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Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, 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. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names.

The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley.

There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. 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.

This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. 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. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.

Stave II: The First of the Three Spirits Stave III: The Second of the Three Spirits Stave IV: The Last of the Spirits May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. I HAVE 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.