it. With a club or stick you strike the tail so that the ball springs
up in the air and then before it falls you strike it with your club
toward your enemy's goal line. The players are divided into sides who
try to defend their goal lines and to send back the ball to the other
side. Make your own rules as experience teaches you is fair.

Other Games

The endless variations of leap-frog should not be forgotten in
devising outdoor games: and tournaments of long or broad jumping and
high jumping are good. Stilts and the games to be arranged with them
are also another great resource. And the seasons bring, as regularly
as flowers and snow, the round of tops, and kites and marbles. Of
these last a very summary account is given here as most boys and
regions have their own rules.

Marbles

The first thing to learn in "Marbles" is the way that the marble
should be held. Of course one can have very good games by bowling the
marble, as if it were a ball, or holding it between the thumb-nail and
the second joint of the first finger and shooting it with the thumb
from there; but these ways are wrong. The correct way is to hold it
between the tip of the forefinger and the first joint of the thumb.
Marbles are divided into "taws," or well-made strong marbles with
which you shoot, and "clays," or the ordinary cheap colored marbles at
which you aim and with which you pay your losses.

Ring Taw

Two or three boys with marbles could never have difficulty in hitting
on a game to play with them, but the best regular game for several
players is "Ring Taw." A chalk ring is made on as level a piece of
ground as there is, and each player puts a clay on it at regular
distances from each other. A line from which to shoot during the first
round is then drawn two yards or so from the ring, and the game begins
by the player who has won the right of leading off (a real advantage)
knuckling down on the line and shooting at one of the marbles in the
ring. If a player knocks a marble out of the ring, that marble is his
and he has the right to shoot again from the place where his taw comes
to a stand; but if in knocking a marble out of the ring his taw
remains in it (or if his taw remains in it under any condition
whatever), he has to put all the marbles he has won into the ring, in
addition to one for a fine, and take up his taw and play no more till
the next game. There is one exception to this rule: If only one marble
is left in the rin