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his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and
Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face
to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am
now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.

It was a strange figure--like a child: yet not so like a child as like
an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the
appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a
child's proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its
back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in
it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and
muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength.
Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper
members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist
was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a
branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular contradiction
of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But
the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there
sprang a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible; and
which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a
great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.

Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness,
was _not_ its strangest quality. For as its belt sparkled and glittered
now in one part and now in another, and what was light one instant, at
another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its
distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with
twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a
body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the
dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the very wonder of this, it
would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever.

"Are you the Spirit, Sir, whose coming was foretold to me?" asked
Scrooge.

"I am!"

The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if instead of being so
close beside him, it were at a distance.

"Who, and what are you?" Scrooge demanded.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"Long past?" inquired Scrooge, observant of its dwarfish stature.

"No. Your past."

Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if anybody could