dering 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
the shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year
through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of seaweed
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 a 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
figurehead 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.'

The second of these spirits accompanies SCROOGE to a scene that is well
worth seeing, and the like of which many of our readers have doubtless
often encountered--a regular Christmas frolic; in the present instance at
the residence of his nephew, who has a sister, a lovely, plump damsel,
with a lace tucker: she was 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 sa