A Christmas Carol | Page 3

knowing ones call "nuts" to Scrooge.
Once upon a time--of all the good days in the year, on Christmas
Eve--old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak,
biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court
outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their
breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm

them. The City clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark
already--it had not been light all day--and candles were flaring in the
windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the
palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and
keyhole, and was so dense without, that, although the court was of the
narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy
cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have
thought that nature lived hard by and was brewing on a large scale.
The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open, that he might keep his
eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank,
was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire
was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't
replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so
surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it
would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his
white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which
effort, not being a man of strong imagination, he failed.
"A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a cheerful voice. It
was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that
this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
"Bah!" said Scrooge. "Humbug!"
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this
nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and
handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's nephew. "You don't mean
that, I am sure?"
"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be
merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough."
"Come, then," returned the nephew gaily. "What right have you to be
dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough."

Scrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said,
"Bah!" again; and followed it up with "Humbug!"
"Don't be cross, uncle!" said the nephew.
[Illustration: "A Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a
cheerful voice.]
"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, and not an hour richer; a time for
balancing your books, and having every item in 'em through a round
dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,"
said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry
Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and
buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"
"Uncle!" pleaded the nephew.
"Nephew!" returned the uncle sternly, "keep Christmas in your own
way, and let me keep it in mine."
"Keep it!" repeated Scrooge's nephew. "But you don't keep it."
"Let me leave it alone, then," said Scrooge. "Much good may it do you!
Much good it has ever done you!"
"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by
which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew; "Christmas
among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time,
when it has come round--apart from the veneration due to its sacred
name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that--as a
good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I
know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem
by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of
people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave,
and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And

therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my
pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I
say, God bless it!"
The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately
sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last
frail spark for ever.
"Let me