ort of "Bah! humbug!" not a word was added of
the descriptive sentence immediately following. Admirable though every
word of it is, however, one could hardly regret its suppression. Is it
asked why? Well then, for this simple reason--the force of which will
be admitted by anyone who ever had the happiness of grasping Charles
Dickens's hand in friendship--that his description of Scrooge's Nephew
was, quite unconsciously but most accurately, in every word of it, a
literal description of himself, just as he looked upon any day in the
blithest of all seasons, after a brisk walk in the wintry streets or on
the snowy high road. "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." The Novelist himself was depicted there to a nicety. No need,
therefore, was there for even one syllable of this in the Reading.
Scrooge's Nephew was visibly before us, without a word being uttered.

To our thinking, it has always seemed as if the one chink through which
Scrooge's sympathies are got at and his heart-strings are eventually
touched, is discernable in his keen sense of humour from the very
outset. It is precisely through this that there seems hope, from the
very beginning, of his proving to be made of "penetrable stuff." When,
after his monstrous "Out upon merry Christmas!" he goes on to say, "If
I had my will 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 in his heart: he should!" one almost feels as if he were laughing
in his sleeve from the very commencement. Instance, as yet more
strikingly to the point in respect to what we are here maintaining, the
wonderfully comic effect of the bantering remarks addressed by him to
the Ghost of Jacob Marley all through their confabulation, even when the
spectre's voice, as we are told, was disturbing the very marrow in
his bones. True, it is there stated that, all through that portentous
dialogue, he was only trying to be smart "as a means of distracting his
own attention." But the jests themselves are too delicious, one would
say, for mere make-believes. Besides which, hear his laugh at the end of
the book! Hardly that of one really so long out of practice--"a splendid
laugh, a most illustrious laugh, the father of a long, long line of
brilliant laughs!" A laugh, o