A Christmas Carol

Jacob Marley had been dead for seven years, and Ebenezer Scrooge, his old business partner, was the only person who had come to his funeral.Scrooge was a hard, greedy old man, cold inside and out, who cared for nothing but money and kept every fire small to save coal.On a bitter, foggy Christmas Eve he sat working in his counting-house, while his clerk copied letters in a freezing little room with only one lump of coal on the fire.

His cheerful nephew looked in to wish him a merry Christmas and to invite him to dinner the next day, but Scrooge only said, "Bah! Humbug!" and sent him away.Then two kind gentlemen came in, collecting money for the poor, but Scrooge refused to give a single coin and told them the poor could go to the prisons and the workhouses.When the day's work was over, he grudgingly let his clerk have Christmas Day off with pay, and then walked home through the fog to the gloomy rooms that had once been Marley's.

As he put his key in the door, the knocker seemed to change into Marley's face, pale and staring, with spectacles pushed up on its ghostly forehead.He blinked, and it was only a knocker again; but upstairs, alone by his small fire, he heard a bell begin to ring by itself, and then a heavy clanking of chains coming up from below.Straight through the closed door came the ghost of Jacob Marley, the same face Scrooge had known, but wound about with a long chain made of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, and heavy purses.

Scrooge tried not to believe his eyes, saying the ghost might be nothing more than a bad piece of meat he had eaten, until the spirit gave a terrible cry and shook its chain so hard that Scrooge fell on his knees.Marley explained that in life he had never looked beyond his own money, and so now he could find no rest: he was forced to wander the world and watch the people he could no longer help."This chain I wear, I made myself in life," he said, "link by link — and yours was already longer and heavier than mine seven Christmas Eves ago."

He had come, he said, to warn Scrooge that there was still a chance to choose a different path, and that he would be haunted by three spirits.The first would come the next night when the bell struck one, the second the night after at the same hour, and the third when the last stroke of midnight had finished on the third night.Then Marley drew Scrooge to the window, and outside in the night air were crowds of moaning phantoms, each bound in chains, all of them wretched that they could no longer do any good among the living.

The ghost floated backward out into the dark, and when Scrooge looked again the phantoms had faded and the night was silent.Worn out by all he had seen, Scrooge stumbled to his bed without undressing and fell asleep the moment he lay down.