choly 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, where it had so little
business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run
there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other
houses, and have forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and
dreary enough; for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being
all let out as offices.

Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant's cellars below,
appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a
man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across
the hall, and up the stairs; slowly too: trimming his candle as he went.
Half a dozen gas-lamps out of the street wouldn't have lighted the
entry too well, so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with
Scrooge's dip.

Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that. Darkness is cheap, and
Scrooge liked it. But before he shut his heavy door, he walked through
his rooms to see that all was right.

Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in;
double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against
surprise, he, took off his cravat; put on his dressing gown and
slippers, and his night-cap; and sat down before the fire to take his
gruel. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to
rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and
communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the
highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with
a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin
to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a
sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an
hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded
by a clanking noise deep down below, as if some person were dragging a
heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant's cellar. Scrooge then
remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as
dragging chains.

The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the
noise much louder, on the floors below;