life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold
young brood, I couldn't have done it; I should have expected my arm to
have grown round it for a punishment, and never come straight again. And
yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have
questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the
lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose
waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in
short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest
license of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.

[Illustration: _A flushed and boisterous group_]

But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately
ensued that she, with laughing face and plundered dress, was borne
towards it the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to
greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas
toys and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and the
onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter! The scaling him, with
chairs for ladders, to dive into his pockets, despoil him of
brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round his
neck, pummel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection! The
shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package
was received! The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in
the act of putting a doll's frying pan into his mouth, and was more than
suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden
platter! The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy, and
gratitude, and ecstasy! They are all indescribable alike. It is enough
that, by degrees, the children and their emotions got out of the
parlour, and, by one stair at a time, up to the top of the house, where
they went to bed, and so subsided.

And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the master of
the house, having his daughter leaning fondly on him, sat down with her
and her mother at his own fireside; and when he thought that such
another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might have
called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his
life, his sight grew very dim indeed.

'Belle,' said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, 'I saw an
old friend of yours this afternoon.'

'Who was it?'

'Guess!'

'How can I? Tut, don't