s face.

"Mercy!" he said. "Dreadful apparition, why do
you trouble me?"

"Man of the worldly mind!" replied the Ghost, "do
you believe in me or not?"

"I do," said Scrooge. "I must. But why do spirits
walk the earth, and why do they come to me?"

"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!"

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain
and wrung its shadowy hands.

"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell
me why?"

"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 you?"

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"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!"

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.

"Jacob," he said, imploringly. "Old Jacob Marley,
tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob!"

"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!"

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.

"You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,"
Scrooge observed, in a business-like manner, though
with humility and deference.

"Slow!" the Ghost repeated.

"Seven years dead," mused Scrooge. "And travelling
all the time!"

"The whole time," said the Ghost. "No r