said unto the
lip-server: Sell all that thou hast, and give it to the Poor, and follow
Me; and from Whom the lip-server, having great possessions, went away
exceeding sorrowful!

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 woul