A Christmas Carrol

                        'A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!' Which all the family re-echoed.

                        'God bless us every one!' said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

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

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

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

                        'No, no,' said Scrooge. 'Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.'

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

                        Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with
                        penitence and grief.

                        'Man,' said the Ghost, 'if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have
                        discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, and what
                        men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live
                        than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the
                        too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!'

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

                        'Mr. Scrooge!' said Bob; 'I'll give you Mr. Scrooge, the Founder of the Feast!'

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

                        'My dear,' said Bob, 'the children! Christmas Day.'

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

                        'My dear,' was Bob's mild answer, 'Christmas Day.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                        'What place is this?' asked Scrooge.

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

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

                        The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his robe, and passing on above the moor,
                        sped- whither? Not to sea? To sea. To Scrooge's horror, looking back, he saw the last of the land,
                        a frightful range of rocks, behind them; and his ears were deafened by the thundering of water, as
                        it rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to
                        undermine the earth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

                        'Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!'

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

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

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

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