A Christmas Carol de Charles Dickens PDF

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
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CHARLES DICKENS
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biblioteca zapatero
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
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A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Charles Dickens
Texto
WIKISOURCE
Edición
ANTONIO ARIAS IZAGUIRRE
1843 agosto 2018
biblioteca zapatero 1
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
CONTENTS
STAVE ONE 4
STAVE TWO 29
STAVE THREE 53
STAVE FOUR 83
STAVE FIVE 105
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
I have endeavoured in this ghostly little book, to raise the ghost of an idea, which
shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with
the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish
to lay it.
Their faithful friend and servant,
C. D.
December, 1843.
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STAVE ONE
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.
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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 grindstone, 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 dog-days; 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.
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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
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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."
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"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
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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."
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"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."
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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?"
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"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.
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"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 resumed 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 overflowings 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
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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 tomorrow'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 gentlemen!
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 tomorrow, I suppose?", said Scrooge.
"If quite convenient, sir."
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"It’s not convenient", said Scrooge, "and it's not fair. If I was to stop you 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 a
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
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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 of its own expression.
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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
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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, Pharaoh's daughters;
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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.
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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.
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"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?"
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"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.
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"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.
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"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.
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"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!"
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"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.
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"That is no light part of my penance", pursued the Ghost. "I am here tonight 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
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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.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
STAVE TWO
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
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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 or 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 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, and presented 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 had warned 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.
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“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
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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!”
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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!”
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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 a 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!
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
“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
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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.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
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.
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“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! Halloo!”
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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 battled 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. “Was I 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 shoes 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.
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“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 ’em up in their places—four, five,
six—barred ’em and pinned ’em—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
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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 couple 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
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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
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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 ’em 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 particular,” said Scrooge.
“Something, I think?” the Ghost insisted.
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“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.
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“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 be 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
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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STAVE THREE
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
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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
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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
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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.
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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 re-crossed
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 a 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
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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, 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, squat 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
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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
bakers’ 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
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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.
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“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,
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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.
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“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!”
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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
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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.
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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
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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.”
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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.”
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“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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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, too. Oh, perfectly 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.”
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“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!”
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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
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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
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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 Topper
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 in 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!”
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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 Scro-o-o-o-oge!”
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!’ ”
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“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
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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 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.
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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 bide 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.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
STAVE FOUR
THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS
The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached. When it came near him,
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.
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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 paused 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
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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?”
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“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 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?”
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“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
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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
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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.”
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“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 ’em 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
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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!”
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“You don’t mean to say you took ’em 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 ’em, I dare say.”
“I hope he didn’t die of anything 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
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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 they had
been obscene 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.
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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.
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“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.
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He sat down to the dinner that had been hoarding 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!”
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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!
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“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!”
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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.
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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 whenever we part from one another, I
0
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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.

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“This court,” 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.
2
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“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.
3
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
“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 reversed, he saw an
alteration in the Phantom’s hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled
down into a bedpost.
4
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
STAVE FIVE
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.
5
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
“I don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same
breath; and making a perfect Laocoön 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!
6
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
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.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
“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 ’em 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 Bob Cratchit’s!” whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and
splitting with a laugh. “He sha’n’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
8
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
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 ’em 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-plaister
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.
9
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
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 munifi—”
“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.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
“Thank’ee,” 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’ee. 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.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
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 hecame. So did the plump sister when she came. So did every one
when they came. Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity,
won-der-ful 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?”

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
“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

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
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!
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.

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A CHRISTMAS CAROL

1843 agosto 2018

STAVE FIVE 105

Their faithful friend and servant,

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise?

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing,

"Bah!", said Scrooge. "Humbug!"

"Don't be cross, uncle!", said the nephew.

"Uncle!", pleaded the nephew.

The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately sensible of

"Don't be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us tomorrow."

"But why?", cried Scrooge's nephew. "Why?"

"Why did you get married?", said Scrooge.

"Because I fell in love."

"Good afternoon", said Scrooge.

"Good afternoon", said Scrooge.

"Good afternoon!", said Scrooge.

"And a happy New Year!"

"Good afternoon!", said Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?", asked Scrooge.

"Both very busy, sir."

"Nothing!", Scrooge replied.

"You wish to be anonymous?"

"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."

"But you might know it", observed the gentleman.

"God bless you, merry gentlemen!

May nothing you dismay!",

At length the hour of shutting up the counting–house arrived. With an ill–will

"If quite convenient, sir."

The clerk smiled faintly.

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

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

"Humbug!", said Scrooge; and walked across the room.

"It's humbug still!", said Scrooge. "I won't believe it."

"Much!"—Marley's voice, no doubt about it.

"Who are you?"

"Ask me who I was."

"In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley."

"Do it, then."

Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know whether a ghost so

"You don't believe in me", observed the Ghost.

"I don't", said Scrooge.

"I don't know", said Scrooge.

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"I do", replied the Ghost.

"You are not looking at it", said Scrooge.

"But I see it", said the Ghost, "notwithstanding."

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

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

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Slow!", the Ghost repeated.

"On the wings of the wind", replied the Ghost.

"Hear me!", cried the Ghost. "My time is nearly gone."

"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.

"I—I think I'd rather not", said Scrooge.

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

THE FIRST OF THE THREE SPIRITS

“A quarter past,” said Scrooge, counting.