Volume I Part 17 (1/2)

Boggle about the Stacks

A favourite play among young people in the villages, in which one hunts several others (Brockett's _North-Country Words_). The game is alluded to in one of the songs given by Ritson (ii. 3), and Jamieson describes it as a Scottish game.

See ”Barley-break.”

Boggle-bush

The child's play of finding the hidden person in the company.-Robinson's _Whitby Glossary_. See ”Hide and Seek.”

Bonnety

This is a boys' game. The players place their bonnets or caps in a pile.

They then join hands and stand in a circle round it. They then pull each other, and twist and wriggle round and round and over it, till one overturns it or knocks a bonnet off it. The player who does so is hoisted on the back of another, and pelted by all the others with their bonnets.-Keith, Nairn (Rev. W. Gregor).

Booman

[Music]

-Norfolk.

Dill doule for Booman, Booman is dead and gone, Left his wife all alone, and all his children.

Where shall we bury him? Carry him to London; By his grandfather's grave grows a green onion.

Dig his grave wide and deep, strow it with flowers; Toll the bell, toll the bell, twenty-four hours.

-Norfolk, 1825-30 (J. Doe).

(_b_) One boy lies down and personates Booman. Other boys form a ring round him, joining hands and alternately raising and lowering them, to imitate bell-pulling, while the girls who play sit down and weep. The boys sing the first verse. The girls seek for daisies or any wild flowers, and join in the singing of the second verse, while the boys raise the prostrate Booman and carry him about. When singing the third verse the boys act digging a grave, and the dead boy is lowered. The girls strew flowers over the body. When finished another boy becomes Booman.

(_c_) This game is clearly dramatic, to imitate a funeral. Mr. Doe writes, ”I have seen somewhere [in Norfolk] a tomb with a crest on it-a leek-and the name Beaumont,” but it does not seem necessary to thus account for the game.

Boss-out

A game at marbles. Strutt describes it as follows:-”One bowls a marble to any distance that he pleases, which serves as a mark for his antagonist to bowl at, whose business it is to hit the marble first bowled, or lay his own near enough to it for him to span the s.p.a.ce between them and touch both the marbles. In either case he wins. If not, his marble remains where it lay, and becomes a mark for the first player, and so alternately until the game be won.”-_Sports_, p. 384.

Boss and Span

The same as ”Boss-out.” It is mentioned, but not described, in Baker's _Northamptons.h.i.+re Glossary_.

Boys and Girls

[Music]