No. 54 Follow Your Leader
In this game, the leader having been chosen by “speaking first,” or “counting out,” the rest must do whatever he does. It is usually played out-of-doors, and the children “follow their leader” in a row, across roads, fences, and ditches, jumping from heights, and creeping under barriers.90 We are told that the game is played in a peculiarly reckless fashion in the South, where the leader will sometimes go under a horse’s legs or between the wheels of a wagon, whereupon the driver, knowing what to expect, will stop for the rest.
No doubt this sport, now a mere exhibition of daring, has an ancient origin and history. Perhaps it was a development of the king game, already referred to.
The technical word for challenge among children in America is “stump.” One boy “stumps” another to do a thing. Whence derived?