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.

Kenneth Kincaid had been modestly listening to the older gentlemen,
and now and then venturing to inquire or remark something, with an
intelligence that attracted Mr. Geoffrey; and presently it came out
that he had been south with the army; and then Mr. Geoffrey asked
questions of him, and they got upon Reconstruction business, and
comparing facts and exchanging conclusions, quite as if one was not
a mere youth with only his eyes and his brains and his conscience to
help him in his first grapple with the world in the tangle and
crisis at which he found it, and the other a grave, practiced,
keen-judging man, the counsellor of national leaders.