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The game of tip-cat, although very old in Ireland, where it is said to have originated, and in all the British Islands, where it is very popular, is comparatively new in this country. Up to twenty years ago "Cat," as it is generally called, was unknown to the boys of this country. Now it is played from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Lakes to the Gulf.
Twice a ball had whizzed past him; and a small but select party, with a tip-cat of huge dimensions and awesome points, played just out of reach. Mr. Wragg, snapping his eyes nervously, threatened in vain. "Morning, old crusty-patch," said a cheerful voice at his elbow. Mr. Wragg glanced up at the young fisherman towering above him, and eyed him disdainfully.
However, the gallant cook tackles them in a sort of tip-cat way with a stick, and we proceed into a patch of long grass, beyond which there is a reach of amomums. The winged amomum I see here in Africa for the first time. Horrid slippery things amomum sticks to walk on, when they are lying on the ground; and there is a lot of my old enemy the calamus about.
He says that a marked change in his mental condition suddenly began while playing a game of "tip-cat" on Sunday afternoon on the village-green, having listened in the morning to a sermon upon Sabbath-breaking. His conscience smote him; he abandoned the game, leaving his cat upon the ground, and then began his great spiritual struggle.
The whole spot and its surroundings can be but little altered from the time when our hero was the ringleader of the youth of the place in the dances on the greensward, which he tells us he found it so hard to give up, and in "tip-cat," and the other innocent games which his diseased conscience afterwards regarded as "ungodly practices."
It is a wholesome and entirely harmless form of amusement, except for the betting which takes place at the big contests. There is a fine game called itte-dhandu, after the names of the two pieces of wood with which it is played. It is a little like tip-cat. The itte is a rounded bit of wood 2-1/2 inches long and perhaps an inch in diameter.
It was in pure love that, in his earlier years, his mother whispered that tender Mademoiselle to him, while his old grandmother used to say jokingly: "The fact is, that as for the tip-cat he has got, it is really not worth mentioning in a Christian. No offense to God in saying so."
But in the midst of his game of tip-cat or "sly," just as he had struck the "cat" from its hole, and was going to give it a second blow the minuteness of the detail shows the unforgetable reality of the crisis he seemed to hear a voice from heaven asking him whether "he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell."
Replied I, "Yes; and when I awoke, I found on my stomach a cube of bone, a single tip-cat stick, a stone of a green date and a carob pod, and I know not why she did this." Then I wept and went up to her and said, "Expound to me her meaning in so doing and tell me how shall I act and aid me in my sore strait." She answered, "On my head and eyes!
Maybe you know the kind the asphalt always littered with paper, garbage cans left out, and swarms of kids playin' tip-cat or dashin' about on roller skates. Cheap and messy. And to judge by the names on the letter boxes you'd say the tenants had been shipped in from every country on the map.
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