After a week of such glorious weather that it was a pleasure merely to be alive there came a day when the rain fell in hopeless torrents.

“I wouldn’t quarrel with the weather,” said Lily, gloomily, “if it had the propriety to do the right thing Saturday; but when our only holiday is spoiled it seems a little exasperating. I’ve flattened my classic features against the window-pane as long as I can stand it, but I can’t find a symptom of clearing up.”

“Let’s do something amusing,” said Louie Field. “There is no fun in just wishing it would stop raining, and that’s what we’ve been doing, with intervals for yawning, for the last hour.”

“Amusing! Well, I like that! What’s going to amuse us?” asked Bell Burgoyne, scornfully.

“Capping verses is pretty good fun,” said Mary Ann, modestly. It was seldom she made a suggestion; but Edna, who generally snapped her up with a sarcasm, or silenced her proposals with blighting sneers, was out of the way now. “That’s so,” said Katie, looking up from a struggle with the accounts that her father required her to keep of her very liberal supply of pocket-money. “It is fun, but I don’t remember exactly how it’s played. You write a line of poetry and then fold the paper over it and pass it along for your next neighbor to write a line that rhymes with it, don’t you?”

“Yes; that’s one way, but we used to play it another way for a change. Let’s try your way first, and then I’ll show you how we used to play it at Chemunk.”

There was much stirring about for a few minutes to find pencils and paper, and then a half sheet of foolscap was handed to Lily, who wrote a heading and then a first line.

“Arrayed,” she said, passing the paper on to Katie, after carefully turning down her line so that no one could read it.

“No one can make a rhyme to that,” said Katie, who was not blessed with a powerful rhyming talent; “that’s one of the words there’s no rhyme to, like silver and twelfth.”

“Maid, shade, glade, played,” suggested Mary Ann.

“O, yes,” said Katie; “but I don’t know a line of poetry that ends in any of those words.” “Give Mary Ann your turn, then,” said Lily, “and may be you’ll get an easier word.”

So Mary Ann wrote a line rapidly and then passed the paper to Lottie Bush, who wrote another rhyme to it, for the versification was to be in triplets. Then Katie, thinking it would be easier to inaugurate a rhyme than to find one, began a new verse and gave “tale” as the final word of her line.

Some of the party were very quick, but others had to expend much thought on their lines; so quite a little while passed before the poem was finished and handed to Lily to read.

“Ahem!” she began, clearing her throat. “This remarkable poem is the joint production of a number of first-class poets. It was original sometime, and it is called—

“MANY LINES FROM MANY PENS, BY LOTS OF FOLKS.

“That wasn’t bad fun,” said Louie. “Now suppose we try the other way. Tell us how you do it, Mary Ann.”

“You compose four lines of poetry, or stuff—of course you can’t really call it poetry—and leave off the rhymes, and pass it to the next one to guess out the rhymes and put them in.”

“But, my goodness, child, we can’t all compose poetry! What do you take us for?” asked Louie. “Wont it do to quote four lines from a book?”

“Not quite so well, for it might be familiar, and then there’d be no skill in getting the rhymes.”

“O, let’s try it,” said Lily. “It needn’t be real poetry, as Mary Ann says, and we’ll get some fun out of it, I guess.”

Some narrow strips of paper were supplied to each of the party, who, with the exception of two or three who declared it was impossible for them to think of any thing to write, were soon busy trying to wrench poetical ideas from their puzzled brains.

Parodies were the easiest to write, Mary Ann had said; so most of the verses when done bore strong suggestions of very familiar songs or poems, and after they were written it was not hard for most of the girls to supply the rhymes.

Edna, who came in too late to join in composing, was chosen to read the verses to them after they were done. There were no names signed and it was some sport to guess the authors. The first one selected from the pile had an easy jingle about it that made the girls certain it was from Lily’s ready pen. It was headed:

“ODE TO MY FRIEND.

“Now, guess the rhyme,” said the reader, who knew what they were because, according to rule, they were written on the back. “It’s an every-other-line rhyme, and the second one is ‘gladly.’ It isn’t quite fair to tell you that, but you’ll never guess it if I don’t give you some clew.”

There was much puzzling about fitting the rhymes, but Mary Ann and Bell succeeded in finding them and comfortably fitted “once,” “dunce,” “gladly,” “badly,” into their places at the end of the lines.

The next verse was easier, and even Katie found no great difficulty in supplying the missing words:

“The ‘fun,’ ‘done,’ ‘better,’ ‘letter,’ that belong to that verse are what I call self-evident rhymes,” said Lily, “and it’s no fun to guess them, for they say themselves, almost. Now, wait till I write you something grand, gloomy, and obscure, with rhymes that don’t shout themselves out at you.”

“After Browning, I suppose.”

“O, miles after. Now, hush, or I can’t hear the whispering of my muse.” And Lily rolled up her eyes, and with her hand bending her ear forward put on a rapt appearance of listening. Then with a bow to the corner of the ceiling and a grateful, “Thanks, thanks, madam, for your timely assistance,” supposed to be addressed to the obliging but invisible muse, she began to scribble rapidly, in a few moments handing this effusion to Edna to read:

That was considered funny, because two of the girls had actually jumped out of bed at daylight to suppress some unmelodious cats whose wails had kept them awake; but their united efforts could not produce all the needful rhymes; so Edna read them off from the back of the paper: “dawn, howling, lawn, yowling, groans, moans.”

It was a noticeable fact that when Edna joined a circle which included Mary Ann the latter soon made an excuse for leaving; so after the last poetry had been read and laughed at she quietly slipped out of the room, leaving the others to continue the sport without her.

Edna commented on her departure with a sarcastic supposition that she had probably gone to seek more congenial society in the servants’ quarters, and, although there was not a girl present who believed what she said, still there were none who openly contradicted her, for Edna had acquired a sort of influence over the girls that required some moral courage to combat.

Study-hour came soon after for some of them, but the half-dozen older ones who were left kept on making the verses, which, unfortunately, assumed a personal character that made them seem very pointed and witty to the thoughtless girls, but which led to unhappy results a week later.