d the nephew.

[Illustration: _"A Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a
cheerful voice._]

"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I live in such a world
of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's
Christmas-time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time
for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for
balancing your books, and having every item in 'em through a round dozen
of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will," said
Scrooge indignantly, "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 through his heart. He should!"

"Uncle!" pleaded the nephew.

"Nephew!" returned the uncle sternly, "keep Christmas in your own way,
and let me keep it in mine."

"Keep it!" repeated Scrooge's nephew. "But you don't keep it."

"Let me leave it alone, then," said Scrooge. "Much good may it do you!
Much good it has ever done you!"

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I
have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew; "Christmas among
the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it
has come round--apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and
origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that--as a good
time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know
of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one
consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people
below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and
not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore,
uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I
believe that it _has_ done me good, and _will_ do me good; and I say,
God bless it!"

The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately
sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the
last frail spark for ever.

"Let me hear another sound from _you_," said Scrooge, "and you'll keep
your Christmas by losing your situation! You're quite a powerful
speaker, sir," he added, turning to his nephew. "I wonder you don't go
into Parliament."

"Don't be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to-morrow."

Scrooge said that he would see him----Yes, indeed he did. He went the
whole length of the expression, and said that he would see