently, as forming a regular part of education). We have only general descriptions of them, and these either by Greek scholiasts or by modern philologists. But, in spite of the sad want of practical knowledge of games shown by both, the instincts of boyhood are so uniform that we can often frame a very distinct idea of the sort of amusement popular among Greek children. For young boys, games can hardly consist of anything else than either the practising of some bodily dexterity, such as hopping on one foot, higher or longer than is easy, or throwing farther with a stone; or else some imitation of war, such as snowballing, or pulling a rope across a line, or pursuing under fixed conditions; or, lastly, the practice of some mechanical ingenuity, such as whipping a top or shooting with marbles. So far as climate or mechanical inventions have not altered our little boys’ games, we find all these principles represented in Greek games. There was the hobby- or cock-horse (κάλαμον παραβῆναι), standing or hopping on one leg (ἀσκωλιάζειν), which, as the word ἀσκός implies, was attempted on a skin-bottle filled with liquid and greased; blindman’s-buff (χαλκῆ μυῖα), in which the boy cried, “I am hunting a bracken fly,” and the rest answered, “You will not catch it;” games of hide-and-seek, of taking and releasing prisoners, of fool in the middle, of playing at king—in fact, there is probably no simple child’s game now known which was not then in use.