CHAPTER XVIII.
CHILDREN'S RHYMES AND GAMES.
Children are more or less observers of nature, and frequently far
more so than their elders. This, perhaps, is in a great measure to be
accounted for from the fact that childhood is naturally inquisitive, and
fond of having explained whatever seems in any way mysterious. Such
especially is the case in the works of nature, and in a country ramble
with children their little voices are generally busy inquiring why this
bird does this, or that plant grows in such a way--a variety of questions,
indeed, which unmistakably prove that the young mind instinctively
seeks after knowledge. Hence, we find that the works of nature enter
largely into children's pastimes; a few specimens of their rhymes and
games associated with plants we quote below.
In Lincolnshire, the butter-bur (Petasites vulgaris) is nicknamed bog-
horns, because the children use the hollow stalks as horns or trumpets,
and the young leaves and shoots of the common hawthorn (Cratoegus
oxyacantha), from being commonly eaten by children in spring, are
known as "bread and cheese;" while the ladies-smock (Cardamine
pratensis) is termed "bread and milk," from the custom, it has been
suggested, of country people having bread and milk for breakfast about
the season when the flower first comes in. In the North of England this
plant is known as cuckoo-spit, because almost every flower stem has
deposited upon it a frothy patch not unlike human saliva, in which is
enveloped a pale green insect. Few north-country children will gather
these flowers, believing that it is unlucky to do so, adding that the
cuckoo has spit upon it when flying over. [1]
The fruits of the mallow are popularly termed by children cheeses, in
allusion to which Clare writes:--
"The sitting down when school was o'er,
Upon the threshold of the door,
Picking from mallows, sport to please,
The crumpled seed we call a cheese."
A Buckinghamshire name with children for the deadly nightshade
(Atropa belladonna) is the naughty-man's cherry, an illustration of which
we may quote from Curtis's "Flora Londinensis":--"On Keep Hill, near
High Wycombe, where we observed it, there chanced to be a little boy. I
asked him if he knew the plant. He answered 'Yes; it was naughty-man's