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.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains

“In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.”

No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

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