“You are?  Yes.  I think you are.  Step this way, if you please.”

“It’s only once a year, sir.  It shall not be repeated.  I was making rather merry yesterday, sir.”

“Now, I’ll tell you what, my friend.  I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer.  And therefore,” Scrooge continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the Tank again,—­“and therefore I am about to raise your salary!”

Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler.

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back.  “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year!  I’ll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!  Make up the fires, and buy a second coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!”

Scrooge was better than his word.  He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father.  He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world.  Some people laughed to see the alteration in him; but his own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with spirits, but lived in that respect upon the total-abstinence principle ever afterward; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.  May that be truly said of us, and all of us!  And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us every one!

VI.  THE GREAT STONE FACE[*] (1850)

[* From “The Snow Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales.”  Used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers of Hawthorne’s Works.]

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)

[Setting.  The Profile Mountain, a huge “work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness,” seems to have given the suggestion.  The Profile Mountain is a part of Cannon Mountain, which is one of the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  But the larger background is to be sought in the interplay of the spiritual and physical forces which Hawthorne has here staged in allegory.  The mountain is the symbol of a lofty ideal that blesses those that follow its beckoning and marks the degree of failure of those that slight or ignore it.