An old, old man and
woman, with their children and their children's children, and another
generation beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire.
The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling of the wind
upon the barren waste, was singing them a Christmas song; it had been a
very old song when he was a boy; and from time to time they all joined
in the chorus. So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got
quite blithe and loud; and, so surely as they stopped, his vigour sank
again.

The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his robe, and,
passing on above the moor, sped whither? Not to sea? To sea. To
Scrooge's horror, looking back, he saw the last of the land, a frightful
range of rocks, behind them; and his ears were deafened by the
thundering of water, as it rolled and roared, and raged among the
dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.

Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from shore,
on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there
stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of seaweed clung to its base,
and storm-birds--born of the wind, one might suppose, as seaweed of the
water--rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.

But, even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire that
through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of
brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough
table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their
can of grog; and one of them, the elder too, with his face all damaged
and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might
be, struck up a sturdy song that was like a gale in itself.

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea--on, on--until,
being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a
ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the
bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their
several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or
had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of
some bygone Christmas-day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And
every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder
word for one another on that day than on any day in the year; and had
shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he
cared