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Updated: May 19, 2025
Through the stone columns the sea was visible, smooth, dark, and blue; the low sun bathed the brown hills of the coast in a golden mist. It was December. The shepherds were driving home their flocks, the work of the day was done, and a noise of light laughter and rippling talk came from the Slaves' quarter. In the middle of the stone-flagged yard two little boys were playing at quoits.
Iron quoits may be purchased for a dollar a set. The average weight of the quoits used by experts is from seven to nine pounds each. Sixty-one points constitute a game. The distance from the peg shall be either 10, 15 or 18 yards. For a space three feet around the pin or peg the ground should be clay.
This one interested me more than I care to own. The next morning Judge Short, looking somewhat dejected after the overnight conference he had had with his wife, was innocently and somewhat ostentatiously engaged in tossing quoits with me in front of the inn, when Miss Thorn drove up in a basket cart. She gave me a bow which proved that she bore no ill-will for that which I had said about her hero.
As to sports and pastimes, the boys are faithfully exercised in all that are on record, quoits, races, prison-bars, tipcat, trap-ball, bandy-ball, wrestling, leaping, and what not.
The plates skimmed about like quoits, and all the board became a wreck of glass and china. Above the clamor and the fighting could be heard Carew's strident voice demanding his beaker, pouring unimaginable anathemas against any one who should do it damage, and threatening to unmuzzle and bring in his bear.
The aim of each player is to pitch his quoit on the hob, or, if he cannot do that, as near it as possible, the parties throwing from one hob to another. Charles Bracebridge and Lemon were playing on opposite sides when the archers came up. First Charles threw. One quoit was close to the hob, and the other quoits he sent were within a few inches of it, and of each other. Then Lemon threw.
Keats alludes to this in his "Endymion," where he describes the lookers-on at the game of quoits: "Or they might watch the quoit-pitchers, intent On either side, pitying the sad death Of Hyacinthus, when the cruel breath Of Zephyr slew him; Zephyr penitent, Who now ere Phoebus mounts the firmament, Fondles the flower amid the sobbing rain."
When the glad troop of children departed, Plato followed them to see their father's flocks, and play quoits with the larger boys. Anaxagoras looked after him with a pleased expression, as he said, "He will delight their minds, as he has elevated ours. Assuredly, his soul is like the Homeric, chain of gold, one end of which rests on earth, and the other terminates in Heaven."
He was playing at quoits the other day in the court; a gentleman, a decent-looking person enough, came past, and as a quoit hit his shin, he lifted his cane; but my young bravo whips out his pistol, like Beau Clincher in the "Trip to the Jubilee," and had not a scream of Gardez l'eau from an upper window set all parties a-scampering for fear of the inevitable consequences, the poor gentleman would have lost his life by the hands of that little cockatrice.
Those who say that to find out the cause of a prodigy is in effect to destroy its supposed signification as such, do not take notice that, at the same time, together with divine prodigies, they also do away with signs and signals of human art and concert, as, for instance, the clashings of quoits, fire-beacons, and the shadows on sun-dials, every one of which things has its cause, and by that cause and contrivance is a sign of something else.
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