After tea, they went out into the garden; and there, under the shady horse-chestnuts, was a swing; and there were balls with which Hazel showed them how to play “class;” tossing in turn against the high brick wall, and taking their places up and down, according to the number of their catches.  It was only Miss Craydocke’s “Thread the Needle” that got them in again; and after that, she showed them another simple old dancing game, the “Winding Circle,” from which they were all merrily and mysteriously untwisting themselves with Miss Craydocke’s bright little thin face and her fluttering cap ribbons, and her spry little trot leading them successfully off, when the door opened, and the grand Mr. Geoffrey walked in; the man who could manage State Street, and who had stood at the right hand of Governor and President, with his clear brain, and big purse, and generous hand, through the years of the long, terrible war; the man whom it was something for great people to get to their dinners, or to have walk late into an evening drawing-room and dignify an occasion for the last half hour.

Mrs. Ripwinkley was just simply glad to see him; so she was to see Kenneth Kincaid, who came a few minutes after, just as Luclarion brought the tray of sweetmeats in, which Mrs. Ripwinkley had so far innovated upon the gracious-grandmother plan as to have after tea, instead of before.

The beautiful cockles and their rhymes got their heads all together around the large table, for the eating and the reading.  Mr. Geoffrey and Uncle Titus sat talking European politics together, a little aside.  The sugar-plums lasted a good while, with the chatter over them; and then, before they quite knew what it was all for, they had got slips of paper and lead pencils before them, and there was to be a round of “Crambo” to wind up.

“O, I don’t know how!” and “I never can!” were the first words, as they always are, when it was explained to the uninitiated; but Miss Craydocke assured them that “everybody could;” and Hazel said that “nobody expected real poetry; it needn’t be more than two lines, and those might be blank verse, if they were very hard, but jingles were better;” and so the questions and the wards were written and folded, and the papers were shuffled and opened amid outcries of, “O, this is awful!” “What a word to get in!” “Why, they haven’t the least thing to do with each other!”

“That’s the beauty of it,” said Miss Craydocke, unrelentingly; “to make them have; and it is funny how much things do have to do with each other when they once happen to come across.”

Then there were knit brows, and desperate scratchings, and such silence that Mr. Geoffrey and Uncle Titus stopped short on the Alabama question, and looked round to see what the matter was.