ne might suppose, as contagious as that of
his own Nephew when he was "so inexpressibly tickled that he was obliged
to get up off the sofa and stamp!" Speaking of which our author writes
so delectably, "If you should happen by any unlikely chance to know a
man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge's Nephew, all I can say is, I
should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I'll cultivate
his acquaintance." At which challenge one might almost have been tempted
anticipatively to say at a venture--Scrooge! Good-humoured argument
apart, however, what creatures were those who, one by one--sometimes, it
almost seemed, two or three of them together--appeared and disappeared
upon the platform, at the Reader's own good-will and pleasure!

After Scrooge's "Good afternoon!"--delivered with irresistibly ludicrous
iteration--we caught something more than a distant glimpse of the Clerk
in the tank, when--on Scrooge's surly interrogation, if he will want
all day to-morrow?--the Reader replied in the thinnest and meekest of
frightened voices, "If quite convenient, sir!" It brought into full
view instantaneously, and for the first time, the little Clerk whom one
followed in imagination with interest a minute afterwards on his "going
down a slide at the end of a lane of boys twenty times in honour of
Christmas, and then, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling
below his waist (for he boasted no greatcoat) running home as hard as
he could pelt to play at blind man's buff." Instantly, upon the heels
of this, we find noted on the margin, p. 18, "Tone to mystery." The
spectral illusion of the knocker on Scrooge's house-door, looking for
all the world not like a knocker, but like Marley's face, "with a dismal
light about it like a bad lobster in a dark cellar," prepared the
way marvellously for what followed. Numberless little tid-bits of
description that anybody else would have struck out with reluctance, as,
for instance, that of Scrooge looking cautiously behind the street door
when he entered, "as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight
of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall," were unhesitatingly
erased by the Reader, as, from his point of view, not necessarily to
the purpose. Then, after the goblin incident of the disused bell slowly
oscillating until it and all the other bells in the house rang loudly
for a while--afterwards becoming in turn just as suddenly hushed--we got
to the clanking approach, from