Did Joseph Tell His Family That Mary Was Pregnantby the Holy Ghost

A Christmas Ballad by Charles Dickens

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We are super pumped for the holidays, and to get even more in the mood, we'll be republishing A Christmas Carol past Charles Dickens.

We will share this classic Christmas story in x parts every weekday for the adjacent two weeks. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss any of the story!

If you lot haven't already, be sure to give Part 1 a read earlier continuing to the story below.

The following was written by Charles Dickens and originally published in 1843.

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Marley's Ghost — Part 2

At length the 60 minutes of shutting upwards the counting- house arrived. With an sick-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.

'You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?' said Scrooge.

'If quite convenient, sir.'

'Information technology'southward not convenient,' said Scrooge, 'and it's non fair. If I was to terminate half-a-crown for it, you'd recall yourself sick- used, I'll be bound?'

The clerk smiled faintly.

'And still,' said Scrooge, 'y'all don't think me ill-used, when I pay a day's wages for no work.'

The clerk observed that it was merely once a yr.

'A poor excuse for picking a human being's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!' said Scrooge, buttoning his great-glaze to the chin. 'But I suppose y'all must have the whole day. Be here all the before next morning.'

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the stop of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran dwelling house to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman's-buff.

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the remainder of the evening with his broker's- book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had in one case belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business concern to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the style out again. Information technology was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all allow out as offices. The yard was and so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his easily. The fog and frost so hung about the black quondam gateway of the house, that information technology seemed every bit if the Genius of the Weather sabbatum in mournful meditation on the threshold.

Now, it is a fact, that there was naught at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that identify; also that Scrooge had every bit little of what is chosen fancy almost him as whatsoever man in the city of London, fifty-fifty including — which is a bold discussion — the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Allow it likewise be borne in listen that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last mention of his seven years' dead partner that afternoon. So let any man explain to me, if he tin, how information technology happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing whatever intermediate process of alter — not a knocker, but Marley'due south face.

Marley'due south face up. It was not in impenetrable shadow every bit the other objects in the yard were, just had a dismal light most information technology, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, just looked at Scrooge equally Marley used to await: with ghostly glasses turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the optics were wide open up, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; only its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part or its ain expression.

As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible awareness to which information technology had been a stranger from infancy, would exist untrue. But he put his hand upon the primal he had relinquished, turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.

He did pause, with a moment's irresolution, before he shut the door; and he did look charily backside it first, as if he half-expected to exist terrified with the sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall. But there was nada on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said 'Pooh, pooh!' and closed information technology with a bang.

The sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room higher up, and every cask in the wine-merchant'south cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall, and up the stairs; slowly besides: trimming his candle as he went.

You may talk vaguely near driving a coach-and-six up a good one-time flying of stairs, or through a bad young Human activity of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken information technology broadwise, with the splinter- bar towards the wall and the door towards the balustrades: and done it piece of cake. In that location was enough of width for that, and room to spare; which is peradventure the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half a dozen gas-lamps out of the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well, and so yous may suppose that information technology was pretty dark with Scrooge's dip.

Upwardly Scrooge went, non caring a button for that. Darkness is inexpensive, and Scrooge liked it. Simply before he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms to encounter that all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face to want to practise that.

Sitting-room, bedchamber, lumber-room. All as they should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa; a pocket-sized burn in the grate; spoon and basin ready; and the piddling saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had a cold in his head) upon the hob. Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging upwards in a suspicious attitude against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Erstwhile fire-guards, former shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on 3 legs, and a poker.

Quite satisfied, he airtight his door, and locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.

Information technology was a very low fire indeed; goose egg on such a bitter night. He was obliged to sit down shut to it, and breed over it, before he could excerpt the least sensation of warmth from such a scattering of fuel. The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long agone, and paved all circular with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. At that place were Cains and Abels, Pharaohs' daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds similar feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts — and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came similar the ancient Prophet's rod, and swallowed upwardly the whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, at that place would take been a re-create of old Marley'south head on every i.

'Braggadocio!' said Scrooge; and walked across the room.

After several turns, he sabbatum down once more. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to remainder upon a bell, a disused bong, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with keen astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and and so did every bell in the house.

This might have lasted half a infinitesimal, or a minute, but information technology seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded past a clanking noise, deep downwards below; as if some person were dragging a heavy concatenation over the casks in the wine merchant's cellar. Scrooge so remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described every bit dragging chains.

The cellar-door flew open up with a booming sound, and and so he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming upwardly the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.

'Information technology'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 information technology cried 'I know him; Marley's Ghost!' and fell again.

The aforementioned face up: the very same. Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, similar his pigtail, and his glaze-skirts, and the pilus upon his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his eye. It was long, and wound most him like a tail; and information technology 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 run across the two buttons on his coat behind.

Scrooge had oftentimes heard it said that Marley had no bowels, merely 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 information technology standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its expiry-common cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief leap about its caput and chin, which wrapper he had non observed before; he was still incredulous, and fought confronting his senses.

'How now!' said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. 'What practise you want with me?'

'Much!' — Marley's voice, no doubt about it.

'Who are you?'

'Ask me who I was.'

'Who were you and so?' said Scrooge, raising his voice.

'You're detail, for a shade.' He was going to say 'to a shade,' but substituted this, every bit more appropriate.

'In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.'

'Can you — can you sit?' asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.

'I tin can.'

'Do it, then.'

Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know whether a ghost then transparent might find himself in a condition to have a chair; and felt that in the event of its beingness impossible, information technology might involve the necessity of an embarrassing caption. Simply 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 show would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?'

'I don't know,' said Scrooge. 'Why do yous doubt your senses?'

'Considering,' said Scrooge, 'a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the tummy makes them cheats. You lot may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There'south more than of gravy than of grave nigh yous, whatever you are!'

Scrooge was non much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his eye, past any ways waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, equally a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre'due south voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

To sit, staring at those stock-still glazed 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. Scrooge could not feel it himself, merely this was conspicuously the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its pilus, and skirts, and tassels, were nevertheless agitated every bit by the hot vapour from an oven.

'Y'all see this toothpick?' said Scrooge, returning apace to the charge, for the reason but assigned; and wishing, though it were only for a second, to divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.

'I practice,' replied the Ghost.

'You are not looking at it,' said Scrooge.

'Simply I see information technology,' said the Ghost, 'even so.'

'Well!' returned Scrooge, 'I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you! humbug!'

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its concatenation with such a dismal and bloodcurdling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was his horror, when the phantom taking off the cast round its head, as if it were likewise warm to clothing indoors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!

Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face up.

'Mercy!' he said. 'Dreadful bogeyman, why practice yous trouble me?'

'Human of the worldly mind!' replied the Ghost, 'exercise y'all believe in me or not?'

'I do,' said Scrooge. 'I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?'

'It is required of every human being,' the Ghost returned, 'that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and broad; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to practice then after expiry. It is doomed to wander through the world — oh, woe is me! — and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!'

Again the spectre raised a weep, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.

'You are fettered,' said Scrooge, trembling. 'Tell me why?'

'I article of clothing the chain I forged in life,' replied the Ghost. 'I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own gratuitous will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to yous?'

Scrooge trembled more and more.

'Or would y'all know,' pursued the Ghost, 'the weight and length of the potent curlicue yous conduct yourself? Information technology was full as heavy and every bit long as this, 7 Christmas Eves ago. You accept laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!'

Scrooge glanced near him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could come across zero.

'Jacob,' he said, imploringly. 'Old Jacob Marley, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob!'

'I have none to give,' the Ghost replied. 'It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed past other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor can I tell you what I would. A very fiddling more, is all permitted to me. I cannot remainder, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked across our counting-house — marker me! — in life my spirit never roved across the narrow limits of our coin-irresolute hole; and weary journeys lie before me!'

It was a addiction with Scrooge, whenever he became thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets. Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did and so now, but without lifting up his optics, or getting off his knees.

'You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,' Scrooge observed, in a business-similar manner, though with humility and deference.

'Irksome!' the Ghost repeated.

'Vii years dead,' mused Scrooge. 'And travelling all the time!'

'The whole time,' said the Ghost. 'No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.'

'You travel fast?' said Scrooge.

'On the wings of the wind,' replied the Ghost.

'Y'all might have got over a great quantity of ground in seven years,' said Scrooge.

The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the Ward would take been justified in indicting it for a nuisance.

'Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,' cried the phantom, 'not to know, that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth must laissez passer into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its piddling sphere, whatever information technology may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no infinite of regret tin can make apology for one life's opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!'

'But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to utilize this to himself.

'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands over again. 'Flesh was my business. The common welfare was my business concern; charity, mercy, abstinence, and benevolence, were, all, my business organization. The dealings of my trade were but a drib of water in the comprehensive bounding main of my business concern!'

Information technology held up its chain at arm'southward length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the basis again.

'At this time of the rolling year,' the spectre said 'I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of swain- beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor home! Were there no poor homes to which its calorie-free would accept conducted me!'

Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the spectre going on at this rate, and began to convulse exceedingly.

'Hear me!' cried the Ghost. 'My time is most gone.'

'I will,' said Scrooge. 'But don't exist difficult upon me! Don't be flowery, Jacob! Pray!' 'How information technology is that I appear before y'all in a shape that y'all tin see, I may not tell. I take sat invisible abreast you many and many a day.'

It was not an amusing thought. Scrooge shivered, and wiped the perspiration from his brow.

'That is no light part of my penance,' pursued the Ghost. 'I am here to-nighttime to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.'

'You were ever a good friend to me,' said Scrooge. 'Thank 'ee!'

'You will exist haunted,' resumed the Ghost, 'past Three Spirits.'

Scrooge's eyebrow fell almost as low equally the Ghost'south had done.

'Is that the run a risk and promise you mentioned, Jacob?' he demanded, in a faltering voice.

'It is.'

'I — I recollect I'd rather not,' said Scrooge.

'Without their visits,' said the Ghost, 'you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the offset tomorrow, when the bell tolls One.'

'Couldn't I have 'em all at once, and accept information technology over, Jacob?' hinted Scrooge.

'Wait the 2d on the next night at the aforementioned hour. The third upon the next night when the final stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more than; and wait that, for your own sake, you lot remember what has passed betwixt u.s.a.!'

When it had said these words, the spectre took its wrapper from the table, and bound it circular its head, as before. Scrooge knew this, past the smart sound its teeth fabricated, when the jaws were brought together by the cast. He ventured to raise his eyes once more, and found his supernatural visitor against him in an erect mental attitude, with its chain wound over and nearly its arm.

The bogeyman walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the window raised itself a lilliputian, then that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open. Information technology beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did. When they were within two paces of each other, Marley's Ghost held up its mitt, alert him to come up no nearer. Scrooge stopped.

Not so much in obedience, equally in surprise and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and cocky-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful chant; and floated out upon the dour, dark night.

Scrooge followed to the window: drastic in his curiosity. He looked out.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering here and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every 1 of them wore chains like Marley'south Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with 1 old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom information technology saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, conspicuously, that they sought to interfere, for proficient, in homo matters, and had lost the power for ever.

Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and their spirit voices faded together; and the night became as it had been when he walked dwelling.

Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door past which the Ghost had entered. It was double-locked, as he had locked information technology with his ain hands, and the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say 'Humbug!' but stopped at the first syllable. And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in demand of repose; went direct to bed, without undressing, and brutal asleep upon the instant.

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Source: https://medium.com/the-mission/a-christmas-carol-by-charles-dickens-aaf8e8817850

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