A Christmas Carol in Prose : Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.
Autograph manuscript signed, December 1843
Page 12
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan before 1900
12
transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event of its being impossible it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down, on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.
"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.
"I don't," said Scrooge.
"What evidence would you have of my reality, beyond that of your senses?"
"I don't know," said Scrooge.
"Why do you doubt your senses?"
"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potatoe. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"
Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.
To sit staring at those fixed glazed eyes in silence, for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very awful too in the spectre's being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case, for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.
"You see this toothpick—," said Scrooge: returning quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned: and wishing, though it were only for a second, to divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.
" I do," replied the Ghost.
"You're not looking at it," said Scrooge.
"But I see it," said the Ghost, "notwithstanding."
"Well!" returned Scrooge. "I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days, persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you— humbug!"
At this, the Spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was his horror, when the Phantom, taking off the bandage round its head as if it were too