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.
“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.
“An Austrian army awfully arrayed,
Sure, I’m but a simple village maid,
Blossomed and ripened in woodland shade.
“Hope told a flattering tale,
She began to weep, and she began to wail,
Come in thy beauty, thou marvel of duty, sweet Annie of the vale.
“Roll on, thou dark and deep blue ocean, roll,
Nor lay that flattering unction to your soul;
And the distant bells softly toll, toll, toll.
“Hark, from the tombs a doleful sound;
The spot whereon thou stand’st is holy ground;
He cleared the barrier with a single bound.
“Have you not heard the poet tell,
Ding, dong, dell, pussy’s in the well,
Down in the meadow, sweet blue bell.”
“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.
“I never told the truth, but--
And then I told it--
I said you were an awful--
But you needn’t have felt so--
“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:
“O, being at school is pretty good--
But going home is--
I’ll be full of joy when the term is--
And I’ll write you a farewell--”
“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:
“Oft in the chilly--
When wandering cats are--
I fly out to the--
And bid them stop their--
Their shrieks and--
Their howls and--
Have driven me almost crazy.”
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.