“Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years.  He died seven years ago, this very night.”

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time.  Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?”

“Plenty of prisons.  But under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the unoffending multitude, a few of us are endeavoring to raise a fund to buy the poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth.  We choose this time, because it is a time of all others when Want is keenly felt and Abundance rejoices.  What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!”

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone.  Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer.  I don’t make merry myself at Christmas, and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.  I help to support the prisons and the workhouses,—­they cost enough,—­and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

At length the hour of shutting up the counting-house arrived.  With an ill-will Scrooge, dismounting from his stool, tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.

“You’ll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?”

“If quite convenient, sir.”

“It’s not convenient, and it’s not fair.  If I was to stop half a crown for it, you’d think yourself mightily ill-used, I’ll be bound?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And yet you don’t think me ill-used, when I pay a day’s wages for no work.”

“It’s only once a year, sir.”

“A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!  But I suppose you must have the whole day.  Be here all the earlier next morning.”

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl.  The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great-coat), went down a slide, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honor of its being Christmas eve, and then ran home as hard as he could pelt, to play at blind-man’s-buff.

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s book, went home to bed.  He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner.  They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard.  The building was old enough now, and dreary enough; for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.