the sub-basement of the old building,
of the noise that at length came on through the heavy door of Scrooge's
apartment! "And"--as the Reader said with startling effect, while
his voice rose to a hurried outcry as he uttered the closing
exclamation--"upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though
it cried, '_I know him! Marley's Ghost!_'" The apparition, although
the description of it was nearly stenographically abbreviated in the
Reading, appeared to be, in a very few words, no less startlingly
realised. "Same face, usual waistcoat, tights, boots," even to the
spectral illusion being so transparent that Scrooge (his own marrow,
then, we may presume, becoming sensitized) looking through his
waistcoat "could see the two back buttons on the coat behind"--with
the incorrigible old joker's cynical reflection to himself that "he had
often heard Marley spoken of as having no bowels, but had never believed
it until then." The grotesque humour of his interview with the spectre
seemed scarcely to have been realised, in fact, until their colloquy was
actually listened to in the Reading.

Scrooge's entreaty addressed to the Ghost, when the latter demanded a
hearing, "Don't be flowery, Jacob, pray!" was only less laughable, for
example, than the expression of the old dreamer's visage when Marley
informed him that he had often sat beside him invisibly! Promised a
chance and hope in the fixture--a chance and hope of his dead partner's
procuring--Scrooge's "Thank 'ee!"--full of doubt--was a fitting prelude
to his acknowledgment of the favour when explained. "You will be
haunted," quoth the Ghost, "by three Spirits." The other faltering,
"I--I think I'd rather not:" and then quietly hinting afterwards,
"Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?"

As for the revelations made to Ebenezer Scrooge by those three memorable
Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, who can ever hope to
relate them and impersonate them as they were related and impersonated
by the Author himself of this peerless ghost-story! Fezziwig, for
example, with his calves shining like moons, who, after going
through all the intricacies of the country dance, bow, corkscrew,
thread-the-needle, and back again to your place, cut--"cut so deftly
that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again
without a stagger!" The very Fiddler, who "went up to the lofty desk
and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-ach