it:
"Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may
change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!"

The kind hand trembled.

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I
will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all
Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they
teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but
he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger
yet, repulsed him.

Holding up his hands in one last prayer to have his fate reversed, he
saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrank, collapsed,
and dwindled down into a bedpost.

STAVE FIVE

_The End of It_

Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his
own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make
amends in!

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!" Scrooge
repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. "The Spirits of all Three shall
strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven and the Christmas Time be
praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob, on my knees!"

He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his
broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing
violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with
tears.

"They are not torn down," cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed-curtains
in his arms, "they are not torn down, rings and all. They are here: I am
here: the shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled.
They will be. I know they will!"

His hands were busy with his garments all this time: turning them inside
out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making
them parties to every kind of extravagance.

"I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the
same breath; and making a perfect Laocooen[346-18] of himself with his
stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am
as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A Merry
Christmas to everybody! A Happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here!
Whoop! Hallo!"

He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now standing there:
perfectly winded.

"There's the saucepan that the gruel was in!" cried Scrooge, starting
off again, and frisking rou