ember! But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the
earlier _next_ morning."

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl.
The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends
of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no
great-coat), went down a slide, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty
times, in honor of its being Christmas eve, and then ran home as hard as
he could pelt, to play at blind-man's-buff.

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy 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. The building was old
enough now, and dreary enough; for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the
other rooms being all let out as offices.

Now it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the
knocker on the door of this house, except that it was very large; also,
that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence
in that place; also, that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy
about him as any man in the city of London. And yet Scrooge, having his
key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing
any intermediate process of change, not a knocker, but Marley's face.

Marley's face, with a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a
dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but it looked at Scrooge as
Marley used to look,--with ghostly spectacles turned up upon its ghostly
forehead.

As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again. He
said, "Pooh, pooh!" and closed the door with a bang.

The sound resounded through the house like thunder. 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.

Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for its being very dark. 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. He had just enough
recollection of the face to desire to do that.

Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room, all as they