That was the cloth. A smell like an
eating-house, and a pastry cook's next door to each other, with a
laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding. In half a minute
Mrs. Cratchit entered: flushed, but smiling proudly: with the pudding,
like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of
half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly
stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he
regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since
their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that now the weight was off her
mind, she would confess she

[Illustration: Original manuscript of Page 38.]

had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had
something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a
small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do
so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth
swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted and
considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a
shovel-full of chesnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew
round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a
one; and at Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass;
two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden
goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks,
while the chesnuts on the fire sputtered and crackled noisily. Then
Bob proposed:

"A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!"

Which all the family re-echoed.

"God bless us every one!" said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

He sat very close to his father's side, upon his little stool. Bob
held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and
wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken
from him.

"Spirit," said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before,
"tell me if Tiny Tim will live."

"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor chimney corner,
and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows
remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die."

"No, no," said Scrooge. "Oh no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared."

"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my
race," returned the Ghos