time. Later again there is tip-cat for the boys,
and hop-scotch for the girls.

On the corn-bins in the Warwickshire ale-house stables we can still find
the lines rudely cut for "nine men's morris." This, in Shakspere's day,
was a favorite game, and one much in vogue among the shepherd boys in
the summer, who cut a "board" in the short turf and whiled away the long
hours by playing it. Little Will must often have gone to watch his
father play "shovel-board" at the Falcon tavern, in Stratford, on the
board upon which tradition says he himself played, in later life. And at
home, he and his brother must have played "push-pin," an old game which
is still played in remote parts of the country. Two pins are laid on the
table; the players in turn jerk them with their fingers, and he who
throws one pin across the other is allowed to take one of them, while
those who do not succeed have to give a pin. This is the game Shakspere
alludes to in "Love's Labour's Lost," when he says, "And Nestor play at
push-pin with the boys."

Little Will knew a great deal about sport. All his allusions to sporting
or woodcraft are those of a man who had been familiar with such things
from his childhood. He and Gilbert must have set plenty of "springes, to
catch wood-cocks," and dug out the "earth-delving conies" that swarmed
in the commmonland of Welcombe, those dingles that in later years he
fought so hard to preserve from inclosure.

[Illustration: BOYS FISHING IN THE AVON--OPPOSITE THE WEIR-BRAKE.]

They must have fished many a time, as the Stratford boys do to this day,
in the slow waters of the Avon, sitting quietly intent for hours upon
the steep clay bank

"to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait."[C]

[Footnote C: "Much Ado about Nothing," Act 3, Sc. 1.]

Then who can doubt that he often watched the hunting of the hare? Each
line in his wonderful description of the hunted hare is written by a
thorough sportsman and a keen observer of nature. How the purblind hare
runs among a flock of sheep or into a rabbit-warren, or "sorteth with a
herd of deer" to throw out "the hot scent-snuffing hounds." How they
pause silent till they have worked "with much ado the cold fault cleanly
out," and then burst into music again.

Of deer, Shakspere knew much--too much for his own comfort. In his
childhood, there were herds at Fulbrooke,--and when he wa