Part 3 (1/2)

_Gho._ In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.

_Scro._ Can you--can you sit down?

_Gho._ I can.

_Scro._ Do it, then.

_Gho._ You don't believe in me?

_Scro._ I don't.

_Gho._ What evidence do you require of my reality beyond that of your senses?

_Scro._ I don't know.

_Gho._ Why do you doubt your senses?

_Scro._ Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an under-done potato.

There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are. You see this tooth-pick?

_Gho._ I do.

_Scro._ You are not looking at it.

_Gho._ But I see it, notwithstanding.

_Scro._ Well! I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of gobblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you; humbug. (_Ghost rattles chain, takes bandage off jaws, and drops lower jaw as far as possible._)

_Scro._ (_Betrays signs of fright._) Mercy! dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?

_Gho._ Man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me, or not?

_Scro._ I do. I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?

_Gho._ It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men and travel far and wide, and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world--oh, woe is me--and witness what it can not share, but might have shared on earth, turned to happiness.

[_Shakes chain and wrings his hands._]

_Scro._ You are fettered; tell me why?

_Gho._ I wear the chain I forged in life; I made it link by link and yard by yard. I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to _you_? Or would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself. It was full as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas-eves ago. You have labored on it since. It is a pondrous chain!

_Scro._ Jacob, old Jacob Marley, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob.

_Gho._ I have none to give. It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers to other lands of men. Nor can I tell you what I would. A very little more is all that is permitted to me. I can not rest, I can not stay, I can not linger anywhere. My spirit never walked beyond our counting house, mark me!--in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me.

_Scro._ You must have been very slow about it, Jacob.