le way of accounting for them--and yet
it is dreadful to believe in such atrocity as my suggestion would imply.
It is clear that Kidd--if Kidd indeed secreted this treasure, which I
doubt not--it is clear that he must have had assistance in the labor.
But, the worst of this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient
to remove all participants in his secret. Perhaps a couple of blows with
a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit;
perhaps it required a dozen--who shall tell?"

V. A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1843)

BY CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)

[_Setting_. In this most famous of Christmas stories Dickens gives us
the very atmosphere of the season with all the contrasts that poverty
and wealth, miserliness and charity, the past and the future can
suggest. Though he had London in mind, any great industrial center would
have served as well, for Dickens was thinking primarily of the relations
between employer and employee. That Christmas is better kept in England
now than when Dickens wrote is a triumph due more to "A Christmas Carol"
than to any other one piece of prose or verse.

_Plot_. The story was planned rather than plotted. By calling it a carol
and dividing it into staves, Dickens would have us think of it not as a
narrative but as a song, full of the joy and good will that Christmas
ought to diffuse. It is a rill from the fountain of the first great
Christmas chant, "On earth peace, good will toward men." The theme is
not so much the duty of service as the joy of service, the happiness
that we feel in making others happy; and the four carols mark the four
stages in the conversion of Scrooge from solitary selfishness to social
good will. The plan is simple but it is suffused with a love and
sympathy that no one but Dickens or O. Henry could have given it. If
"The Gold-Bug" is a triumph of the analytic intellect, this story is a
triumph of the social impulses that make the world better. "It seems to
me," said Thackeray, "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who
reads it a personal kindness." While writing it Dickens said: "I wept
and laughed and wept again." And yet the psychology of the plot is as
soundly intellectual as the style is emotional. Dickens knew that a
flint-hearted man like Scrooge could not be changed by forces brought to
bear from without. The appeal must come from within. He must himself see
his past, his present, and his probable future, but in a new li