Many traditional nursery rhymes from Tayside are given in the delightful collections made by William and Norah Montgomerie (“ Scottish Nursery Rhymes,” etc.) Those who are interested should certainly consult these books, if you can find them.

Times change, and many of the games and toys of my own childhood are now no more than a memory. Older toys such as the “tow-gun,” (which had a wooden barrel and ram-rod), the iron gird and cleek (bought for a penny at the blacksmith’s,), the “cattie and doggie” are seen no more. The skipping-rope still finds favour, however, and terms like “cheat the leader” and “the firein” or “fines” are still heard.

The game called “paily” (probably of French origin) needed the head of a flax-mill bobbin before play could start. “Hod the towie,” “Kick the can,” and “Hoist the flag” were other popular games of fifty years ago. A daring feat was (in Angus, and especially around Arbroath) called “a coosie.” Dr J. B. Salmond, who was an Arbroathian, or Red Lichtie, thought this word might have derived from a young man named a' Couci, who was connected with the Abbey of Aberbrothock and noted for his daring exploits.

Children of to-day may not concern themselves with such things, but long ago it was a seasonal ploy to gather “souracks” and to search for arnuts, which were also called lucy-arnuts, earth-nuts and pig-nuts. They weile dug out of the turfy soil with gully-knives or fingers. They were rather like marble-sized potatoes. Conopodium denudatum is the Latin name for the plant, and it is a member of the hemlock family.

Arnuts were hard and tasteless, but perhaps the effort to gel them made them the more desirable, like the inside of thistles, painfully deprived of their prickles.

In those days children esteemed other things of a like nature, the soft end of rushes, the sweet flowers of the clover, “birch beer” caught in a tin below a “spale” cut in the silvery bark, young larch twig points and the resin itself, when soft and clear it was very aromatic and had a fine clean taste.

But children’s ploys and toys are many and various, and to deal with them adequately (as with folk-lore in general) a writer would need plenty of ink and plenty of time. Even then, as William Soutar says:

Lang, lang, or the makin were ended
His rowth o’ years were by;
And a’ the hills wud be midden-heaps,
And a’ the burns dry.

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