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