[f. the vbl. phrase to fly the garter.] A game in which the players leap from one side of a ‘garter’ or line of stones over the back of one of their number.
1818. Keats, Lett., Wks. (1889), III. 153. I must go from Hazlitt to Patmore, and make Wordsworth and Coleman play at leap-frog, or keep one of them down a whole half-holiday at fly-the-garter; ‘from Gray to Gay, from Little to Shakespeare.’
1862. Miss Braddon, Ralph Bailiff, My First Happy Christmas, 161. During the half-year’s lessons and the half-year’s exercises, the half-year’s propria quæ maribus and ‘Enfield’s Speaker,’ bad marks and good marks, stolen feasts in dimly lighted dormitories, prisoner’s base and fly the garter, in the great bare playground, I was tolderably happy.
