' What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough.' 'Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.'.I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest license of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.They often ‘came down’ handsomely, and Scrooge never did. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.

No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge.Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business! The common welfare was my business charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. Stave 1: Marley's Ghost Mankind was my business. I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me.4 Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits.3 Stave 2: The First of the Three Spirits.

The christmas carol dickens