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| 46 | (Original First Edition Cover; 1843 Original Illustrations in Color by John Leech) | | —- | —- | | 19337 | (Published in 1905; Illustrations in Black and White by G. A. Williams) | | 24022 | (Published in 1915; Illustrations in Black and White and Color by By Arthur Rackham) | | 30368 | (First edition with original hand written pages; Black and White illustrations.) |

  <br />

    A CHRISTMAS CAROL

      IN PROSE

      BEING

##### BY

## CHARLES DICKENS

      WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN LEECH

### PREFACE

    I  endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise
    the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with
    themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt
    their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. 
  <br />
    Their faithful Friend and Servant, 
  <br />
    C. D.
  <br />
    , 1843. 

    CONTENTS

MARLEY’S GHOST

THE FIRST OF THE THREE SPIRITS

THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS

THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS

THE END OF IT

    ILLUSTRATIONS

|

         
       | 
         
       | 
       |

|

          [Marley’s Ghost](#link6)
       | 
              
       | 
        J. Leech
     |

|

          [Ghosts of Departed Usurers](#link7)
       | 
         
       | 
        ,,
     |

|

          [Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball](#link8)
       | 
         
       | 
        ,,
     |

|

          [Scrooge Extinguishes the First<br />of the Three
          Spirits](#link9)
       | 
        &nbsp;
       | 
        ,,
     |

|

          [Scrooge’s Third Visitor](#link10)
       | 
         
       | 
        ,,
     |

|

          [Ignorance and Want](#link11)
       | 
         
       | 
        ,,
     |

|

          [The Last of the Spirits](#link12)
       | 
         
       | 
        ,,
     |

|

          [Scrooge and Bob Cratchit](#link13)
       | 
         
       | 
        ,,
     |

    [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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I
    started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be
    distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am
    going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s
    Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more
    remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon
    his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman
    rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s
    Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak
    mind.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could
    warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than
    he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain
    less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him.
    The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the
    advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down”
    handsomely, and Scrooge never did.
  <br />
    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!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas
    Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold,
    bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the
    court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their
    breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.
    The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it
    had not been light all day—and candles were flaring in the windows
    of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown
    air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so
    dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses
    opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down,
    obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by,
    and was brewing on a large scale.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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.
  <br />
    “Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew.
    “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”
  <br />
    “I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right
    have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re
    poor enough.”
  <br />
    “Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right
    have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re
    rich enough.”
  <br />
    Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said,
    “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”
  <br />
    “Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    “Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.
  <br />
    “Nephew!” returned the uncle sternly, “keep Christmas
    in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”
  <br />
    “Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you
    don’t keep it.”
  <br />
    “Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much
    good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”
  <br />
    “There are many things from which I might have derived good, by
    which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew.
    “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of
    Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration
    due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be
    apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable,
    pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the
    year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up
    hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were
    fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound
    on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap
    of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it  done me
    good, and  do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “Let me hear another sound from ,” 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.”
  <br />
    “Don’t be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to-morrow.”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “But why?” cried Scrooge’s nephew. “Why?”
  <br />
    “Why did you get married?” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “Because I fell in love.”
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    “Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened.
    Why give it as a reason for not coming now?”
  <br />
    “Good afternoon,” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be
    friends?”
  <br />
    “Good afternoon,” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    “Good afternoon!” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “And A Happy New Year!”
  <br />
    “Good afternoon!” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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.”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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?”
  <br />
    “Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” Scrooge
    replied. “He died seven years ago, this very night.”
  <br />
    “We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his
    surviving partner,” said the gentleman, presenting his
    credentials.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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.”
  <br />
    “Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
  <br />
    “Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen
    again.
  <br />
    “And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are
    they still in operation?”
  <br />
    “They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I
    could say they were not.”
  <br />
    “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?”
    said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “Both very busy, sir.”
  <br />
    “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.”
  <br />
    “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?”
  <br />
    “Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
  <br />
    “You wish to be anonymous?”
  <br />
    “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.”
  <br />
    “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
  <br />
    “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.”
  <br />
    “But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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 Mayor’s
    household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five
    shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the
    streets, stirred up to-morrow’s pudding in his garret, while his
    lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.
  <br />
    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 <br />

|

        “God bless you, merry gentleman!<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;May nothing
        you dismay!”
     |

| —- |

Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.
At length the hour of shutting up the counting-house arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.
“You’ll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?” said Scrooge.
“If quite convenient, sir.”
“It’s not convenient,” said Scrooge, “and it’s not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you’d think yourself ill-used, I’ll be bound?”
The clerk smiled faintly.
“And yet,” said Scrooge, “you don’t think ill-used, when I pay a day’s wages for no work.”
The clerk observed that it was only once a year.
“A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!” said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin. “But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.”
The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman’s-buff.
Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s-book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices. The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.
Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the city of London, even including—which is a bold word—the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last mention of his seven years’ dead partner that afternoon. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face.
Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.
As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.
To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished, turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.
He pause, with a moment’s irresolution, before he shut the door; and he look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley’s pigtail sticking out into the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said “Pooh, pooh!” and closed it with a bang.
The sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant’s cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall, and up the stairs; slowly too: trimming his candle as he went.
You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall and the door towards the balustrades: and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen gas-lamps out of the street wouldn’t have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge’s dip.
Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that. Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But before he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face to desire to do that.
Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room. All as they should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had a cold in his head) upon the hob. Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard, 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; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts; and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came like the ancient Prophet’s rod, and swallowed up the whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old Marley’s head on every one.
“Humbug!” said Scrooge; and walked across the room.
After several turns, he sat down again. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.
This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant’s cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.
The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.
“It’s humbug still!” said Scrooge. “I won’t believe it.”
His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, “I know him; Marley’s Ghost!” and fell again.

####

  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had
    never believed it until now.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “How now!” said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. “What
    do you want with me?”
  <br />
    “Much!”—Marley’s voice, no doubt about it.
  <br />
    “Who are you?”
  <br />
    “Ask me who I .”
  <br />
    “Who  you then?” said Scrooge, raising his voice.
    “You’re particular, for a shade.” He was going to say
    “ a shade,” but substituted this, as more
    appropriate.
  <br />
    “In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.”
  <br />
    “Can you—can you sit down?” asked Scrooge, looking
    doubtfully at him.
  <br />
    “I can.”
  <br />
    “Do it, then.”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
  <br />
    “I don’t,” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your
    senses?”
  <br />
    “I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “Why do you doubt your senses?”
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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.
  <br />
    “I do,” replied the Ghost.
  <br />
    “You are not looking at it,” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “But I see it,” said the Ghost, “notwithstanding.”
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    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!
  <br />
    Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.
  <br />
    “Mercy!” he said. “Dreadful apparition, why do you
    trouble me?”
  <br />
    “Man of the worldly mind!” replied the Ghost, “do you
    believe in me or not?”
  <br />
    “I do,” said Scrooge. “I must. But why do spirits walk
    the earth, and why do they come to me?”
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its
    shadowy hands.
  <br />
    “You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me
    why?”
  <br />
    “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 ”
  <br />
    Scrooge trembled more and more.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “Jacob,” he said, imploringly. “Old Jacob Marley, tell
    me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob!”
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,” Scrooge
    observed, in a business-like manner, though with humility and deference.
  <br />
    “Slow!” the Ghost repeated.
  <br />
    “Seven years dead,” mused Scrooge. “And travelling all
    the time!”
  <br />
    “The whole time,” said the Ghost. “No rest, no peace.
    Incessant torture of remorse.”
  <br />
    “You travel fast?” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “On the wings of the wind,” replied the Ghost.
  <br />
    “You might have got over a great quantity of ground in seven
    years,” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,”
    faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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 ”
  <br />
    Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the spectre going on at this
    rate, and began to quake exceedingly.
  <br />
    “Hear me!” cried the Ghost. “My time is nearly gone.”
  <br />
    “I will,” said Scrooge. “But don’t be hard upon
    me! Don’t be flowery, Jacob! Pray!”
  <br />
    “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.”
  <br />
    It was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge shivered, and wiped the
    perspiration from his brow.
  <br />
    “That is no light part of my penance,” pursued the Ghost.
    “I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and
    hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.”
  <br />
    “You were always a good friend to me,” said Scrooge. “Thank’ee!”
  <br />
    “You will be haunted,” resumed the Ghost, “by Three
    Spirits.”
  <br />
    Scrooge’s countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost’s had
    done.
  <br />
    “Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?” he
    demanded, in a faltering voice.
  <br />
    “It is.”
  <br />
    “I—I think I’d rather not,” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “Without their visits,” said the Ghost, “you cannot
    hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first to-morrow, when the bell
    tolls One.”
  <br />
    “Couldn’t I take ’em all at once, and have it over,
    Jacob?” hinted Scrooge.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    When it had said these words, the spectre took its wrapper from the
    table, and bound it round its head, as before. Scrooge knew this, by the
    smart sound its teeth made, when the jaws were brought together by the
    bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again, and found his supernatural
    visitor confronting him in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over
    and about its arm.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked
    out.
  <br />
    The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in
    restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains
    like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments)
    were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to
    Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost,
    in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle,
    who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an
    infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all
    was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters,
    and had lost the power for ever.

    Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist enshrouded them, he
    could not tell. But they and their spirit voices faded together; and the
    night became as it had been when he walked home.
  <br />
    Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door by which the Ghost had
    entered. It was double-locked, as he had locked it with his own hands,
    and the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say “Humbug!”
    but stopped at the first syllable. And being, from the emotion he had
    undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible
    World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the
    hour, much in need of repose; went straight to bed, without undressing,
    and fell asleep upon the instant. 

    [STAVE  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.
  <br />
    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!
  <br />
    He touched the spring of his repeater, to correct this most preposterous
    clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve: and stopped.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed, and groped his
    way to the window. He was obliged to rub the frost off with the sleeve
    of his dressing-gown before he could see anything; and could see very
    little then. All he could make out was, that it was still very foggy and
    extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and
    fro, and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been if
    night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the world. This
    was a great relief, because “three days after sight of this First
    of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,” and so
    forth, would have become a mere United States’ security if there
    were no days to count by.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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?”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “Ding, dong!”
  <br />
    “A quarter past,” said Scrooge, counting.
  <br />
    “Ding, dong!”
  <br />
    “Half-past!” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “Ding, dong!”
  <br />
    “A quarter to it,” said Scrooge.
  <br />
    “Ding, dong!”
  <br />
    “The hour itself,” said Scrooge, triumphantly, “and
    nothing else!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    It was a strange figure—like a child: yet not so like a child as
    like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him
    the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to
    a child’s proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and
    down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a
    wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were
    very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of
    uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like
    those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and
    round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was
    beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in
    singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with
    summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the
    crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all
    this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in
    its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held
    under its arm.
  <br />
    Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness,
    was  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.
  <br />
    “Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?”
    asked Scrooge.
  <br />
    “I am!”
  <br />
    The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if instead of being so
    close beside him, it were at a distance.
  <br />
    “Who, and what are you?” Scrooge demanded.
  <br />
    “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
  <br />
    “Long Past?” inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish
    stature.
  <br />
    “No. Your past.”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “Your welfare!” said the Ghost.
  <br />
    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:
  <br />
    “Your reclamation, then. Take heed!”
  <br />
    It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him gently by the
    arm.
  <br />
    “Rise! and walk with me!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “I am a mortal,” Scrooge remonstrated, “and liable to
    fall.”
  <br />
    “Bear but a touch of my hand ,” said the Spirit,
    laying it upon his heart, “and you shall be upheld in more than
    this!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “Good Heaven!” said Scrooge, clasping his hands together, as
    he looked about him. “I was bred in this place. I was a boy here!”
  <br />
    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!
  <br />
    “Your lip is trembling,” said the Ghost. “And what is
    that upon your cheek?”
  <br />
    Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice, that it was a
    pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him where he would.
  <br />
    “You recollect the way?” inquired the Spirit.
  <br />
    “Remember it!” cried Scrooge with fervour; “I could
    walk it blindfold.”
  <br />
    “Strange to have forgotten it for so many years!” observed
    the Ghost. “Let us go on.”
  <br />
    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!
  <br />
    “These are but shadows of the things that have been,” said
    the Ghost. “They have no consciousness of us.”
  <br />
    The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge knew and named
    them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them! Why
    did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past! Why
    was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry
    Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and bye-ways, for their several
    homes! What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas!
    What good had it ever done to him?
  <br />
    “The school is not quite deserted,” said the Ghost. “A
    solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.”
  <br />
    Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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
     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
     to be married to the Princess!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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.”
  <br />
    “What is the matter?” asked the Spirit.
  <br />
    “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.”
  <br />
    The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand: saying as it did so,
    “Let us see another Christmas!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.”
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    “Home, little Fan?” returned the boy.
  <br />
    “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.”
  <br />
    “You are quite a woman, little Fan!” exclaimed the boy.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered,”
    said the Ghost. “But she had a large heart!”
  <br />
    “So she had,” cried Scrooge. “You’re right. I
    will not gainsay it, Spirit. God forbid!”
  <br />
    “She died a woman,” said the Ghost, “and had, as I
    think, children.”
  <br />
    “One child,” Scrooge returned.
  <br />
    “True,” said the Ghost. “Your nephew!”
  <br />
    Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and answered briefly, “Yes.”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked Scrooge if he
    knew it.
  <br />
    “Know it!” said Scrooge. “Was I apprenticed here!”
  <br />
    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:
  <br />
    “Why, it’s old Fezziwig! Bless his heart; it’s
    Fezziwig alive again!”
  <br />
    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:
  <br />
    “Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!”
  <br />
    Scrooge’s former self, now grown a young man, came briskly in,
    accompanied by his fellow-’prentice.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    “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!”
  <br />
    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.
  <br />
    In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and
    made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came
    Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss
    Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose
    hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the
    business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the
    cook, with her brother’s particular friend, the milkman. In came
    the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough
    from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door
    but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In
    they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some
    gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all
    came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty 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.
  <br />
    There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and
    there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold
    Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were
    mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came
    after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The
    sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told
    it him!) struck up “Sir Roger de Coverley.” Then old
    Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a
    good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair
    of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who 
    dance, and had no notion of walking.