from Gorey to Trinnahely. There are also many other different names that record the game.
Jack-stones, played with three or fom- small stones that are thrown up in the air and caught again, seems to have been a very ancient game, as the stones have been found in the crannogs or lake-dwellings in some hole near the fire-places, similar to where they are found in a cabin at the present day. An old woman, or other player, at the present time, puts them in a place near the hob, when they stop their game, and go to do something else.
THE FOLK-LORE OF DRAYTON.
PART II.—Minerals—Animals—Portents.—(Continued from page 235.)
"The charitable robinet in came,
Whose nature taught the others to be tame."
Its work of love, everybody knows, on the evidence of the Babes in the Wood, is that of burying the dead:
"Covering with moss the dead's unclosed eye,
The little Redbreast teacheth charity,"
as Drayton says elsewhere.[1] I have a secondhand quotation[2] from a play of Webster, who was for some years his contemporary:
"Call for the robin and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with dead leaves do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men."
- ↑ The Owl [iv. 1291].
- ↑ From "English Ballads," an article in an Aunt Judy's Magazine of unremembered date.
