Story A Christmas Carol Author Charles Dickens

Story A Christmas Carol  

Author Charles Dickens

Stave 1: Marley’s Ghost   

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt  whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed  by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief  mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was  good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.  

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.  

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own  knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door- nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin- nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But  the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my  unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s  done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat,  emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.  

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How  could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I  don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole  executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole  residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And  even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the  very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an  undoubted bargain. The mention of Marley’s funeral  brings me back to the point I started from. There is no  doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly  understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I  am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced  that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there  would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at  night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than  there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly  turning out after dark in a breezy spot — say Saint Paul’s  Churchyard for instance — literally to astonish his son’s  weak mind.  

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it  stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door:  Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and  Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called  Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered  to both names. It was all the same to him.  

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone,  Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping,  clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint,  from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire;  secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The  cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed  nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes  red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his  grating voice. A frosty rime  was on his head, and on his  eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low  temperature always about with him; he iced his office in  the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.  

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge.  No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No  wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was  more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to  entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him.  The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could  boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They  often ‘came down’ handsomely, and Scrooge never did.  

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with  gladsome looks, ‘My dear Scrooge, how are you? When  will you come to see me?’ No beggars implored him to  bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock,  no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the  way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind  men’s dogs appeared to know  him; and when they saw  him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though  they said, ‘No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark  master!’  

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he  liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life,  warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was  what the knowing ones call ‘nuts’ to Scrooge.  

Once upon a time — of all the good days in the year,  on Christmas Eve — old Scrooge sat busy in his counting- house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal:  and he could hear the people in the court outside, go  wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their  breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones  to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three,  but it was quite dark already — it had not been light all  day — and candles were flaring in the windows of the  neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable  brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and  keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the  court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere  phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down,  obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature  lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.  

The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that  he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal  little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters.  Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so  very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he  couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his  own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the  shovel, the master predicted that  it would be necessary for  them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white  comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in  which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he  failed.  

‘A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!’ cried a  cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who  came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation  he had of his approach.  

‘Bah!’ said Scrooge, ‘Humbug!’  

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog  and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a  glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled,  and his breath smoked again. ‘Christmas a humbug, uncle!’  said Scrooge’s nephew. ‘You don’t mean that, I am sure?’  

 ‘I do,’ said Scrooge. ‘Merry Christmas! What right have  you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry?  You’re poor enough.’  

‘Come, then,’ returned the nephew gaily. ‘What right  have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be  morose? You’re rich enough.’  

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of  the moment, said ‘Bah!’ again; and followed it up with  ‘Humbug.’  

‘Don’t be cross, uncle!’ said the nephew.  

‘What else can I be,’ returned the uncle, ‘when I live in  such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon  merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time  for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself  a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing  your books and having every item in ‘em through a round  dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could  work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who  goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be  boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of  holly through his heart. He should!’  

‘Uncle!’ pleaded the nephew.  

‘Nephew!’ returned the uncle  sternly, ‘keep Christmas  in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.’  

 ‘Keep it!’ repeated Scrooge’s nephew. ‘But you don’t  keep it.’  

‘Let me leave it alone, then,’ said Scrooge. ‘Much good  may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!’  

‘There are many things from which I might have  derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’  returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am  sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has  come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred  name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart  from that — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable,  pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long  calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one  consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of  people below them as if they  really were fellow-passengers  to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on  other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never  put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it  has done me good, and will do  me good; and I say, God  bless it!’  

The clerk in the Tank involuntarily applauded.  Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he  poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark for  ever.  

 ‘Let me hear another sound from you,’ said Scrooge,  ‘and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation!  You’re quite a powerful speaker, sir,’ he added, turning to  his nephew. ‘I wonder you don’t go into Parliament.’  

‘Don’t be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us  tomorrow.’  

Scrooge said that he would see him — yes, indeed he  did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said  that he would see him in that extremity first.  

‘But why?’ cried Scrooge’s nephew. ‘Why?’  

‘Why did you get married?’ said Scrooge.  

‘Because I fell in love.’  

‘Because you fell in love!’ growled Scrooge, as if that  were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than  a merry Christmas. ‘Good afternoon!’  

‘Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before that  happened. Why give it as a reason for not coming now?’  

‘Good afternoon,’ said Scrooge.  

‘I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why  cannot we be friends?’  

‘Good afternoon,’ said Scrooge.  

‘I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute.  We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a  party. But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I’ll keep my Christmas humour to the last. So A  Merry Christmas, uncle!’  

‘Good afternoon,’ said Scrooge.  

‘And A Happy New Year!’  

‘Good afternoon,’ said Scrooge.  

His nephew left the room without an angry word,  notwithstanding. He stopped at  the outer door to bestow  the greetings of the season on the clerk, who cold as he  was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned them  cordially.  

‘There’s another fellow,’ muttered Scrooge; who  overheard him: ‘my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week,  and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I’ll  retire to Bedlam.’  

This lunatic, in letting Scrooge’s nephew out, had let  two other people in. They were portly gentlemen,  pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in  Scrooge’s office. They had books and papers in their  hands, and bowed to him.  

‘Scrooge and Marley’s, I believe,’ said one of the  gentlemen, referring to his list. ‘Have I the pleasure of  addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?’  

‘Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,’ Scrooge  replied. ‘He died seven years ago, this very night.’  

 ‘We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by  his surviving partner,’ said the gentleman, presenting his  credentials.  

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits.  At the ominous word ‘liberality,’ Scrooge frowned, and  shook his head, and handed the credentials back.  

‘At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,’ said  the gentleman, taking up a pen, ‘it is more than usually  desirable that we should make some slight provision for  the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present  time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries;  hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts,  sir.’  

‘Are there no prisons?’ asked Scrooge.  

‘Plenty of prisons,’ said the gentleman, laying down the  pen again.  

‘And the Union workhouses?’  demanded Scrooge. ‘Are  they still in operation?’  

‘They are. Still,’ returned the gentleman, ‘I wish I  could say they were not.’  

‘The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour,  then?’ said Scrooge.  

‘Both very busy, sir.’  

 ‘Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that  something had occurred to stop them in their useful  course,’ said Scrooge. ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’  

‘Under the impression that  they scarcely furnish  Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,’  returned the gentleman, ‘a few of us are endeavouring to  raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink. and  means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a  time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and  Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?’  

‘Nothing!’ Scrooge replied.  

‘You wish to be anonymous?’  

‘I wish to be left alone,’ said Scrooge. ‘Since you ask  me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t  make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make  idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I  have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are  badly off must go there.’  

‘Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.’  

‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had  better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides  — excuse me — I don’t know that.’  

‘But you might know it,’ observed the gentleman.  

 ‘It’s not my business,’ Scrooge returned. ‘It’s enough  for a man to understand his own business, and not to  interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me  constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!’  

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their  point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge returned his  labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a  more facetious temper than was usual with him.  

Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that  people ran about with flaring links, proffering their  services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them  on their way. The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff  old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a  Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck  the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous  vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its  frozen head up there. The cold became intense. In the  main street at the corner of the court, some labourers were  repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a  brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were  gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes  before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in  solitude, its overflowing sullenly congealed, and turned to  misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the  windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers’  and grocers’ trades became a splendid joke; a glorious  pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe  that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to  do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty  Mansion House, gave orders to  his fifty cooks and butlers  to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should;  and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings  on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty  in the streets, stirred up to-morrow’s pudding in his garret,  while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.  

Foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting  cold. If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil  Spirit’s nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead  of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he would have  roared to lusty purpose. The owner of one scant young  nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones  are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge’s keyhole  to regale him with a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of ‘God bless you, merry gentleman! May nothing you  dismay!’  

Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action,  that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog  and even more congenial frost.  

At length the hour of shutting up the counting- house  arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his  stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in  the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on  his hat.  

‘You’ll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?’ said  Scrooge.  

‘If quite convenient, sir.’  

‘It’s not convenient,’ said Scrooge, ‘and it’s not fair. If I  was to stop half-a-crown for it, you’d think yourself ill- used, I’ll be bound?’  

The clerk smiled faintly.  

‘And yet,’ said Scrooge, ‘you don’t think me ill-used,  when I pay a day’s wages for no work.’  

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.  

‘A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every  twenty-fifth of December!’ said Scrooge, buttoning his  great-coat to the chin. ‘But I suppose you must have the  whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.’  

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked  out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling,  and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter  dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great-coat),  went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of  boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve,  and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could  pelt, to play at blindman’s-buff.  

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual  melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers,  and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s- book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had  once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a  gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a  yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could  scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was  a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other  houses, and forgotten the way out again. It was old  enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it  but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.  The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its  every stone, was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and  frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house,  that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in  mournful meditation on the threshold.  

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular  about the knocker on the door, except that it was very  large. It is also a fact, that  Scrooge had seen it, night and  morning, during his whole residence in that place; also  that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him  as any man in the city of London, even including —  which is a bold word — the corporation, aldermen, and  livery. Let it also be borne in mind that Scrooge had not  bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last mention of  his seven years’ dead partner that afternoon. And then let  any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that  Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the  knocker, without its undergoing  any intermediate process  of change — not a knocker, but Marley’s face.  

Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the  other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light  about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry  or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to  look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly  forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or  hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were  perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it  horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face  and beyond its control, rather than a part or its own  expression.  

As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a  knocker again.  

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was  not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a  stranger from infancy, would be untrue. But he put his  hand upon the key he had relinquished, turned it sturdily,  walked in, and lighted his candle.  

He did pause, with a moment’s irresolution, before he  shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind it first, as  if he half-expected to be terrified with the sight of  Marley’s pigtail sticking out into the hall. But there was  nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and  nuts that held the knocker on, so he said ‘Pooh, pooh!’  and closed it with a bang.  

The sound resounded through the house like thunder.  Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant’s  cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of  its own. Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by  echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall,  and up the stairs; slowly too: trimming his candle as he went.  

You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six up  a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of  Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse  up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter- bar towards the wall and the door towards the balustrades:  and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and  room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge  thought he saw a locomotive  hearse going on before him  in the gloom. Half a dozen gas-lamps out of the street  wouldn’t have lighted the entry too well, so you may  suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge’s dip.  

Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that.  Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But before he shut  his heavy door, he walked through his rooms to see that  all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face  to desire to do that.  

Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room. All as they  should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the  sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin ready; and  the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had a cold in his head)  upon the hob. Nobody under the bed; nobody in the  closet; nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging  up in a suspicious attitude  against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guards, old shoes, two fish-baskets,  washing-stand on three legs, and a poker.  

Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself  in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom.  Thus secured against surprise, he took off his cravat; put  on his dressing-gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and  sat down before the fire to take his gruel.  

It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter  night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it,  before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from  such a handful of fuel. The fireplace was an old one, built  by some Dutch merchant long  ago, and paved all round  with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the  Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaohs’  daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers  descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds,  Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in  butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts —  and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came like  the ancient Prophet’s rod, and swallowed up the whole. If  each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to  shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed  fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy  of old Marley’s head on every one.  

 ‘Humbug!’ said Scrooge; and walked across the room.  

After several turns, he sat down again. As he threw his  head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a  bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and  communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a  chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with  great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread,  that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung  so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but  soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.  

This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but  it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun,  together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep  down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy  chain over the casks in the wine merchant’s cellar. Scrooge  then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted  houses were described as dragging chains.  

The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and  then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below;  then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards  his door.  

‘It’s humbug still!’ said Scrooge. ‘I won’t believe it.’  

His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it  came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame  leaped up, as though it cried ‘I know him; Marley’s  Ghost!’ and fell again.  

The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail,  usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on the latter  bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair  upon his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his  middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and  it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash- boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses  wrought in steel. His body was transparent; so that  Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his  waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.  

Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no  bowels, but he had never believed it until now.  

No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked  the phantom through and through, and saw it standing  before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its  death-cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the folded  kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he  had not observed before; he was still incredulous, and  fought against his senses.  

‘How now!’ said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever.  ‘What do you want with me?’  

 ‘Much!’ — Marley’s voice, no doubt about it.  

‘Who are you?’  

‘Ask me who I was.’  

‘Who were you then?’ said Scrooge, raising his voice.  ‘You’re particular, for a shade.’ He was going to say ‘to a  shade,’ but substituted this, as more appropriate.  

‘In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.’  

‘Can you — can you sit down?’ asked Scrooge, looking  doubtfully at him.  

‘I can.’  

‘Do it, then.’  

Scrooge asked the question, because he didn’t know  whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a  condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event of its  being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an  embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down on the  opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.  

‘You don’t believe in me,’ observed the Ghost.  

‘I don’t.’ said Scrooge.  

‘What evidence would you have of my reality beyond  that of your senses?’  

‘I don’t know,’ said Scrooge.  

‘Why do you doubt your senses?’  

 ‘Because,’ said Scrooge, ‘a little thing affects them. A  slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You  may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a  crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.  There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever  you are!’  

Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes,  nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then.  The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of  distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror;  for the spectre’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his  bones.  

To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a  moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with  him. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre’s  being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own.  Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the  case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair,  and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot  vapour from an oven.  

‘You see this toothpick?’ said Scrooge, returning  quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned; and  wishing, though it were only for  a second, to divert the  vision’s stony gaze from himself.  

 ‘I do,’ replied the Ghost.  

‘You are not looking at it,’ said Scrooge.  

‘But I see it,’ said the Ghost, ‘notwithstanding.’  

‘Well!’ returned Scrooge, ‘I have but to swallow this,  and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of  goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you!  humbug!’  

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its  chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge  held on tight to his chair, to save himself  from falling in a  swoon. But how much greater was his horror, when the  phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if it  were too warm to wear indoors, its lower jaw dropped  down upon its breast!  

Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands  before his face.  

‘Mercy!’ he said. ‘Dreadful apparition, why do you  trouble me?’  

‘Man of the worldly mind!’ replied the Ghost, ‘do you  believe in me or not?’  

‘I do,’ said Scrooge. ‘I must.  But why do spirits walk  the earth, and why do they come to me?’  

‘It is required of every man,’ the Ghost returned, ‘that  the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes  not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is  doomed to wander through the world — oh, woe is me!  — and witness what it cannot share, but might have  shared on earth, and turned to happiness!’  

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and  wrung its shadowy hands.  

‘You are fettered,’ said Scrooge, trembling. ‘Tell me  why?’  

‘I wear the chain I forged in  life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I  made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my  own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its  pattern strange to you?’  

Scrooge trembled more and more.  

‘Or would you know,’ pursued the Ghost, ‘the weight  and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full  as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago.  You have laboured on it, since.  It is a ponderous chain!’  

Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the  expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or  sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing.  

‘Jacob,’ he said, imploringly. ‘Old Jacob Marley, tell me  more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob!’  

 ‘I have none to give,’ the Ghost replied. ‘It comes from  other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by  other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor can I tell you  what I would. A very little more, is all permitted to me. I  cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My  spirit never walked beyond our counting-house — mark  me! — in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow  limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie  before me!’  

It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became  thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets.  Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did so now, but  without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his knees.  

‘You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,’  Scrooge observed, in a business-like manner, though with  humility and deference.  

‘Slow!’ the Ghost repeated.  

‘Seven years dead,’ mused Scrooge. ‘And travelling all  the time!’  

‘The whole time,’ said the Ghost. ‘No rest, no peace.  Incessant torture of remorse.’  

‘You travel fast?’ said Scrooge.  

‘On the wings of the wind,’ replied the Ghost.  

 ‘You might have got over a great quantity of ground in  seven years,’ said Scrooge.  

The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and  clanked its chain so hideously  in the dead silence of the  night, that the Ward would have been justified in  indicting it for a nuisance.  

‘Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,’ cried the  phantom, ‘not to know, that ages of incessant labour, by  immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity  before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed.  Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in  its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life  too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that  no space of regret can make  amends for one life’s  opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!’  

‘But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,’  faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.  

‘Business!’ cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again.  ‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my  business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence,  were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but  a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my  business!’  

It held up its chain at arm’s length, as if that were the  cause of all its unavailing grief,  and flung it heavily upon  the ground again.  

‘At this time of the rolling year,’ the spectre said ‘I  suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow- beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to  that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode!  Were there no poor homes to which its light would have  conducted me!’  

Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the spectre  going on at this rate, and began to quake exceedingly.  

‘Hear me!’ cried the Ghost. ‘My time is nearly gone.’  

‘I will,’ said Scrooge. ‘But don’t be hard upon me!  Don’t be flowery, Jacob! Pray!’ ‘How it is that I appear  before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I  have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.’  

It was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge shivered, and  wiped the perspiration from his brow.  

‘That is no light part of my penance,’ pursued the  Ghost. ‘I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet  a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and  hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.’  

‘You were always a good friend to me,’ said Scrooge.  ‘Thank ‘ee!’  

 ‘You will be haunted,’ resumed the Ghost, ‘by Three  Spirits.’  

Scrooge’s countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost’s  had done.  

‘Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?’ he  demanded, in a faltering voice.  

‘It is.’  

‘I — I think I’d rather not,’ said Scrooge.  

‘Without their visits,’ said the Ghost, ‘you cannot hope  to shun the path I tread. Expect the first tomorrow, when  the bell tolls One.’  

‘Couldn’t I take ‘em all at once, and have it over,  Jacob?’ hinted Scrooge.  

‘Expect the second on the next night at the same hour.  The third upon the next night when the last stroke of  Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more;  and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has  passed between us!’  

When it had said these words, the spectre took its  wrapper from the table, and bound it round its head, as  before. Scrooge knew this, by  the smart sound its teeth  made, when the jaws were brought together by the  bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again, and found his supernatural visitor confronting him in an erect  attitude, with its chain wound over and about its arm.  

The apparition walked backward from him; and at  every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that  when the spectre reached it, it was wide open. It  beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did. When they  were within two paces of each other, Marley’s Ghost held  up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Scrooge  stopped.  

Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear: for  on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused  noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and  regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the  mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark  night.  

Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his  curiosity. He looked out.  

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and  thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every  one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few  (they might be guilty governments) were linked together;  none were free. Many had been personally known to  Scrooge in their lives. He had  been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe  attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable  to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw  below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was,  clearly, that they sought to  interfere, for good, in human  matters, and had lost the power for ever.  

Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist  enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and their  spirit voices faded together; and the night became as it had  been when he walked home.  

Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door by  which the Ghost had entered. It  was double-locked, as he  had locked it with his own hands, and the bolts were  undisturbed. He tried to say ‘Humbug!’ but stopped at the  first syllable. And being, from the emotion he had  undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the  Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or  the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose; went  straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon  the instant.  

Stave 2: The First of the Three Spirits 

  

When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out  of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent  window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was  endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes,  when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck the four  quarters. So he listened for the hour.  

To his great astonishment the heavy bell went on from  six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to  twelve; then stopped. Twelve. It was past two when he  went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have  got into the works. Twelve.  

He touched the spring of his repeater, to correct this  most preposterous clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve:  and stopped.  

‘Why, it isn’t possible,’ said Scrooge, ‘that I can have  slept through a whole day and far into another night. It  isn’t possible that anything has happened to the sun, and  this is twelve at noon.’  

The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of  bed, and groped his way to the window. He was obliged  to rub the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he could see anything; and could see very little  then. All he could make out was, that it was still very  foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of  people running to and fro, and making a great stir, as there  unquestionably would have been if night had beaten off  bright day, and taken possession of the world. This was a  great relief, because ‘Three days after sight of this First of  Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge on his order,’ and  so forth, would have become  a mere United States  security if there were no days to count by.  

Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought,  and thought it over and over,  and could make nothing of  it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was; and,  the more he endeavoured not to think, the more he  thought.  

Marley’s Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time  he resolved within himself, after mature inquiry that it was  all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring  released, to its first position, andpresented the same  problem to be worked all through, ‘Was it a dream or  not?’  

Scrooge lay in this state  until the chime had gone  three-quarters more, when he remembered, on a sudden,  that the Ghost hadwarned him of a visitation when the bell tolled one. He resolved to lie awake until the hour  was passed; and, considering that he could no more go to  sleep than go to heaven, this was, perhaps, the wisest  resolution in his power.  

The quarter was so long, that he was more than once  convinced he must have sunk into a doze unconsciously,  and missed the clock. At length it broke upon his listening  ear.  

‘Ding, dong!’  

‘A quarter past,’ said Scrooge, counting.  

‘Ding, dong!’  

‘Half past,’ said Scrooge.  

‘Ding, dong!’  

‘A quarter to it,’ said Scrooge. ‘Ding, dong!’  

‘The hour itself,’ said Scrooge triumphantly, ‘and  nothing else!’  

He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now  did with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy ONE. Light  flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains  of his bed were drawn.  

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by  a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his  back, but those to which his face was addressed. The  curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting  up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to  face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to  it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at  your elbow.  

It was a strange figure — like a child: yet not so like a  child as like an old man, viewed through some  supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of  having receded from the view, and being diminished to a  child’s proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck  and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the  face had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was  on the skin. The arms were very long and muscular; the  hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength.  Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those  upper members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white,  and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of  which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly  in its hand; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry  emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But  the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its  head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all  this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of  its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a  cap, which it now held under its arm.  

Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with  increasing steadiness, was not its strangest quality. For as its  belt sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in  another, and what was light one instant, at another time  was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness:  being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now  with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a  head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline  would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted  away. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself  again; distinct and clear as ever.  

‘Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to  me.’ asked Scrooge.  

‘I am.’  

The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if  instead of being so close beside him, it were at a distance.  

‘Who, and what are you.’ Scrooge demanded.  

‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.’  

‘Long Past.’ inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish  stature.  

‘No. Your past.’  

Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if  anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire  to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.  

 ‘What.’ exclaimed the Ghost,  ‘would you so soon put  out, with worldly hands, the light I give. Is it not enough  that you are one of those whose passions made this cap,  and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low  upon my brow.’   

Scrooge reverently disclaimed all intention to offend or  any knowledge of having wilfully bonneted the Spirit at  any period of his life. He then made bold to inquire what  business brought him there.  

‘Your welfare.’ said the Ghost.  

Scrooge expressed himself much obliged, but could not  help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have  been more conducive to that end. The Spirit must have  heard him thinking, for it said immediately:  

‘Your reclamation, then. Take heed.’  

It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him  gently by the arm.  

‘Rise. and walk with me.’  

It would have been in vain for Scrooge to plead that  the weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian  purposes; that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long  way below freezing; that he was clad but lightly in his  slippers, dressing-gown, and nightcap; and that he had a  cold upon him at that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman’s hand, was not to be resisted. He rose: but finding  that the Spirit made towards the window, clasped his robe  in supplication.  

‘I am mortal,’ Scrooge remonstrated, ‘and liable to fall.’  

‘Bear but a touch of my hand there,’ said the Spirit,  laying it upon his heart,’ and you shall be upheld in more  than this.’  

As the words were spoken, they passed through the  wall, and stood upon an open country road, with fields on  either hand. The city had entirely vanished. Not a vestige  of it was to be seen. The darkness and the mist had  vanished with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter day, with  snow upon the ground.  

‘Good Heaven!’ said Scrooge, clasping his hands  together, as he looked about him. ‘I was bred in this place.  I was a boy here.’   

The Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch,  though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still  present to the old man’s sense of feeling. He was conscious  of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one  connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys,  and cares long, long, forgotten.  

‘Your lip is trembling,’ said the Ghost. ‘And what is  that upon your cheek.’   

Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his  voice, that it was a pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead  him where he would.  

‘You recollect the way.’ inquired the Spirit.  

‘Remember it.’ cried Scrooge with fervour; ‘I could  walk it blindfold.’   

‘Strange to have forgotten it for so many years.’  observed the Ghost. ‘Let us go on.’   

They walked along the road, Scrooge recognising every  gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town  appeared in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and  winding river. Some shaggy ponies now were seen  trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who  called to other boys in country  gigs and carts, driven by  farmers. All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to  each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry  music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it.  

‘These are but shadows of the things that have been,’  said the Ghost. ‘They have no consciousness of us.’   

The jocund travellers came on; and as they came,  Scrooge knew and named them every one. Why was he  rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them. Why did his cold  eye glisten, and his heart leap  up as they went past. Why  was he filled with gladness when  he heard them give each other Merry Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and  bye-ways, for their several homes. What was merry  Christmas to Scrooge. Out upon merry Christmas. What  good had it ever done to him.  

‘The school is not quite deserted,’ said the Ghost. ‘A  solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.’   

Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.  

They left the high-road, by a well-remembered lane,  and soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a  little weathercock-surmounted cupola, on the roof, and a  bell hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of broken  fortunes; for the spacious offices were little used, their  walls were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and  their gates decayed. Fowls clucked and strutted in the  stables; and the coach-houses and sheds were over-run  with grass. Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state,  within; for entering the dreary hall, and glancing through  the open doors of many rooms, they found them poorly  furnished, cold, and vast. There was an earthy savour in  the air, a chilly bareness in the place, which associated  itself somehow with too much getting up by candle-light,  and not too much to eat.   

They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a  door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still  by lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a  lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat  down upon a form, and wept to  see his poor forgotten self  as he used to be.  

Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle  from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the  half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a  sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar,  not the idle swinging of an empty store-house door, no,  not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of  Scrooge with a softening influence, and gave a freer  passage to his tears.  

The Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his  younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man, in  foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at:  stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt,  and leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.  

‘Why, it’s Ali Baba.’ Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. ‘It’s  dear old honest Ali Baba. Yes, yes, I know. One  Christmas time, when yonder solitary child was left here  all alone, he did come, for the first time, just like that.  Poor boy. And Valentine,’ said Scrooge,’ and his wild  brother, Orson; there they go. And what’s his name, who was put down in his drawers, asleep, at the Gate of  Damascus; don’t you see him. And the Sultan’s Groom  turned upside down by the Genii; there he is upon his  head. Serve him right. I’m glad of it. What business had he  to be married to the Princess.’   

To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his  nature on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice  between laughing and crying; and to see his heightened  and excited face; would have been a surprise to his  business friends in the city, indeed.  

‘There’s the Parrot.’ cried Scrooge. ‘Green body and  yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the  top of his head; there he is. Poor Robin Crusoe, he called  him, when he came home again after sailing round the  island. ‘Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin  Crusoe.’ The man thought he was dreaming, but he  wasn’t. It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday,  running for his life to the little creek. Halloa. Hoop.  Hallo.’   

Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his  usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, ‘Poor  boy.’ and cried again.  

 ‘I wish,’ Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his  pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with  his cuff: ‘but it’s too late now.’   

‘What is the matter.’ asked the Spirit.  

‘Nothing,’ said Scrooge. ‘Nothing. There was a boy  singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should  like to have given him something: that’s all.’   

The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand:  saying as it did so, ‘Let us see another Christmas.’   

Scrooge’s former self grew larger at the words, and the  room became a little darker and more dirty. The panels  shrunk, the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out  of the ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead; but  how all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more  than you do. He only knew that it was quite correct; that  everything had happened so; that there he was, alone  again, when all the other boys had gone home for the jolly  holidays.  

He was not reading now, but walking up and down  despairingly.  

Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful  shaking of his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.  

It opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy,  came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and often kissing him, addressed him as her ‘Dear, dear  brother.’  

‘I have come to bring you home, dear brother.’ said the  child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to  laugh. ‘To bring you home, home, home.’   

‘Home, little Fan.’ returned the boy.  

‘Yes.’ said the child, brimful of  glee. ‘Home, for good  and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder  than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven. He spoke so  gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that  I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come  home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a  coach to bring you. And you’re to be a man.’ said the  child, opening her eyes,’ and are never to come back here;  but first, we’re to be together all the Christmas long, and  have the merriest time in all the world.’   

‘You are quite a woman, little Fan.’ exclaimed the boy.  

She clapped her hands and laughed, and tried to touch  his head; but being too little, laughed again, and stood on  tiptoe to embrace him. Then she began to drag him, in  her childish eagerness, towards the door; and he, nothing  loth to go, accompanied her.  

A terrible voice in the hall cried. ‘Bring down Master  Scrooge’s box, there.’ and in the hall appeared the  

schoolmaster himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with  a ferocious condescension, and threw him into a dreadful  state of mind by shaking hands with him. He then  conveyed him and his sister into the veriest old well of a  shivering best-parlour that ever was seen, where the maps  upon the wall, and the celestial and terrestrial globes in the  windows, were waxy with cold. Here he produced a  decanter of curiously light wine, and a block of curiously  heavy cake, and administered instalments of those dainties  to the young people: at the same time, sending out a  meagre servant to offer a glass of something to the  postboy, who answered that he  thanked the gentleman,  but if it was the same tap as  he had tasted before, he had  rather not. Master Scrooge’s trunk  being by this time tied  on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the  schoolmaster good-bye right willingly; and getting into it,  drove gaily down the garden-sweep: the quick wheels  dashing the hoar-frost and snow from off the dark leaves  of the evergreens like spray.  

‘Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have  withered,’ said the Ghost. ‘But she had a large heart.’   

‘So she had,’ cried Scrooge. ‘You’re right. I will not  gainsay it, Spirit. God forbid.’   

 ‘She died a woman,’ said the Ghost, ‘and had, as I  think, children.’   

‘One child,’ Scrooge returned.  

‘True,’ said the Ghost. ‘Your nephew.’   

Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and answered  briefly, ‘Yes.’   

Although they had but that moment left the school  behind them, they were now in  the busy thoroughfares of  a city, where shadowy passengers passed and repassed;  where shadowy carts and coaches battle for the way, and  all the strife and tumult of a real city were. It was made  plain enough, by the dressing of  the shops, that here too it  was Christmas time again; but it was evening, and the  streets were lighted up.  

The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and  asked Scrooge if he knew it.  

‘Know it.’ said Scrooge. ‘I was apprenticed here.’   

They went in. At sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh  wig, sitting behind such a high  desk, that if he had been  two inches taller he must have knocked his head against  the ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement:  

‘Why, it’s old Fezziwig. Bless his heart; it’s Fezziwig  alive again.’   

Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the  clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his  hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over  himself, from his shows to his organ of benevolence; and  called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice:  

‘Yo ho, there. Ebenezer. Dick.’   

Scrooge’s former self, now grown a young man, came  briskly in, accompanied by his fellow-prentice.  

‘Dick Wilkins, to be sure.’ said Scrooge to the Ghost.  ‘Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached to  me, was Dick. Poor Dick. Dear, dear.’   

‘Yo ho, my boys.’ said Fezziwig. ‘No more work to- night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer. Let’s  have the shutters up,’ cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap  of his hands,’ before a man can say Jack Robinson.’   

You wouldn’t believe how those two fellows went at  it. They charged into the street with the shutters — one,  two, three — had them up in their places — four, five, six  — barred them and pinned then — seven, eight, nine —  and came back before you could have got to twelve,  panting like race-horses.  

‘Hilli-ho!’ cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the  high desk, with wonderful agility. ‘Clear away, my lads, and let’s have lots of room here. Hilli-ho, Dick. Chirrup,  Ebenezer.’   

Clear away. There was nothing they wouldn’t have  cleared away, or couldn’t have cleared away, with old  Fezziwig looking on. It was done in a minute. Every  movable was packed off, as if it were dismissed from  public life for evermore; the floor was swept and watered,  the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire;  and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and  bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a  winter’s night.  

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to  the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like  fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs Fezziwig, one vast  substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs,  beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers  whose hearts they broke. In  came all the young men and  women employed in the business. In came the housemaid,  with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her  brother’s particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy  from over the way, who was suspected of not having  board enough from his master;  trying to hide himself  behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved  to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some  gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling;  in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all  went, twenty couples at once; hands half round and back  again the other way; down the middle and up again;  round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping;  old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new  top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all  top couples at last, and not  a bottom one to help them.  When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig,  clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out,’ Well  done.’ and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of  porter, especially provided for  that purpose. But scorning  rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again,  though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler  had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he  were a bran-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or  perish.  

There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and  more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus,  and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a  great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies,  and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening  came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind. The sort of man who knew his business  better than you or I could have told it him.) struck up Sir  Roger de Coverley.’ Then old Fezziwig stood out to  dance with Mrs Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good  stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and  twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled  with; people who would dance, and had no notion of  walking.  

But if they had been twice as many — ah, four times  — old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and  so would Mrs Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be  his partner in every sense of the term. If that’s not high  praise, tell me higher, and I’ll use it. A positive light  appeared to issue from Fezziwig’s calves. They shone in  every part of the dance like moons. You couldn’t have  predicted, at any given time, what would have become of  them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs Fezziwig had  gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands  to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the- needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig cut — cut  so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came  upon his feet again without a stagger.  

When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke  up. Mr and Mrs Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side of the door, and shaking hands with every  person individually as he or she went out, wished him or  her a Merry Christmas. When everybody had retired but  the two prentices, they did the same to them; and thus the  cheerful voices died away, and the lads were left to their  beds; which were under a counter in the back-shop.  

During the whole of this time, Scrooge had acted like a  man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene,  and with his former self. He corroborated everything,  remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and  underwent the strangest agitation. It was not until now,  when the bright faces of his former self and Dick were  turned from them, that he  remembered the Ghost, and  became conscious that it was looking full upon him, while  the light upon its head burnt very clear.  

‘A small matter,’ said the Ghost, ‘to make these silly  folks so full of gratitude.’  

‘Small.’ echoed Scrooge.  

The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two  apprentices, who were pouring out their hearts in praise of  Fezziwig: and when he had done so, said,  

‘Why. Is it not. He has spent but a few pounds of your  mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that  he deserves this praise.’   

 ‘It isn’t that,’ said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and  speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self.  ‘It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy  or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a  pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and  looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is  impossible to add and count them up: what then. The  happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.’   

He felt the Spirit’s glance, and stopped.  

‘What is the matter.’ asked the Ghost.  

‘Nothing in particular,’ said Scrooge.   

‘Something, I think.’ the Ghost insisted.  

‘No,’ said Scrooge,’ No. I should like to be able to say  a word or two to my clerk just now. That’s all.’   

His former self turned down  the lamps as he gave  utterance to the wish; and Scrooge and the Ghost again  stood side by side in the open air.  

‘My time grows short,’ observed the Spirit. ‘Quick.’   

This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one  whom he could see, but it produced an immediate effect.  For again Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man  in the prime of life. His face  had not the harsh and rigid  lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of  care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had  taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree  would fall.  

He was not alone, but sat by  the side of a fair young  girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears,  which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of  Christmas Past.  

‘It matters little,’ she said, softly. ‘To you, very little.  Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and  comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do,  I have no just cause to grieve.’   

‘What Idol has displaced you.’ he rejoined.  

‘A golden one.’   

‘This is the even-handed dealing of the world.’ he said.  ‘There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and  there is nothing it professes to  condemn with such severity  as the pursuit of wealth.’   

‘You fear the world too much,’ she answered, gently.  ‘All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being  beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your  nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master- passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not.’   

‘What then.’ he retorted. ‘Even if I have grown so  much wiser, what then. I am not changed towards you.’   

She shook her head.  

‘Am I.’   

‘Our contract is an old one. It was made when we  were both poor and content to be so, until, in good  season, we could improve our  worldly fortune by our  patient industry. You are changed. When it was made,  you were another man.’   

‘I was a boy,’ he said impatiently.  

‘Your own feeling tells you that you were not what  you are,’ she returned. ‘I am. That which promised  happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with  misery now that we are two. How often and how keenly I  have thought of this, I will not say. It is enough that I  have thought of it, and can release you.’   

‘Have I ever sought release.’   

‘In words. No. Never.’   

‘In what, then.’   

‘In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another  atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In  everything that made my love of any worth or value in  your sight. If this had never been between us,’ said the  girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him;’ tell  me, would you seek me out and try to win me now. Ah,  no.’   

He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in  spite of himself. But he said with a struggle,’ You think  not.’   

‘I would gladly think otherwise if I could,’ she  answered, ‘Heaven knows. When I have learned a Truth  like this, I know how strong and  irresistible it must be.  But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can  even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl —  you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh  everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you  were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so,  do I not know that your repentance and regret would  surely follow. I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for  the love of him you once were.’   

He was about to speak; but with her head turned from  him, she resumed.  

‘You may — the memory of what is past half makes me  hope you will — have pain in this. A very, very brief  time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as  an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that  you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have  chosen.’   

She left him, and they parted. 

 ‘Spirit.’ said Scrooge,’ show me no more. Conduct me  home. Why do you delight to torture me.’   

‘One shadow more.’ exclaimed the Ghost.  

‘No more.’ cried Scrooge. ‘No more, I don’t wish to  see it. Show me no more.’   

But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms,  and forced him to observe what happened next.  

They were in another scene and place; a room, not  very large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the  winter fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that  Scrooge believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a  comely matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The noise  in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were  more children there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of  mind could count; and, unlike the celebrated herd in the  poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves  like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.  The consequences were uproarious beyond belief; but no  one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and  daughter laughed heartily, and enjoyed it very much; and  the latter, soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got  pillaged by the young brigands most ruthlessly. What  would I not have given to one of them. Though I never  could have been so rude, no, no. I wouldn’t for the wealth of all the world have crushed that braided hair, and  torn it down; and for the precious little shoe, I wouldn’t  have plucked it off, God bless my soul. to save my life. As  to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young  brood, I couldn’t have done it; I should have expected my  arm to have grown round it for a punishment, and never  come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked, I  own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her,  that she might have opened them; to have looked upon  the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush;  to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be  a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I  do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and  yet to have been man enough to know its value.  

But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a  rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and  plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a  flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet the  father, who came home attended by a man laden with  Christmas toys and presents. Then the shouting and the  struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the  defenceless porter. The scaling him with chairs for ladders  to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown-paper  parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible  affection. The shouts of wonder and delight with which  the development of every package was received. The  terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in the  act of putting a doll’s frying-pan into his mouth, and was  more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious  turkey, glued on a wooden platter. The immense relief of  finding this a false alarm. The joy, and gratitude, and  ecstasy. They are all indescribable alike. It is enough that  by degrees the children and their emotions got out of the  parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to the top of the  house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.  

And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than  ever, when the master of the house, having his daughter  leaning fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother  at his own fireside; and when  he thought that such  another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise,  might have called him father, and been a spring-time in  the haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim  indeed.  

‘Belle,’ said the husband, turning to his wife with a  smile,’ I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.’   

‘Who was it.’   

‘Guess.’   

 ‘How can I. Tut, don’t I know.’ she added in the same  breath, laughing as he laughed. ‘Mr Scrooge.’   

‘Mr Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as  it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could  scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of  death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the  world, I do believe.’   

‘Spirit.’ said Scrooge in a broken voice,’ remove me  from this place.’   

‘I told you these were shadows of the things that have  been,’ said the Ghost. ‘That they  are what they  are, do not  blame me.’   

‘Remove me.’ Scrooge exclaimed,’ I cannot bear it.’   

He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked  upon him with a face, in which in some strange way there  were fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled  with it.  

‘Leave me. Take me back. Haunt me no longer.’   

In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which  the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was  undisturbed by any effort of its adversary, Scrooge  observed that its light was burning high and bright; and  dimly connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action  pressed it down upon its head.  

The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher  covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it  down with all his force, he could not hide the light, which  streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the  ground.  

He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by  an irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own  bedroom. He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his  hand relaxed; and had barely time to reel to bed, before he  sank into a heavy sleep.  

Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits 

Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge  had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon  the stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time, for the especial  purpose of holding a conference with the second  messenger despatched to him through Jacob Marley’s  intervention. But, finding that he turned uncomfortably  cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this  new spectre would draw back, he put them every one  aside with his own hands, and lying down again,  established a sharp look-out all round the bed. For, he  wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its  appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise, and  made nervous.  

Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume  themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and  being usually equal to the time-of-day, express the wide  range of their capacity for adventure by observing that  they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to  manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range  of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily  as this, I don’t mind calling on you to believe that he was  ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and  that nothing between a baby  and rhinoceros would have  astonished him very much.  

Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not  by any means prepared for nothing; and, consequently,  when the Bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was  taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten  minutes, a quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came.  All this time, he lay upon his bed, the very core and centre  of a blaze of ruddy light, which streamed upon it when  the clock proclaimed the hour; and which, being only  light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was  powerless to make out what it  meant, or would be at; and  was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very  moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion,  without having the consolation of knowing it. At last,  however, he began to think — as you or I would have  thought at first; for it is always the person not in the  predicament who knows what ought to have been done in  it, and would unquestionably have done it too — at last, I  say, he began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from  whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea  taking full possession of his mind, he got up softly and  shuffled in his slippers to the door.  

The moment Scrooge’s hand was on the lock, a strange  voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He  obeyed.  

It was his own room. There was no doubt about that.  But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The  walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it  looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright  gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly,  mistletoe, and ivy reflected back  the light, as if so many  little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty  blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull  petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge’s  time, or Marley’s, or for many and many a winter season  gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne,  were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of  meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies,  plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts,  cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears,  immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that  made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to  see, who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike  Plenty’s horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on  Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door.  

‘Come in.’ exclaimed the Ghost. ‘Come in, and know  me better, man.’  

Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this  Spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and  though the Spirit’s eyes were clear and kind, he did not  like to meet them.  

‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,’ said the Spirit.  ‘Look upon me.’  

Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple  green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This  garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious  breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed  by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds  of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no  other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there  with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and  free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand,  its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its  joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath  was eaten up with rust.  

‘You have never seen the like  of me before.’ exclaimed  the Spirit.  

‘Never,’ Scrooge made answer to it.  

‘Have never walked forth with the younger members  of my family; meaning (for I am very young) my elder  brothers born in these later years.’ pursued the Phantom.  

‘I don’t think I have,’ said Scrooge. ‘I am afraid I have  not. Have you had many brothers, Spirit.’   

‘More than eighteen hundred,’ said the Ghost.  

‘A tremendous family to provide for.’ muttered  Scrooge.  

The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.  

‘Spirit,’ said Scrooge submissively,’ conduct me where  you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I  learnt a lesson which is working now. To-night, if you  have aught to teach me, let me profit by it.’   

‘Touch my robe.’   

Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.  

Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game,  poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies,  puddings, fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly. So did  the room, the fire, the ruddy glow, the hour of night, and they stood in the city streets on Christmas morning, where  (for the weather was severe) the people made a rough, but  brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the  snow from the pavement in front of their dwellings, and  from the tops of their houses, whence it was mad delight  to the boys to see it come plumping down into the road  below, and splitting into artificial little snow-storms.  

The house fronts looked black enough, and the  windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet  of snow upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon  the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed up in  deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons;  furrows that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of  times where the great streets branched off; and made  intricate channels, hard to trace in the thick yellow mud  and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest  streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half  frozen, whose heavier particles descended in shower of  sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by  one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their  dear hearts’ content. There was nothing very cheerful in  the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of  cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse  in vain.  

For, the people who were shovelling away on the  housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one  another from the parapets, and  now and then exchanging  a facetious snowball — better-natured missile far than  many a wordy jest — laughing heartily if it went right and  not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers’ shops  were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in  their glory. There were great, round, round, pot-bellied  baskets of chestnuts, shaped like  the waistcoats of jolly old  gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the  street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy,  brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the  fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking  from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they  went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe.  There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming  pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the  shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous  hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they  passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown,  recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the  woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and  swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons,  and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons,  urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in  paper bags and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver  fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though  members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to  know that there was something going on; and, to a fish,  went gasping round and round their little world in slow  and passionless excitement.  

The Grocers’. oh the Grocers’. nearly closed, with  perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those  gaps such glimpses. It was not alone that the scales  descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that  the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the  canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or  even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so  grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so  plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the  sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so  delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with  molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint  and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were  moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that  everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but  the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the  hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against  each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets  wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and  came running back to fetch them, and committed  hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible;  while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh  that the polished hearts with which they fastened their  aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside  for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if  they chose.  

But soon the steeples called good people all, to church  and chapel, and away they came, flocking through the  streets in their best clothes, and with their gayest faces.  And at the same time there emerged from scores of bye- streets, lanes, and nameless turnings, innumerable people,  carrying their dinners to the baker’ shops. The sight of  these poor revellers appeared  to interest the Spirit very  much, for he stood with Scrooge beside him in a baker’s  doorway, and taking off the covers as their bearers passed,  sprinkled incense on their dinners from his torch. And it  was a very uncommon kind of torch, for once or twice when there were angry words between some dinner- carriers who had jostled each other, he shed a few drops of  water on them from it, and their good humour was  restored directly. For they said, it was a shame to quarrel  upon Christmas Day. And so it was. God love it, so it was.  

In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up;  and yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these  dinners and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed  blotch of wet above each baker’s oven; where the  pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.   

‘Is there a peculiar flavour in  what you sprinkle from  your torch.’ asked Scrooge.  

‘There is. My own.’   

‘Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day.’  asked Scrooge.  

‘To any kindly given. To a poor one most.’   

‘Why to a poor one most.’ asked Scrooge.  

‘Because it needs it most.’   

‘Spirit,’ said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought,’ I  wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about  us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of  innocent enjoyment.’   

‘I.’ cried the Spirit.  

 ‘You would deprive them of their means of dining  every seventh day, often the only day on which they can  be said to dine at all,’ said Scrooge. ‘Wouldn’t you.’   

‘I.’ cried the Spirit.  

‘You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day.’  said Scrooge. ‘And it comes to the same thing.’   

‘I seek.’ exclaimed the Spirit.  

‘Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your  name, or at least in that of your family,’ said Scrooge.  

‘There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the  Spirit,’ who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds  of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and  selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all  our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember  that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’   

Scrooge promised that he would; and they went on,  invisible, as they had been before, into the suburbs of the  town. It was a remarkable quality of the Ghost (which  Scrooge had observed at the baker’s), that notwithstanding  his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any  place with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite  as gracefully and like a supernatural creature, as it was  possible he could have done in any lofty hall.  

And perhaps it was the pleasure the good Spirit had in  showing off this power of his, or else it was his own kind,  generous, hearty nature, and his sympathy with all poor  men, that led him straight to Scrooge’s clerk’s; for there he  went, and took Scrooge with him, holding to his robe;  and on the threshold of the door the Spirit smiled, and  stopped to bless Bob Cratchit’s dwelling with the  sprinkling of his torch. Think of that. Bob had but fifteen  bob a-week himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen  copies of his Christian name; and yet the Ghost of  Christmas Present blessed his four-roomed house.  

Then up rose Mrs Cratchit, Cratchit’s wife, dressed out  but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons,  which are cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence;  and she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second  of her daughters, also brave in  ribbons; while Master Peter  Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and  getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob’s  private property, conferred upon his son and heir in  honour of the day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself  so gallantly attired, and yearned to show his linen in the  fashionable Parks. And now two smaller Cratchits, boy  and girl, came tearing in, screaming that outside the  baker’s they had smelt the goose, and known it for their own; and basking in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion,  these young Cratchits danced about the table, and exalted  Master Peter Cratchit to the skies, while he (not proud,  although his collars nearly choked him) blew the fire, until  the slow potatoes bubbling up, knocked loudly at the  saucepan-lid to be let out and peeled.  

‘What has ever got your precious father then.’ said Mrs  Cratchit. ‘And your brother, Tiny Tim. And Martha  warn’t as late last Christmas Day by half-an-hour.’   

‘Here’s Martha, mother.’ said a girl, appearing as she  spoke.  

‘Here’s Martha, mother.’ cried the two young  Cratchits. ‘Hurrah. There’s such a goose, Martha.’   

‘Why, bless your heart alive,  my dear, how late you  are.’ said Mrs Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and  taking off her shawl and bonnet for her with officious zeal.  

‘We’d a deal of work to finish  up last night,’ replied the  girl,’ and had to clear away this morning, mother.’   

‘Well. Never mind so long as you are come,’ said Mrs  Cratchit. ‘Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and have a  warm, Lord bless ye.’   

‘No, no. There’s father coming,’ cried the two young  Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. ‘Hide, Martha,  hide.’   

So Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the  father, with at least three feet  of comforter exclusive of the  fringe, hanging down before him; and his threadbare  clothes darned up and brushed, to look seasonable; and  Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a  little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame.  

‘Why, where’s our Martha.’ cried Bob Cratchit,  looking round.  

‘Not coming,’ said Mrs Cratchit.  

‘Not coming.’ said Bob, with a sudden declension in  his high spirits; for he had been Tim’s blood horse all the  way from church, and had come home rampant. ‘Not  coming upon Christmas Day.’   

Martha didn’t like to see him disappointed, if it were  only in joke; so she came out prematurely from behind  the closet door, and ran into his arms, while the two  young Cratchits hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into  the wash-house, that he might hear the pudding singing in  the copper.  

‘And how did little Tim behave. asked Mrs Cratchit,  when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had  hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.  

‘As good as gold,’ said Bob,’ and better. Somehow he  gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming  home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church,  because he was a cripple, and it  might be pleasant to them  to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame  beggars walk, and blind men see.’   

Bob’s voice was tremulous when he told them this, and  trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing  strong and hearty.  

His active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and  back came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken,  escorted by his brother and sister to his stool before the  fire; and while Bob, turning up his cuffs — as if, poor  fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby —  compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and  lemons, and stirred it round and round and put it on the  hob to simmer; Master Peter, and the two ubiquitous  young Cratchits went to fetch  the goose, with which they  soon returned in high procession.  

Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a  goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to  which a black swan was a matter of course — and in truth  it was something very like it in that house. Mrs Cratchit  made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan)  hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour; Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple- sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim  beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young  Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting  themselves, and mounting guard upon their posts,  crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek  for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the  dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by  a breathless pause, as Mrs Cratchit, looking slowly all  along the carving-knife, prepared to plunge it in the  breast; but when she did, and when the long expected  gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose  all round the board, and even Tiny Tim, excited by the  two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of  his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah.  

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t  believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness  and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of  universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed  potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family;  indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying  one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it  all at last. Yet every one  had had enough, and the  youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows. But now, the plates being changed  by Miss Belinda, Mrs Cratchit left the room alone — too  nervous to bear witnesses — to take the pudding up and  bring it in.  

Suppose it should not be done enough. Suppose it  should break in turning out. Suppose somebody should  have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it,  while they were merry with the goose — a supposition at  which the two young Cratchits became livid. All sorts of  horrors were supposed.  

Hallo. A great deal of steam. The pudding was out of  the copper. A smell like a washing-day. That was the  cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next  door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that.  That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs Cratchit  entered — flushed, but smiling proudly — with the  pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm,  blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and  bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.  

Oh, a wonderful pudding. Bob Cratchit said, and  calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success  achieved by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs  Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she  would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but  nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a  large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any  Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.  

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared,  the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in  the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and  oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of  chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew  round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle,  meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the  family display of glass. Two tumblers, and a custard-cup  without a handle.  

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well  as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out  with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire  sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:  

‘A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us.’   

Which all the family re-echoed.  

‘God bless us every one.’ said Tiny Tim, the last of all.  

He sat very close to his father’s side upon his little stool.  Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the  child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded  that he might be taken from him.  

 ‘Spirit,’ said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt  before, ‘tell me if Tiny Tim will live.’   

‘I see a vacant seat,’ replied the Ghost, ‘in the poor  chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully  preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the  Future, the child will die.’   

‘No, no,’ said Scrooge. ‘Oh, no, kind Spirit. say he will  be spared.’   

‘If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none  other of my race,’ returned the Ghost, ‘will find him here.  What then. If he be like to die, he had better do it, and  decrease the surplus population.’   

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted  by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.  ‘Man,’ said the Ghost, ‘if man you be in heart, not  adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have  discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you  decide what men shall live, what men shall die. It may be,  that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and  less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh  God. to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the  too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.’ 

Scrooge bent before the Ghost’s rebuke, and trembling  cast his eyes upon the ground. But he raised them  speedily, on hearing his own name.  

‘Mr Scrooge.’ said Bob; ‘I’ll give you Mr Scrooge, the  Founder of the Feast.’   

‘The Founder of the Feast indeed.’ cried Mrs Cratchit,  reddening. ‘I wish I had him here. I’d give him a piece of  my mind to feast upon, and I hope he’d have a good  appetite for it.’   

‘My dear,’ said Bob, ‘the children. Christmas Day.’   

‘It should be Christmas Day, I am sure,’ said she, ‘on  which one drinks the health of such an odious, stingy,  hard, unfeeling man as Mr Scrooge. You know he is,  Robert. Nobody knows it better than you do, poor  fellow.’   

‘My dear,’ was Bob’s mild answer, ‘Christmas Day.’   

‘I’ll drink his health  for your sake and the Day’s,’ said  Mrs Cratchit, ‘not for his. Long life to him. A merry  Christmas and a happy new year. He’ll be very merry and  very happy, I have no doubt.’   

The children drank the toast after her. It was the first of  their proceedings which had  no heartiness. Tiny Tim  drank it last of all, but he didn’t care twopence for it.  Scrooge was the Ogre of the family. The mention of his name cast a dark shadow on the party, which was not  dispelled for full five minutes.  

After it had passed away, they were ten times merrier  than before, from the mere relief of Scrooge the Baleful  being done with. Bob Cratchit told them how he had a  situation in his eye for Master Peter, which would bring  in, if obtained, full five-and-sixpence weekly. The two  young Cratchits laughed tremendously at the idea of  Peter’s being a man of business; and Peter himself looked  thoughtfully at the fire from between his collars, as if he  were deliberating what particular investments he should  favour when he came into the receipt of that bewildering  income. Martha, who was a poor apprentice at a  milliner’s, then told them what kind of work she had to  do, and how many hours she worked at a stretch, and how  she meant to lie abed to-morrow morning for a good long  rest; to-morrow being a holiday she passed at home. Also  how she had seen a countess and a lord some days before,  and how the lord was much about  as tall as Peter; at which  Peter pulled up his collars so high that you couldn’t have  seen his head if you had been there. All this time the  chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and by-and- bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive little voice,  and sang it very well indeed.  

There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not  a handsome family; they were not  well dressed; their shoes  were far from being water-proof; their clothes were  scanty; and Peter might have known, and very likely did,  the inside of a pawnbroker’s. But, they were happy,  grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the  time; and when they faded, and looked happier yet in the  bright sprinklings of the Spirit’s torch at parting, Scrooge  had his eye upon them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until  the last.  

By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty  heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the  streets, the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens,  parlours, and all sorts of rooms, was wonderful. Here, the  flickering of the blaze showed preparations for a cosy  dinner, with hot plates baking through and through before  the fire, and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut  out cold and darkness. There all the children of the house  were running out into the snow to meet their married  sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, and be the first to  greet them. Here, again, were shadows on the window- blind of guests assembling; and  there a group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur-booted, and all chattering at once,  tripped lightly off to some near  neighbour’s house; where,  woe upon the single man who saw them enter — artful  witches, well they knew it — in a glow.  

But, if you had judged from the numbers of people on  their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought  that no one was at home to give them welcome when  they got there, instead of every house expecting company,  and piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it,  how the Ghost exulted. How it bared its breadth of breast,  and opened its capacious palm, and floated on,  outpouring, with a generous hand, its bright and harmless  mirth on everything within its reach. The very  lamplighter, who ran on before, dotting the dusky street  with specks of light, and who was dressed to spend the  evening somewhere, laughed out loudly as the Spirit  passed, though little kenned the lamplighter that he had  any company but Christmas.  

And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost,  they stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where  monstrous masses of rude stone  were cast about, as though  it were the burial-place of giants; and water spread itself  wheresoever it listed, or would have done so, but for the  frost that held it prisoner; and  nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass. Down in the west the setting  sun had left a streak of fiery  red, which glared upon the  desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning  lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of  darkest night.  

‘What place is this.’ asked Scrooge.  

‘A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels  of the earth,’ returned the Spirit. ‘But they know me.  See.’   

A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly  they advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud  and stone, they found a cheerful company assembled  round a glowing fire. An old, old man and woman, with  their children and their children’s children, and another  generation beyond that, all decked out gaily in their  holiday attire. The old man, in a voice that seldom rose  above the howling of the wind upon the barren waste,  was singing them a Christmas song — it had been a very  old song when he was a boy — and from time to time  they all joined in the chorus. So surely as they raised their  voices, the old man got quite blithe and loud; and so  surely as they stopped, his vigour sank again.  

The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his  robe, and passing on above the moor, sped — whither.  

Not to sea. To sea. To Scrooge’s horror, looking back, he  saw the last of the land, a frightful range of rocks, behind  them; and his ears were deafened by the thundering of  water, as it rolled and roared, and raged among the  dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to  undermine the earth.  

Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league  or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed,  the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse.  Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds  — born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of  the water — rose and fell about it, like the waves they  skimmed.  

But even here, two men who watched the light had  made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone  wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining  their horny hands over the rough table at which they sat,  they wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of  grog; and one of them: the elder, too, with his face all  damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head  of an old ship might be: struck up a sturdy song that was  like a Gale in itself.  

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving  sea — on, on — until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted  on a ship. They stood beside  the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the  officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their  several stations; but every man among them hummed a  Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke  below his breath to his companion of some bygone  Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it.  And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or  bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than  on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in  its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a  distance, and had known that they delighted to remember  him.  

It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the  moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it  was to move on through the lonely darkness over an  unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as  Death: it was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus  engaged, to hear a hearty laugh. It was a much greater  surprise to Scrooge to recognise it as his own nephew’s  and to find himself in a bright, dry, gleaming room, with  the Spirit standing smiling by his side, and looking at that  same nephew with approving affability.  

‘Ha, ha.’ laughed Scrooge’s nephew. ‘Ha, ha, ha.’   

If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know  a man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge’s nephew, all I  can say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him  to me, and I’ll cultivate his acquaintance.  

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things,  that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is  nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter  and good-humour. When Scrooge’s nephew laughed in  this way: holding his sides, rolling his head, and twisting  his face into the most extravagant contortions: Scrooge’s  niece, by marriage, laughed as heartily as he. And their  assembled friends being not a bit behindhand, roared out  lustily.  

‘Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha, ha.’   

‘He said that Christmas was a humbug, as I live.’ cried  Scrooge’s nephew. ‘He believed it too.’   

‘More shame for him, Fred.’ said Scrooge’s niece,  indignantly. Bless those women; they never do anything  by halves. They are always in earnest.  

She was very pretty: exceedingly pretty. With a  dimpled, surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little  mouth, that seemed made to  be kissed — as no doubt it  was; all kinds of good little dots about her chin, that  melted into one another when she laughed; and the sunniest pair of eyes you ever saw in any little creature’s  head. Altogether she was what you would have called  provoking, you know; but satisfactory.  

‘He’s a comical old fellow,’ said Scrooge’s nephew,’  that’s the truth: and not so pleasant as he might be.  However, his offences carry their own punishment, and I  have nothing to say against him.’   

‘I’m sure he is very rich, Fred,’ hinted Scrooge’s niece.  ‘At least you always tell me so.’   

‘What of that, my dear.’ said Scrooge’s nephew. ‘His  wealth is of no use to him. He don’t do any good with it.  He don’t make himself comfortable with it. He hasn’t the  satisfaction of thinking — ha, ha,  ha. — that he is ever  going to benefit us with it.’   

‘I have no patience with him,’ observed Scrooge’s  niece. Scrooge’s niece’s sisters, and all the other ladies,  expressed the same opinion.  

‘Oh, I have.’ said Scrooge’s nephew. ‘I am sorry for  him; I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers  by his ill whims. Himself, always. Here, he takes it into his  head to dislike us, and he won’t come and dine with us.  What’s the consequence. He don’t lose much of a dinner.’   

‘Indeed, I think he loses a very good dinner,’  interrupted Scrooge’s niece. Everybody else said the same,  and they must be allowed to have been competent judges,  because they had just had dinner; and, with the dessert  upon the table, were clustered round the fire, by  lamplight.  

‘Well. I’m very glad to hear it,’ said Scrooge’s nephew,  ‘because I haven’t great faith in these young housekeepers.  What do you say, Topper.’   

Topper had clearly got his eye upon one of Scrooge’s  niece’s sisters, for he answered that a bachelor was a  wretched outcast, who had no right to express an opinion  on the subject. Whereat Scrooge’s niece’s sister — the  plump one with the lace tucker: not the one with the  roses — blushed.  

‘Do go on, Fred,’ said Scrooge’s niece, clapping her  hands. ‘He never finishes what he  begins to say. He is such  a ridiculous fellow.’   

Scrooge’s nephew revelled in another laugh, and as it  was impossible to keep the infection off; though the  plump sister tried hard to do it with aromatic vinegar; his  example was unanimously followed.  

‘I was only going to say,’ said Scrooge’s nephew,’ that  the consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not  making merry with us, is, as I think, that he loses some  pleasant moments, which could do him no harm. I am sure he loses pleasanter companions than he can find in his  own thoughts, either in his mouldy old office, or his dusty  chambers. I mean to give him the same chance every year,  whether he likes it or not, for I pity him. He may rail at  Christmas till he dies, but he can’t help thinking better of  it — I defy him — if he finds me going there, in good  temper, year after year, and saying Uncle Scrooge, how  are you. If it only puts him in the vein to leave his poor  clerk fifty pounds, that’s something; and I think I shook  him yesterday.’   

It was their turn to laugh now at the notion of his  shaking Scrooge. But being thoroughly good-natured, and  not much caring what they laughed at, so that they  laughed at any rate, he encouraged them in their  merriment, and passed the bottle joyously.  

After tea. they had some  music. For they were a  musical family, and knew what they were about, when  they sung a Glee or Catch, I can assure you: especially  Topper, who could growl away in the bass like a good  one, and never swell the large veins in his forehead, or get  red in the face over it. Scrooge’s niece played well upon  the harp; and played among other tunes a simple little air  (a mere nothing: you might learn to whistle it in two  minutes), which had been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from the boarding-school, as he had been  reminded by the Ghost of Christmas Past. When this strain  of music sounded, all the things that Ghost had shown  him, came upon his mind; he softened more and more;  and thought that if he could have listened to it often, years  ago, he might have cultivated the kindnesses of life for his  own happiness with his own hands, without resorting to  the sexton’s spade that buried Jacob Marley.  

But they didn’t devote the whole evening to music.  After a while they played at forfeits; for it is good to be  children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas,  when its mighty Founder was a child himself. Stop. There  was first a game at blind-man’s buff. Of course there was.  And I no more believe Topper was really blind than I  believe he had eyes in his boots. My opinion is, that it was  a done thing between him and Scrooge’s nephew; and that  the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went  after that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage  on the credulity of human nature. Knocking down the  fire-irons, tumbling over the chairs, bumping against the  piano, smothering himself among the curtains, wherever  she went, there went he. He always knew where the  plump sister was. He wouldn’t  catch anybody else. If you  had fallen up against him (as some of them did), on purpose, he would have made a feint of endeavouring to  seize you, which would have been an affront to your  understanding, and would instantly have sidled off in the  direction of the plump sister. She often cried out that it  wasn’t fair; and it really was not. But when at last, he  caught her; when, in spite of all her silken rustlings, and  her rapid flutterings past him, he got her into a corner  whence there was no escape; then his conduct was the  most execrable. For his pretending not to know her; his  pretending that it was necessary to touch her head-dress,  and further to assure himself of her identity by pressing a  certain ring upon her finger, and a certain chain about her  neck; was vile, monstrous. No doubt she told him her  opinion of it, when, another blind-man being in office,  they were so very confidential together, behind the curtains.  

Scrooge’s niece was not one of the blind-man’s buff  party, but was made comfortable with a large chair and a  footstool, in a snug corner, where the Ghost and Scrooge  were close behind her. But she joined in the forfeits, and  loved her love to admiration with all the letters of the  alphabet. Likewise at the game of How, When, and  Where, she was very great, and to the secret joy of  Scrooge’s nephew, beat her sisters hollow: though they were sharp girls too, as could have told you. There might  have been twenty people there, young and old, but they  all played, and so did Scrooge, for, wholly forgetting the  interest he had in what was going on, that his voice made  no sound in their ears, he sometimes came out with his  guess quite loud, and very often guessed quite right, too;  for the sharpest needle, best Whitechapel, warranted not  to cut in the eye, was not sharper than Scrooge; blunt as  he took it in his head to be.  

The Ghost was greatly pleased to find him in this  mood, and looked upon him with such favour, that he  begged like a boy to be allowed to stay until the guests  departed. But this the Spirit said could not be done.  

‘Here is a new game,’ said Scrooge. ‘One half hour,  Spirit, only one.’   

It was a Game called Yes and No, where Scrooge’s  nephew had to think of something, and the rest must find  out what; he only answering to their questions yes or no,  as the case was. The brisk fire of questioning to which he  was exposed, elicited from him that he was thinking of an  animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage  animal, an animal that growled and grunted sometimes,  and talked sometimes, and lived in London, and walked  about the streets, and wasn’t made a show of, and wasn’t led by anybody, and didn’t live in a menagerie, and was  never killed in a market, and was not a horse, or an ass, or  a cow, or a bull, or a tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a  bear. At every fresh question that was put to him, this  nephew burst into a fresh roar of laughter; and was so  inexpressibly tickled, that he was obliged to get up off the  sofa and stamp. At last the plump sister, falling into a  similar state, cried out:  

‘I have found it out. I know what it is, Fred. I know  what it is.’   

‘What is it.’ cried Fred.  

‘It’s your Uncle Scrooge.’   

Which it certainly was. Admiration was the universal  sentiment, though some objected that the reply to ‘Is it a  bear.’ ought to have been ‘Yes;’ inasmuch as an answer in  the negative was sufficient to have diverted their thoughts  from Mr Scrooge, supposing they had ever had any  tendency that way.  

‘He has given us plenty of merriment, I am sure,’ said  Fred,’ and it would be ungrateful not to drink his health.  Here is a glass of mulled wine ready to our hand at the  moment; and I say, ‘Uncle Scrooge.‘‘  

‘Well. Uncle Scrooge.’ they cried.  

 ‘A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the old  man, whatever he is.’ said Scrooge’s nephew. ‘He  wouldn’t take it from me, but may he have it,  nevertheless. Uncle Scrooge.’   

Uncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so gay and  light of heart, that he would have pledged the unconscious  company in return, and thanked them in an inaudible  speech, if the Ghost had given him time. But the whole  scene passed off in the breath of the last word spoken by  his nephew; and he and the Spirit were again upon their  travels.  

Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes  they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood  beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands,  and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they  were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was  rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery’s every  refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not  made fast the door and barred the Spirit out, he left his  blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.  

It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge  had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays  appeared to be condensed into the space of time they  passed together. It was strange,  too, that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew  older, clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but  never spoke of it, until they left a children’s Twelfth Night  party, when, looking at the Spirit as they stood together in  an open place, he noticed that its hair was grey.  

‘Are spirits’ lives so short.’ asked Scrooge.  

‘My life upon this globe, is  very brief,’ replied the  Ghost. ‘It ends to-night.’   

‘To-night.’ cried Scrooge.  

‘To-night at midnight. Hark. The time is drawing  near.’   

The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven  at that moment.  

‘Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,’ said  Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe,’ but I see  something strange, and not belonging to yourself,  protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw.’   

‘It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,’ was  the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. ‘Look here.’   

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;  wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt  down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its  garment.  

 ‘Oh, Man. look here. Look, look, down here.’  exclaimed the Ghost.  

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged,  scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility.  Where graceful youth should have filled their features out,  and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and  shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted  them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might  have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out  menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of  humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of  wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and  dread.  

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to  him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children,  but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to  a lie of such enormous magnitude.  

‘Spirit. are they yours.’ Scrooge could say no more.  

‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon  them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.  This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them  both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this  boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,  unless the writing be erased. Deny it.’ cried the Spirit,  

stretching out its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those  who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and  make it worse. And abide the end.’   

‘Have they no refuge or resource.’ cried Scrooge.  

‘Are there no prisons.’ said the Spirit, turning on him  for the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no  workhouses.’ The bell struck twelve.  

Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it  not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered  the prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes,  beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming,  like a mist along the ground, towards him.  

Stave 4: The Last of the Spirits

   

The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached.  When it came, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in  the very air through which this  Spirit moved it seemed to  scatter gloom and mystery.  

It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which  concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it  visible save one outstretched hand. But for this it would  have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and  separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.  

He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside  him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a  solemn dread. He knew no more, for the Spirit neither  spoke nor moved.  

‘I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To  Come.’ said Scrooge.  

The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its  hand.  

‘You are about to show me shadows of the things that  have not happened, but will happen in the time before us,’  Scrooge pursued. ‘Is that so, Spirit.’   

The upper portion of the garment was contracted for  an instant in its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head.  That was the only answer he received.  

Although well used to ghostly company by this time,  Scrooge feared the silent shape so much that his legs  trembled beneath him, and he found that he could hardly  stand when he prepared to follow it. The Spirit pauses a  moment, as observing his condition, and giving him time  to recover.  

But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him  with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the  dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon  him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost,  could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap  of black.  

‘Ghost of the Future.’ he exclaimed,’ I fear you more  than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose  is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man  from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and  do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me.’   

It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight  before them.  

 ‘Lead on.’ said Scrooge. ‘Lead on. The night is waning  fast, and it is precious time to me, I know. Lead on,  Spirit.’   

The Phantom moved away as it had come towards  him. Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which  bore him up, he thought, and carried him along.  

They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for the city  rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass  them of its own act. But there they were, in the heart of  it; on Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried up  and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and  conversed in groups, and looked at their watches, and  trifled thoughtfully with their great gold seals; and so  forth, as Scrooge had seen them often.  

The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business  men. Observing that the hand was pointed to them,  Scrooge advanced to listen to their talk.  

‘No,’ said a great fat man with a monstrous chin,’ I  don’t know much about it, either way. I only know he’s  dead.’   

‘When did he die.’ inquired another.  

‘Last night, I believe.’   

 ‘Why, what was the matter with him.’ asked a third,  taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff- box. ‘I thought he’d never die.’   

‘God knows,’ said the first, with a yawn.  

‘What has he done with his money.’ asked a red-faced  gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his  nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.  

‘I haven’t heard,’ said the man with the large chin,  yawning again. ‘Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn’t  left it to me. That’s all I know.’   

This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.  

‘It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral,’ said the same  speaker;’ for upon my life I don’t know of anybody to go  to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer.’   

‘I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided,’ observed  the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. ‘But I  must be fed, if I make one.’   

Another laugh.  

‘Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all,’  said the first speaker,’ for I never wear black gloves, and I  never eat lunch. But I’ll offer to go, if anybody else will.  When I come to think of it, I’m not at all sure that I  wasn’t his most particular friend; for we used to stop and  speak whenever we met. Bye, bye.’   

Speakers and listeners strolled away, and mixed with  other groups. Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards  the Spirit for an explanation.  

The Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed  to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking  that the explanation might lie here.  

He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of  aye business: very wealthy, and of great importance. He  had made a point always of standing well in their esteem:  in a business point of view, that is; strictly in a business  point of view.  

‘How are you.’ said one.  

‘How are you.’ returned the other.  

‘Well.’ said the first. ‘Old Scratch has got his own at  last, hey.’   

‘So I am told,’ returned the second. ‘Cold, isn’t it.’   

‘Seasonable for Christmas time. You’re not a skater, I  suppose.’   

‘No. No. Something else to think of. Good morning.’   

Not another word. That was their meeting, their  conversation, and their parting.  

Scrooge was at first inclined to be surprised that the  Spirit should attach importance to conversations  apparently so trivial; but feeling assured that they must have some hidden purpose, he set himself to consider what  it was likely to be. They could scarcely be supposed to  have any bearing on the death of Jacob, his old partner, for  that was Past, and this Ghost’s province was the Future.  Nor could he think of any one immediately connected  with himself, to whom he could apply them. But nothing  doubting that to whomsoever they applied they had some  latent moral for his own improvement, he resolved to  treasure up every word he heard, and everything he saw;  and especially to observe the shadow of himself when it  appeared. For he had an expectation that the conduct of  his future self would give him the clue he missed, and  would render the solution of these riddles easy.  

He looked about in that very place for his own image;  but another man stood in his accustomed corner, and  though the clock pointed to his usual time of day for  being there, he saw no likeness of himself among the  multitudes that poured in through the Porch. It gave him  little surprise, however; for he had been revolving in his  mind a change of life, and thought and hoped he saw his  new-born resolutions carried out in this.  

Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its  outstretched hand. When he roused himself from his  thoughtful quest, he fancied  from the turn of the hand, and its situation in reference to himself, that the Unseen  Eyes were looking at him keenly. It made him shudder,  and feel very cold.  

They left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part  of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before,  although he recognised its situation, and its bad repute.  The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses  wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly.  Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged  their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the  straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with  crime, with filth, and misery.  

Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low- browed, beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where  iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and greasy offal, were  bought. Upon the floor within, were piled up heaps of  rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and  refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets that few would like to  scrutinise were bred and hidden in mountains of unseemly  rags, masses of corrupted fat, and sepulchres of bones.  Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a charcoal stove,  made of old bricks, was a grey-haired rascal, nearly seventy  years of age; who had screened himself from the cold air  without, by a frousy curtaining of miscellaneous tatters, hung upon a line; and smoked his pipe in all the luxury of  calm retirement.  

Scrooge and the Phantom came into the presence of  this man, just as a woman with a heavy bundle slunk into  the shop. But she had scarcely entered, when another  woman, similarly laden, came in too; and she was closely  followed by a man in faded black, who was no less startled  by the sight of them, than they had been upon the  recognition of each other. After a short period of blank  astonishment, in which the old man with the pipe had  joined them, they all three burst into a laugh.  

‘Let the charwoman alone to be the first.’ cried she  who had entered first. ‘Let the laundress alone to be the  second; and let the undertaker’s man alone to be the third.  Look here, old Joe, here’s a chance. If we haven’t all three  met here without meaning it.’   

‘You couldn’t have met in a better place,’ said old Joe,  removing his pipe from his mouth. ‘Come into the  parlour. You were made free of it long ago, you know;  and the other two an’t strangers. Stop till I shut the door  of the shop. Ah. How it skreeks. There an’t such a rusty  bit of metal in the place as its own hinges, I believe; and  I’m sure there’s no such old bones here, as mine. Ha, ha.  

We’re all suitable to our calling, we’re well matched.  Come into the parlour. Come into the parlour.’   

The parlour was the space behind the screen of rags.  The old man raked the fire together with an old stair-rod,  and having trimmed his smoky lamp (for it was night),  with the stem of his pipe, put it in his mouth again.  

While he did this, the woman who had already spoken  threw her bundle on the floor, and sat down in a flaunting  manner on a stool; crossing her elbows on her knees, and  looking with a bold defiance at the other two.  

‘What odds then. What odds, Mrs Dilber.’ said the  woman. ‘Every person has a right to take care of  themselves. He always did.’   

‘That’s true, indeed.’ said the laundress. ‘No man more  so.’   

‘Why then, don’t stand staring as if you was afraid,  woman; who’s the wiser. We’re not going to pick holes in  each other’s coats, I suppose.’   

‘No, indeed.’ said Mrs Dilber and the man together.  ‘We should hope not.’   

‘Very well, then.’ cried the woman. ‘That’s enough.  Who’s the worse for the loss of a few things like these. Not a dead man, I suppose.’   

‘No, indeed,’ said Mrs Dilber, laughing.  

 ‘If he wanted to keep them  after he was dead, a wicked  old screw,’ pursued the woman,’ why wasn’t he natural in  his lifetime. If he had been, he’d have had somebody to  look after him when he was struck with Death, instead of  lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself.’   

‘It’s the truest word that ever was spoke,’ said Mrs Dilber. ‘It’s a judgment on him.’   

‘I wish it was a little heavier judgment,’ replied the  woman;’ and it should have been, you may depend upon  it, if I could have laid my hands on anything else. Open  that bundle, old Joe, and let me know the value of it.  Speak out plain. I’m not afraid to be the first, nor afraid  for them to see it. We know pretty well that we were  helping ourselves, before we met here, I believe. It’s no  sin. Open the bundle, Joe.’   

But the gallantry of her friends would not allow of this;  and the man in faded black, mounting the breach first,  produced his plunder. It was not extensive. A seal or two,  a pencil-case, a pair of sleeve-buttons, and a brooch of no  great value, were all. They were severally examined and  appraised by old Joe, who chalked the sums he was  disposed to give for each, upon the wall, and added them  up into a total when he found there was nothing more to  come.  

 ‘That’s your account,’ said Joe,’ and I wouldn’t give  another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing it.  Who’s next.’   

Mrs Dilber was next. Sheets and  towels, a little wearing  apparel, two old-fashioned silver teaspoons, a pair of  sugar-tongs, and a few boots. Her account was stated on  the wall in the same manner.  

‘I always give too much to  ladies. It’s a weakness of  mine, and that’s the way I ruin myself,’ said old Joe.  ‘That’s your account. If you asked me for another penny,  and made it an open question, I’d repent of being so  liberal and knock off half-a-crown.’   

‘And now undo my bundle, Joe,’ said the first woman.  

Joe went down on his knees for the greater  convenience of opening it, and having unfastened a great  many knots, dragged out a large and heavy roll of some  dark stuff.  

‘What do you call this.’ said Joe. ‘Bed-curtains.’   

‘Ah.’ returned the woman, laughing and leaning  forward on her crossed arms. ‘Bed-curtains.’   

‘You don’t mean to say you took them down, rings  and all, with him lying there.’ said Joe.  

‘Yes I do,’ replied the woman. ‘Why not.’   

 ‘You were born to make your fortune,’ said Joe,’ and  you’ll certainly do it.’   

‘I certainly shan’t hold my hand, when I can get  anything in it by reaching it  out, for the sake of such a  man as he was, I promise you, Joe,’ returned the woman  coolly. ‘Don’t drop that oil upon the blankets, now.’   

‘His blankets.’ asked Joe.  

‘Whose else’s do you think.’ replied the woman. ‘He  isn’t likely to take cold without them, I dare say.’   

‘I hope he didn’t die of any thing catching. Eh.’ said  old Joe, stopping in his work, and looking up.  

‘Don’t you be afraid of that,’ returned the woman. ‘I  an’t so fond of his company that I’d loiter about him for  such things, if he did. Ah. you may look through that shirt  till your eyes ache; but you won’t find a hole in it, nor a  threadbare place. It’s the best he had, and a fine one too.  They’d have wasted it, if it hadn’t been for me.’   

‘What do you call wasting of it.’ asked old Joe.  

‘Putting it on him to be buried in, to be sure,’ replied  the woman with a laugh. ‘Somebody was fool enough to  do it, but I took it off again. If calico an’t good enough for  such a purpose, it isn’t good enough for anything. It’s  quite as becoming to the body. He can’t look uglier than  he did in that one.’   

Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror. As they sat  grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by  the old man’s lamp, he viewed them with a detestation  and disgust, which could hardly have been greater, though  the demons, marketing the corpse itself.  

‘Ha, ha.’ laughed the same woman, when old Joe,  producing a flannel bag with money in it, told out their  several gains upon the ground. ‘This is the end of it, you  see. He frightened every one away from him when he was  alive, to profit us when he was dead. Ha, ha, ha.’   

‘Spirit.’ said Scrooge, shuddering from head to foot. ‘I  see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my  own. My life tends that way,  now. Merciful Heaven, what  is this.’   

He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and  now he almost touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed: on  which, beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something  covered up, which, though it  was dumb, announced itself  in awful language.  

The room was very dark, too dark to be observed with  any accuracy, though Scrooge glanced round it in  obedience to a secret impulse, anxious to know what kind  of room it was. A pale light, rising in the outer air, fell  straight upon the bed; and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for, was the body of this  man.  

Scrooge glanced towards the Phantom. Its steady hand  was pointed to the head. The cover was so carelessly  adjusted that the slightest raising of it, the motion of a  finger upon Scrooge’s part, would have disclosed the face.  He thought of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and  longed to do it; but had no more power to withdraw the  veil than to dismiss the spectre at his side.  

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar  here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy  command: for this is thy dominion. But of the loved,  revered, and honoured head, thou  canst not turn one hair  to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is  not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when  released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that  the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave,  warm, and tender; and the pulse a man’s. Strike, Shadow,  strike. And see his good deeds springing from the wound,  to sow the world with life immortal.  

No voice pronounced these words in Scrooge’s ears,  and yet he heard them when he looked upon the bed. He  thought, if this man could be  raised up now, what would be his foremost thoughts. Avarice, hard-dealing, griping  cares. They have brought him to a rich end, truly.  

He lay, in the dark empty house, with not a man, a  woman, or a child, to say that he  was kind to me in this or  that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind  to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a  sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What  they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so  restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.  

‘Spirit.’ he said,’ this is a fearful place. In leaving it, I  shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go.’   

Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the  head.  

‘I understand you,’ Scrooge returned,’ and I would do  it, if I could. But I have not the power, Spirit. I have not  the power.’   

Again it seemed to look upon him.  

‘If there is any person in the town, who feels emotion  caused by this man’s death,’ said Scrooge quite agonised,  ‘show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you.’   

The Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a  moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a room  by daylight, where a mother and her children were.  

She was expecting some one, and with anxious  eagerness; for she walked up and down the room; started  at every sound; looked out from the window; glanced at  the clock; tried, but in vain, to work with her needle; and  could hardly bear the voices of the children in their play.  

At length the long-expected knock was heard. She  hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose  face was careworn and depressed, though he was young.  There was a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of  serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he  struggled to repress.  

He sat down to the dinner that had been boarding for  him by the fire; and when she asked him faintly what  news (which was not until after a long silence), he  appeared embarrassed how to answer.  

‘Is it good.’ she said, ‘or bad?’ — to help him.  

‘Bad,’ he answered.  

‘We are quite ruined.’   

‘No. There is hope yet, Caroline.’   

‘If he relents,’ she said, amazed, ‘there is. Nothing is  past hope, if such a miracle has happened.’   

‘He is past relenting,’ said her husband. ‘He is dead.’   

She was a mild and patient creature if her face spoke  truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she said so, with clasped hands. She prayed forgiveness the  next moment, and was sorry; but the first was the emotion  of her heart.  

‘What the half-drunken woman whom I told you of  last night, said to me, when I tried to see him and obtain a  week’s delay; and what I thought was a mere excuse to  avoid me; turns out to have been quite true. He was not  only very ill, but dying, then.’   

‘To whom will our debt be transferred.’   

‘I don’t know. But before that time we shall be ready  with the money; and even though we were not, it would  be a bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in  his successor. We may sleep to-night with light hearts,  Caroline.’   

Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter.  The children’s faces, hushed and clustered round to hear  what they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a  happier house for this man’s death. The only emotion that  the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one  of pleasure.  

‘Let me see some tenderness connected with a death,’  said Scrooge;’ or that dark chamber, Spirit, which we left  just now, will be for ever present to me.’   

The Ghost conducted him through several streets  familiar to his feet; and as they went along, Scrooge  looked here and there to find  himself, but nowhere was he  to be seen. They entered poor  Bob Cratchit’s house; the  dwelling he had visited before; and found the mother and  the children seated round the fire.  

Quiet. Very quiet. The noisy little Cratchits were as  still as statues in one corner, and sat looking up at Peter,  who had a book before him. The mother and her  daughters were engaged in sewing. But surely they were  very quiet.  

‘And he took a child, and set him in the midst of  them.’  

Where had Scrooge heard those words. He had not  dreamed them. The boy must have read them out, as he  and the Spirit crossed the threshold. Why did he not go  on.  

The mother laid her work upon the table, and put her  hand up to her face.  

‘The colour hurts my eyes,’ she said.  

The colour. Ah, poor Tiny Tim.  

‘They’re better now again,’ said Cratchit’s wife. ‘It  makes them weak by candle-light; and I wouldn’t show weak eyes to your father when he comes home, for the  world. It must be near his time.’   

‘Past it rather,’ Peter answered, shutting up his book.  ‘But I think he has walked a little slower than he used,  these few last evenings, mother.’   

They were very quiet again. At last she said, and in a  steady, cheerful voice, that only faltered once:  

‘I have known him walk with — I have known him  walk with Tiny Tim upon his shoulder, very fast indeed.’   

‘And so have I,’ cried Peter. ‘Often.’   

‘And so have I,’ exclaimed another. So had all.  

‘But he was very light to carry,’ she resumed, intent  upon her work,’ and his father loved him so, that it was  no trouble: no trouble. And there is your father at the  door.’   

She hurried out to meet him; and little Bob in his  comforter — he had need of it, poor fellow — came in.  His tea was ready for him on the hob, and they all tried  who should help him to it most. Then the two young  Cratchits got upon his knees and laid, each child a little  cheek, against his face, as if they said,’ Don’t mind it,  father. Don’t be grieved.’   

Bob was very cheerful with them, and spoke pleasantly  to all the family. He looked  at the work upon the table, and praised the industry and speed of Mrs Cratchit and the  girls. They would be done long before Sunday, he said.  

‘Sunday. You went to-day, then, Robert.’ said his wife.  

‘Yes, my dear,’ returned Bob. ‘I wish you could have  gone. It would have done you good to see how green a  place it is. But you’ll see it often. I promised him that I  would walk there on a Sunday. My little, little child.’ cried  Bob. ‘My little child.’   

He broke down all at once. He couldn’t help it. If he  could have helped it, he and his child would have been  farther apart perhaps than they were.  

He left the room, and went up-stairs into the room  above, which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with  Christmas. There was a chair set close beside the child,  and there were signs of some one having been there,  lately. Poor Bob sat down in it, and when he had thought  a little and composed himself, he kissed the little face. He  was reconciled to what had happened, and went down  again quite happy.  

They drew about the fire, and talked; the girls and  mother working still. Bob told them of the extraordinary  kindness of Mr Scrooge’s nephew, whom he had scarcely  seen but once, and who, meeting him in the street that  day, and seeing that he looked a little -’ just a little down you know,’ said Bob, inquired what had happened to  distress him. ‘On which,’ said Bob,’ for he is the  pleasantest-spoken gentleman you ever heard, I told him.  ‘I am heartily sorry for it, Mr Cratchit,’ he said,’ and  heartily sorry for your good wife.’ By the bye, how he  ever knew that, I don’t know.’   

‘Knew what, my dear.’   

‘Why, that you were a good wife,’ replied Bob.  

‘Everybody knows that.’ said Peter.  

‘Very well observed, my boy.’ cried Bob. ‘I hope they  do. ‘Heartily sorry,’ he said,’ for your good wife. If I can  be of service to you in any way,’ he said, giving me his  card,’ that’s where I live. Pray come to me.’ Now, it  wasn’t,’ cried Bob,’ for the sake of anything he might be  able to do for us, so much as  for his kind way, that this  was quite delightful. It really seemed as if he had known  our Tiny Tim, and felt with us.’   

‘I’m sure he’s a good soul.’ said Mrs Cratchit.  

‘You would be surer of it, my dear,’ returned Bob,’ if  you saw and spoke to him. I shouldn’t be at all surprised -  mark what I say. — if he got Peter a better situation.’   

‘Only hear that, Peter,’ said Mrs Cratchit.  

 ‘And then,’ cried one of the girls,’ Peter will be  keeping company with some one, and setting up for  himself.’   

‘Get along with you.’ retorted Peter, grinning.  

‘It’s just as likely as not,’ said Bob,’ one of these days;  though there’s plenty of time for that, my dear. But  however and when ever we part from one another, I am  sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim — shall we  — or this first parting that there was among us.’   

‘Never, father.’ cried they all.  

‘And I know,’ said Bob,’ I know, my dears, that when  we recollect how patient and how mild he was; although  he was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily  among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it.’   

‘No, never, father.’ they all cried again.  

‘I am very happy,’ said little Bob,’ I am very happy.’   

Mrs Cratchit kissed him, his daughters kissed him, the  two young Cratchits kissed him, and Peter and himself  shook hands. Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was  from God.  

‘Spectre,’ said Scrooge,’ something informs me that our  parting moment is at hand. I know it, but I know not  how. Tell me what man that was whom we saw lying  dead.’   

The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed him,  as before — though at a different time, he thought:  indeed, there seemed no order in these latter visions, save  that they were in the Future — into the resorts of business  men, but showed him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did  not stay for anything, but went  straight on, as to the end  just now desired, until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a  moment.  

‘This courts,’ said Scrooge,’ through which we hurry  now, is where my place of occupation is, and has been for  a length of time. I see the house. Let me behold what I  shall be, in days to come.’   

The Spirit stopped; the hand was pointed elsewhere.  

‘The house is yonder,’ Scrooge exclaimed. ‘Why do  you point away.’   

The inexorable finger underwent no change.  

Scrooge hastened to the window of his office, and  looked in. It was an office still, but not his. The furniture  was not the same, and the figure in the chair was not  himself. The Phantom pointed as before.  

He joined it once again, and wondering why and  whither he had gone, accompanied it until they reached  an iron gate. He paused to look round before entering.  

A churchyard. Here, then, the wretched man whose  name he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground. It  was a worthy place. Walled in by houses; overrun by grass  and weeds, the growth of vegetation’s death, not life;  choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted  appetite. A worthy place.  

The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down  to One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom  was exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new  meaning in its solemn shape.  

‘Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you  point,’ said Scrooge, ‘answer me one question. Are these  the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they  shadows of things that May be, only.’   

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by  which it stood.  

‘Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which,  if persevered in, they must lead,’ said Scrooge. ‘But if the  courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is  thus with what you show me.’   

The Spirit was immovable as ever.  

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and  following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected  grave his own name, Ebenezer Scrooge.  

 ‘Am I that man who lay upon the bed.’ he cried, upon  his knees.  

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back  again.  

‘No, Spirit. Oh no, no.’   

The finger still was there.  

‘Spirit.’ he cried, tight clutching at its robe,’ hear me. I  am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have  been but for this intercourse.  Why show me this, if I am  past all hope.’   

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.   

‘Good Spirit,’ he pursued, as down upon the ground he  fell before it:’ Your nature intercedes for me, and pities  me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you  have shown me, by an altered life.’   

The kind hand trembled.  

‘I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it  all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the  Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I  will not shut out the lessons that  they teach. Oh, tell me I  may sponge away the writing on this stone.’   

In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to  free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained  it. The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.  

Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate  aye reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom’s hood  and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a  bedpost. 

Stave 5: The End of It  

Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his  own, the room was his own.  Best and happiest of all, the  Time before him was his own, to make amends in!  

‘I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.’  Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. ‘The Spirits  of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley.  Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this. I say  it on my knees, old Jacob, on my knees.’   

He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good  intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to  his call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with  the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.  

‘They are not torn down.’ cried Scrooge, folding one  of his bed-curtains in his arms,’ they are not torn down,  rings and all. They are here — I am here — the shadows  of the things that would have been, may be dispelled.  They will be. I know they will.’   

His hands were busy with his garments all this time;  turning them inside out, putting them on upside down,  tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to  every kind of extravagance.  

 ‘I don’t know what to do.’ cried Scrooge, laughing and  crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoon  of himself with his stockings. ‘I  am as light as a feather, I  am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I  am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to  everybody. A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo  here. Whoop. Hallo.’   

He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now  standing there: perfectly winded.  

‘There’s the saucepan that the gruel was in.’ cried  Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace.  ‘There’s the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley  entered. There’s the corner where the Ghost of Christmas  Present, sat. There’s the window where I saw the  wandering Spirits. It’s all right, it’s all true, it all happened.  Ha ha ha.’   

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so  many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious  laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs.  

‘I don’t know what day of the month it is.’ said  Scrooge. ‘I don’t know how long I’ve been among the  Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never  mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby. Hallo. Whoop.  Hallo here.’   

He was checked in his transports by the churches  ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash,  clang, hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding;  hammer, clang, clash. Oh, glorious, glorious.  

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his  head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold;  cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight;  Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious.  Glorious.  

‘What’s to-day.’ cried Scrooge, calling downward to a  boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to  look about him.  

‘Eh.’ returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.  

‘What’s to-day, my fine fellow.’ said Scrooge.  

‘To-day.’ replied the boy. ‘Why, Christmas Day.’   

‘It’s Christmas Day.’ said Scrooge to himself. ‘I haven’t  missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They  can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course  they can. Hallo, my fine fellow.’   

‘Hallo.’ returned the boy.  

‘Do you know the Poulterer’s,  in the next street but  one, at the corner.’ Scrooge inquired.  

‘I should hope I did,’ replied the lad.  

 ‘An intelligent boy.’ said Scrooge. ‘A remarkable boy.  Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize Turkey that  was hanging up there — Not the little prize Turkey: the  big one.’   

‘What, the one as big as me.’ returned the boy.  

‘What a delightful boy.’ said Scrooge. ‘It’s a pleasure to  talk to him. Yes, my buck.’   

‘It’s hanging there now,’ replied the boy.  

‘Is it.’ said Scrooge. ‘Go and buy it.’   

‘Walk-er.’ exclaimed the boy.  

‘No, no,’ said Scrooge, ‘I am in earnest. Go and buy it,  and tell them to bring it here,  that I may give them the  direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and  I’ll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than  five minutes and I’ll give you half-a-crown.’   

The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady  hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.  

‘I’ll send it to Bon Cratchit’s.’ whispered Scrooge,  rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. ‘He shan’t  know who sends it. It’s twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe  Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob’s will  be.’   

The hand in which he wrote the address was not a  steady one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down-stairs to open the street  door, ready for the coming  of the poulterer’s man. As he stood there, waiting his  arrival, the knocker caught his eye.  

‘I shall love it, as long as I live.’ cried Scrooge, patting  it with his hand. ‘I scarcely ever looked at it before. What  an honest expression it has in its face. It’s a wonderful  knocker. — Here’s the Turkey. Hallo. Whoop. How are  you. Merry Christmas.’   

It was a Turkey. He never could have stood upon his  legs, that bird. He would have snapped them short off in a  minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.  

‘Why, it’s impossible to carry  that to Camden Town,’  said Scrooge. ‘You must have a cab.’   

The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle  with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with  which he paid for the cab, and  the chuckle with which he  recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the  chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair  again, and chuckled till he cried.  

Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to  shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even  when you don’t dance while you are at it. But if he had  cut the end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of  sticking-plaster over it, and been quite satisfied.  

He dressed himself all in his best, and at last got out  into the streets. The people were by this time pouring  forth, as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas  Present; and walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge  regarded every one with a delighted smile. He looked so  irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good- humoured fellows said,’ Good morning, sir. A merry  Christmas to you.’ And Scrooge said often afterwards, that  of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the  blithest in his ears.  

He had not gone far, when coming on towards him he  beheld the portly gentleman, who had walked into his  counting-house the day before, and said,’ Scrooge and  Marley’s, I believe.’ It sent a pang across his heart to think  how this old gentleman would look upon him when they  met; but he knew what path lay straight before him, and  he took it.  

‘My dear sir,’ said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and  taking the old gentleman by both his hands. ‘How do you  do. I hope you succeeded yesterday. It was very kind of  you. A merry Christmas to you, sir.’   

‘Mr Scrooge.’   

‘Yes,’ said Scrooge. ‘That is my name, and I fear it may  not be pleasant to you. Allow me to ask your pardon. And will you have the goodness’ — here Scrooge whispered in  his ear.  

‘Lord bless me.’ cried the gentleman, as if his breath  were taken away. ‘My dear Mr Scrooge, are you serious.’   

‘If you please,’ said Scrooge. ‘Not a farthing less. A  great many back-payments are included in it, I assure you.  Will you do me that favour.’   

‘My dear sir,’ said the other, shaking hands with him. ‘I  don’t know what to say to such munificence.’  

‘Don’t say anything please,’ retorted Scrooge. ‘Come  and see me. Will you come and see me.’   

‘I will.’ cried the old gentleman. And it was clear he  meant to do it.  

‘Thank you,’ said Scrooge. ‘I am much obliged to you.  I thank you fifty times. Bless you.’   

He went to church, and walked about the streets, and  watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted  children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked  down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows,  and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He  had never dreamed that any walk — that anything —  could give him so much happiness. In the afternoon he  turned his steps towards his nephew’s house.  

He passed the door a dozen times, before he had the  courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash, and did  it:  

‘Is your master at home, my  dear.’ said Scrooge to the  girl. Nice girl. Very.  

‘Yes, sir.’   

‘Where is he, my love.’ said Scrooge.  

‘He’s in the dining-room, sir, along with mistress. I’ll  show you up-stairs, if you please.’   

‘Thank you. He knows me,’ said Scrooge, with his  hand already on the dining-room lock. ‘I’ll go in here, my  dear.’   

He turned it gently, and sidled his face in, round the  door. They were looking at the table (which was spread  out in great array); for these young housekeepers are  always nervous on such points, and like to see that  everything is right.  

‘Fred.’ said Scrooge.  

Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started.  Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting  in the corner with the footstool, or he wouldn’t have  done it, on any account.  

‘Why bless my soul.’ cried Fred,’ who’s that.’   

 ‘It’s I. Your uncle Scrooge. I have come to dinner.  Will you let me in, Fred.’   

Let him in. It is a mercy he didn’t shake his arm off. He  was at home in five minutes. Nothing could be heartier.  His niece looked just the same. So did Topper when he  came. So did the plump sister when she came. So did  every one when they came. Wonderful party, wonderful  games, wonderful unanimity, wonderful happiness.  

But he was early at the office next morning. Oh, he  was early there. If he could only be there first, and catch  Bob Cratchit coming late. That was the thing he had set  his heart upon.  

And he did it; yes, he did. The clock struck nine. No  Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was full eighteen  minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his  door wide open, that he might see him come into the Tank.  

His hat was off, before he opened the door; his  comforter too. He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away  with his pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o’clock.  

‘Hallo.’ growled Scrooge, in his accustomed voice, as  near as he could feign it. ‘What do you mean by coming  here at this time of day.’   

‘I am very sorry, sir,’ said Bob. ‘I am behind my time.’   

 ‘You are.’ repeated Scrooge. ‘Yes. I think you are. Step  this way, sir, if you please.’ 

‘It’s only once a year, sir,’ pleaded Bob, appearing from  the Tank. ‘It shall not be repeated. I was making rather  merry yesterday, sir.’   

‘Now, I’ll tell you what, my friend,’ said Scrooge,’ I am  not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And  therefore,’ he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving  Bob such a dig in the waistcoat  that he staggered back into  the Tank again;’ and therefore I am about to raise your  salary.’   

Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler. He  had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it,  holding him, and calling to the people in the court for  help and a strait-waistcoat.  

‘A merry Christmas, Bob,’ said Scrooge, with an  earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him  on the back. ‘A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow,  than I have given you for many  a year. I’ll raise your  salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and  we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a  Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob. Make up the  fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another  i, Bob Cratchit.’   

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and  infinitely more; and to Tiny  Tim, who did not die, he was  a second father. He became as  good a friend, as good a  master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or  any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good  old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in  him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he  was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on  this globe, for good, at which some people did not have  their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such  as these would be blind anyway,  he thought it quite as  well that they should wrinkle up  their eyes in grins, as  have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart  laughed: and that was quite enough for him.  

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived  upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and  it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep  Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.  May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny  Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!  

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