eastern
Border district, says Johnston, children have a sort of game with the
seed-pouch. They hold it out to their companions, inviting them to "take
a haud o' that." It immediately cracks, and then follows a triumphant
shout, "You've broken your mother's heart." In Northamptonshire,
children pick the leaves of the herb called pick-folly, one by one,
repeating each time the words, "Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief,"
&c., fancying that the one which comes to be named at the last plucking
will prove the conditions of their future partners. Variations of this
custom exist elsewhere, and a correspondent of "Science Gossip" (1876,
xi. 94). writes:--"I remember when at school at Birmingham that my
playmates manifested a very great repugnance to this plant. Very few of
them would touch it, and it was known to us by the two bad names,
"haughty-man's plaything," and "pick your mother's heart out." In
Hanover, as well as in the Swiss canton of St. Gall, the same plant is
offered to uninitiated persons with a request to pluck one of the pods.
Should he do so the others exclaim, "You have stolen a purse of gold
from your father and mother."" "It is interesting to find," writes Mr.
Britten in the "Folk-lore Record" (i. 159), "that a common tropical
weed, _Ageratum conyzoides_, is employed by children in Venezuela in a
very similar manner."

The compilers of the "Dictionary of Plant Names" consider that the
double (garden) form of _Saxifraga granulata_, designated "pretty
maids," may be referred to in the old nursery rhyme:--

"Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
Cockle-shells, and silver bells,
And pretty maids all in a row."

The old-man's-beard (_Clematis vitalba_) is in many places popularly
known as smoke-wood, because "our village-boys smoke pieces of the wood
as they do of rattan cane; hence, it is sometimes called smoke-wood, and
smoking-cane." [6]

The children of Galloway play at hide-and-seek with a little
black-topped flower which is known by them as the Davie-drap, meantime
repeating the following rhyme:--

"Within the bounds of this I hap
My black and bonnie Davie-drap:
Wha is he, the cunning ane,
To me my Davie-drap will fin'?"

This plant, it has been suggested, [7] being the cuckoo grass (_Luzula
campestris_), which so often figures in children's games and rhymes.

Once more, there are numerous games played by children in which certain
flowers are introduced, a