title: a-christmas-carol.txt.
, let me profit by it.'

'Touch my robe!'

Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.

Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry,
brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch,
all vanished instantly. So did the room, the fire, the ruddy glow, the
hour of night, and they stood in the city streets on Christmas morning,
where (for the weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk
and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement
in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses, whence
it was mad delight to the boys to see it come plumping down into the
road below, and splitting into artificial little snowstorms.

The house-fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker,
contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with
the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed
up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons: furrows
that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great
streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace in the
thick yellow mud and icy water. 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. There was nothing very
cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of
cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer
sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

[Illustration: THERE WAS NOTHING VERY CHEERFUL IN THE CLIMATE]

For the people who were shovelling away on the house-tops were jovial
and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now
and then exchanging a facetious snowball--better-natured missile far
than many a wordy jest--laughing heartily if it went right, and not less
heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open,
and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great,
round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of
jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the
street in their apoplectic opulence: There were ruddy, brown-faced,
broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth
like Spanish friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at
the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up
mistletoe. There were pears and apples clustered high in blooming
pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers'
benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks that people's mouths might
water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and
brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and
pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were
Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the
oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy
persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper
bags and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth
among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and
stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going
on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in
slow and passionless excitement.

The Grocers'! oh, the Grocers'! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters
down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone
that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that
the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters
were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended
scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the
raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the
sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious,
the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the
coldest lookers-on feel faint, and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that
the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in
modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything
was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all
so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they
tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets
wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running
back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the
best humour possible; while the grocer and his people were so frank and
fresh, that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons
behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection,
and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.

But soon