CHAPTER VIII.
A RAINY DAY.
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.