Three men are to meet at dinner in the Bumsteadian apartments on this Christmas Eve. How has each one passed the day?
MONTGOMERY PENDRAGON, in his room in Gospeler's Gulch, reads Southern tragedies in an old copy of the _New Orleans Picayune,_ until two o'clock, when he hastily tears up all his soiled paper collars, packs a few things into a travelling satchel, and, with the latter slung over his shoulder, and a Kehoe's Indian club in his right hand, is met in the hall by his tutor, the Gospeler.
"What are you doing with that club, Mr. MONTGOMERY?" asks the Reverend OCTAVIUS, hastily stepping back into a corner.
"I've bought it to exercise with in the open air," answers the young Southerner, playfully denting the wall just over his tutor's head with it "After this dinner with Mr. DROOD, at BUMSTEAD'S, I reckon I shall start on a walking match, and I've procured the club for exercise as I go. Thus:" He twirls it high in the air, grazes Mr. SIMPSON'S nearer ear, hits his own head accidentally, and breaks the glass in the hat-stand.
"I see! I see!" says the Gospeler, rather hurriedly. "Perhaps you _had_ better be entirely alone, and in the open country, when you take that exercise."
Rubbing his skull quite dismally, the prospective pedestrian goes straightway to the porch of the Alms-House, and there waits until his sister comes down in her bonnet and joins him.
"MAGNOLIA," he remarks, hastening to be the first to speak, in order to have any conversational chance at all with her, "it is not the least mysterious part of this Mystery of ours, that keeps us all out of doors so much in the unseasonable winter month of December,[1] and now I am peculiarly a meteorological martyr in feeling obliged to go walking for two whole freezing weeks, or until the Holidays and this--this marriage-business, are over. I didn't tell Mr. SIMPSON, but my real purpose, I reckon, in having this club, is to save myself, by violent exercise with it, from perishing of cold."
"Must you do this, MONTGOMERY?" asks his colloquial sister, thoughtfully. "Perhaps if I were to talk long enough with you--"
"--You'd literally exhaust me into not going? Certainly you would," he returns, confidently. "First, my head would ache from the constant noise; then it would spin; then I should grow faint and hear you less distinctly; then your voice, although you were talking-on the same as ever, would sound like a mere steady hum to me; then I should become unconscious, and be carried home, with you still whispering in my ear. But do _not_ talk, MAGNOLIA; for I must do the walking-match. The prejudice here against my Southern birth makes me a damper upon the festivities of others at this general season of forgiveness to all mankind, and I can't stand the sight of that DROOD and Miss POTTS together. I'd better stay away until they have gone."