“I know they’re talking nonsense,” Alice thought to herself: “and it’s foolish to cry about it.” So she brushed away her tears, and went on as cheerfully as she could. “At any rate I’d better be getting out of the wood, for really it’s coming on very dark. Do you think it‘s going to rain?” Tweedledum spread a large umbrella over himself and his brother, and looked up into it. “No, I don’t think it is,” he said: “at least—not under HERE. Nohow.” “But it may rain OUTSIDE?” “It may—if it chooses,” said Tweedledee: “we’ve no objection. Contrariwise.” “Selfish things!” thought Alice, and she was just going to say “Good-night” and leave them, when Tweedledum sprang out from under the umbrella and seized her by the wrist. “Do you see THAT?” he said, in a voice choking with passion, and his eyes grew large and yellow all in a moment, as he pointed with a trembling finger at a small white thing lying under the tree. “It’s only a rattle,” Alice said, after a careful examination of the little white thing. “Not a rattleSNAKE, you know,” she added hastily, thinking that he was frightened: “only an old rattle—quite old and broken.” “I knew it was!” cried Tweedledum, beginning to stamp about wildly and tear his hair. “It’s spoilt, of course!” Here he looked at Tweedledee, who immediately sat down on the ground, and tried to hide himself under the umbrella. Alice laid her hand upon his arm, and said in a soothing tone, “You needn’t be so angry about an old rattle.” “But it isn’t old!” Tweedledum cried, in a greater fury than ever. “It’s new, I tell you—I bought it yesterday—my nice new RATTLE!” and his voice rose to a perfect scream. All this time Tweedledee was trying his best to fold up the umbrella, with himself in it: which was such an extraordinary thing to do, that it quite took off Alice’s attention from the angry brother. But he couldn’t quite succeed, and it ended in his rolling over, bundled up in the umbrella, with only his head out: and there he lay, opening and shutting his mouth and his large eyes—“looking more like a fish than anything else,” Alice thought. “Of course you agree to have a battle?” Tweedledum said in a calmer tone. “I suppose so,” the other sulkily replied, as he crawled out of the umbrella: “only SHE must help us to dress up, you know.” So the two brothers went off hand-in-hand into the wood, and returned in a minute with their arms full of things—such as bolsters, blankets, hearth-rugs, table-cloths, dish-covers and coal-scuttles. “I hope you’re a good hand at pinning and tying strings?” Tweedledum remarked. “Every one of these things has got to go on, somehow or other.” Alice said afterwards she had never seen such a fuss made about anything in all her life—the way those two bustled about—and the quantity of things they put on—and the trouble they gave her in tying strings and fastening buttons—“Really they’ll be more like bundles of old clothes than anything else, by the time they’re ready!” she said to herself, as she arranged a bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, “to keep his head from being cut off,” as he said.

He was so brimful of exultation that he could hardly hold himself when the old lady came back and stood above the wreck discharging lightnings of wrath from over her spectacles. He said to himself, “Now it’s coming!” And the next instant he was sprawling on the floor! The potent palm was uplifted to strike again when Tom cried out: “Hold on, now, what’er you belting ME for?—Sid broke it!” Aunt Polly paused, perplexed, and Tom looked for healing pity. But when she got her tongue again, she only said: “Umf! Well, you didn’t get a lick amiss, I reckon. You been into some other audacious mischief when I wasn’t around, like enough.” Then her conscience reproached her, and she yearned to say something kind and loving; but she judged that this would be construed into a confession that she had been in the wrong, and discipline forbade that. So she kept silence, and went about her affairs with a troubled heart. Tom sulked in a corner and exalted his woes. He knew that in her heart his aunt was on her knees to him, and he was morosely gratified by the consciousness of it. He would hang out no signals, he would take notice of none. He knew that a yearning glance fell upon him, now and then, through a film of tears, but he refused recognition of it. He pictured himself lying sick unto death and his aunt bending over him beseeching one little forgiving word, but he would turn his face to the wall, and die with that word unsaid. Ah, how would she feel then? And he pictured himself brought home from the river, dead, with his curls all wet, and his sore heart at rest. How she would throw herself upon him, and how her tears would fall like rain, and her lips pray God to give her back her boy and she would never, never abuse him any more! But he would lie there cold and white and make no sign—a poor little sufferer, whose griefs were at an end. He so worked upon his feelings with the pathos of these dreams, that he had to keep swallowing, he was so like to choke; and his eyes swam in a blur of water, which overflowed when he winked, and ran down and trickled from the end of his nose. And such a luxury to him was this petting of his sorrows, that he could not bear to have any worldly cheeriness or any grating delight intrude upon it; it was too sacred for such contact; and so, presently, when his cousin Mary danced in, all alive with the joy of seeing home again after an age-long visit of one week to the country, he got up and moved in clouds and darkness out at one door as she brought song and sunshine in at the other.

They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant’s cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains. The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he beard the noise, much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door. “It’s humbug still!” said Scrooge. “I won’t believe it.” His colour changed though, when, without a pause it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried “I know him! Marley’s Ghost!” and fell again. The same face: the very same. Marley in his pig-tail, usual waistcoat, lights and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pig-tail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind. Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now. No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom through and through and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes, and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before, he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses… “How now!” said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. “What do you want with me?” “Much!” Marley’s voice, no doubt about it. “Who are you?” “Ask me who I was.” “Who were you, then?” said Scrooge, raising his voice. “You’re particular, for a shade.” He was going to say “to a shade”, but substituted this, as more appropriate. “In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.” “Can you-can you sit down?” asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him. “I can.” “Do it, then.” Scrooge asked the question, because he didn’t know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it. “You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost. “I don’t,” said Scrooge. “What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?” “I don’t know,” said Scrooge. “Why do you doubt your senses?” “Because,” said Scrooge, a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach maked them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; (or the spectre’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones. To sit, staring at those fixed glued eyes, in silence for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre’s being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own.