stool; and this it is the business of the former to prevent, by beating it away with the hand, reckoning one to the game for every stroke of the ball; if, however, the ball should be missed by the hand, and touch the stool, the players change places; as they also do if the person who threw the ball can catch and hold it when driven back before it reaches the ground. The conqueror is he who strikes the ball most times before it touches the stool. Elsewhere, it is played with a number of stools and as many players. This seems to have been a game for women more than men, but occasionally it was played by young persons of both sexes indiscriminately, as the following lines show, from Tom D'Urfey's play of "Don Quixote" (1694):—
"Down in a vale, on a summer's day,
All the lads and lasses met to be merry;
A match for kisses at stool-ball to play,
And for cakes and ale, and cider and perry.
Chorus—Come all, great, small, short, tall,—
Away to stool-ball."
Pitching or casting the bar was, in Tudor times, a favourite gymnastic exercise. A poet of the sixteenth century thinks it highly commendable for kings and princes, by way of exercise, to throw "the stone, the bar, or the plummet." Henry VIII. retained "the casting of the bar" among his favourite amusements. The sledge hammer was also used for the same purpose. Loggats (says Sir Thomas Hanmer) is the ancient name of a play or game, one of those made "unlawful" by the 33d Henry VIII. It is now called kittle-pins (i.e., skittles), in which the boys often make use of bones instead of wooden pins, throwing at them with another bone, instead of bowling. Hamlet asks, "Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats
