Name: Immerse in Christmas Spirit: 'A Christmas Carol' Unabridged Audiobook | HD Audio
Uploaded: 2024-05-30T22:42:29.000Z
Duration: 2 h 49 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

A CHRISTMAS CAROL IN PROSE BEING A Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens.

The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.

Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail.

I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffinnail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.

But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.

You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years.

Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner.

And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from.

This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middleaged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spotsay Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name.

There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley.

The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley.

Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names.

But he was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!

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

Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and selfcontained, and solitary as an oyster.

The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.

A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.

He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge.

No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him.

No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.

Foul weather didn't know where to have him.

The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect.

They often 'came down' handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, 'My dear Scrooge, how are you?

No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge.

Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, 'No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!'

To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call 'nuts' to Scrooge.

Once upon a timeof all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eveold Scrooge sat busy in his countinghouse.

It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.

The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already it had not been light all dayand candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air.

The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.

To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge's countinghouse was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters.

Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal.

But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coalbox in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part.

Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, 'Bah!'

'What else can I be,' returned the uncle, 'when I live in such a world of fools as this?

What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?

If I could work my will,' said Scrooge indignantly, 'every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

returned the uncle sternly, 'keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.'

'Let me leave it alone, then,' said Scrooge.

'There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,' returned the nephew.

But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come roundapart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from thatas a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shutup hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellowpassengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!'

The clerk in the Tank involuntarily applauded.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Immerse in Christmas Spirit: 'A Christmas Carol' Unabridged Audiobook | HD Audio

strike

suppose

tiny

spirit