A Christmas Carol

"Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough."

To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything,

No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle,

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner

The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear heart’s content.

“To any kindly given. To a poor one most.”

“Why to a poor one most?” asked Scrooge.

“Because it needs it most.”

Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!

Speak comfort to me, Jacob!”

girded it on of my own free will,