“Christmas,” I said.

I can’t tell how pleased I was with the enterprise I had in mind:  it suggested all sorts of amusing and surprising developments.  Moreover, I left Harriet, finally, in the breeziest of spirits, having quite forgotten her disappointment over the non-arrival of the cousins.

“If you should get the Starkweathers——­”

“‘In the bright lexicon of youth,’” I observed, “’there is no such word as fail.’”

So I set off up the town road.  A team or two had already been that way and had broken a track through the snow.  The sun was now fully up, but the air still tingled with the electricity of zero weather.  And the fields!  I have seen the fields of June and the fields of October, but I think I never saw our countryside, hills and valleys, tree spaces and brook bottoms more enchantingly beautiful than it was this morning.  Snow everywhere—­the fences half hidden, the bridges clogged, the trees laden:  where the road was hard it squeaked under my feet, and where it was soft I strode through the drifts.  And the air went to one’s head like wine!

So I tramped past the Pattersons’.  The old man, a grumpy old fellow, was going to the barn with a pail on his arm.

“Merry Christmas,” I shouted.

He looked around at me wonderingly and did not reply.  At the corners I met the Newton boys so wrapped in tippets that I could see only their eyes and the red ends of their small noses.  I passed the Williams’s house, where there was a cheerful smoke in the chimney and in the window a green wreath with a lively red bow.  And I thought how happy everyone must be on a Christmas morning like this!  At the hill bridge who should I meet but the Scotch Preacher himself, God bless him!

“Well, well, David,” he exclaimed heartily, “Merry Christmas.”

I drew my face down and said solemnly: 

“Dr. McAlway, I am on a most serious errand.”

“Why, now, what’s the matter?” He was all sympathy at once.

“I am out in the highways trying to compel the poor of this neighbourhood to come to our feast.”

The Scotch Preacher observed me with a twinkle in his eye.

“David,” he said, putting his hand to his mouth as if to speak in my ear, “there is a poor man you will na’ have to compel.”

“Oh, you don’t count,” I said.  “You’re coming anyhow.”

Then I told him of the errand with our millionaire friends, into the spirit of which he entered with the greatest zest.  He was full of advice and much excited lest I fail to do a thoroughly competent job.  For a moment I think he wanted to take the whole thing out of my hands.

“Man, man, it’s a lovely thing to do,” he exclaimed, “but I ha’ me doots—­I ha’ me doots.”

At parting he hesitated a moment, and with a serious face inquired: 

“Is it by any chance a goose?”

“It is,” I said, “a goose—­a big one.”