his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly attired, and yearned to show his linen in the fashionable parks. And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing in, screaming that outside the baker's they had smelt the goose, and known it for their own; and, basking in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratchits danced about the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the skies; while he (not proud, although his collar near choked him) blew the fire until the slow potatoes, bubbling up, knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid to be let out, and peeled.

"What has ever got your precious father, then?" said Mrs. Cratchit. "And your brother Tiny Tim? And Martha warn't as late last Christmas Day by half an hour!"

"Here's Martha, mother!" said a girl, appearing as she spoke.

"Here's Martha, mother!" cried the two young Cratchits. "Hurrah! There's such a goose, Martha!"

"Why, bless your heart alive, my dear, how late you are!" said Mrs. Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and taking off her shawl and bonnet for her with officious zeal.

"We'd a deal of work to finish up last night,” replied the girl, "and had to clear away this morning, mother!"

"Well, never mind, so long as you are come," said Mrs. Cratchit. "Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and have a warm; Lord bless ye!"

"No, no! There's father coming," cried the two young Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. "Hide, Martha, hide!"

So Martha hid herself; and in came little Bob the father, with at least three feet of comforter, exclusive of the fringe, hanging down before him, and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim! he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame.

Why, where 's our Martha?" cried Bob Cratchit, looking round.

Not coming!" said Mrs. Cratchit.

"Not coming!" said Bob, with a sudden declension in his high spirits; for he had been Tim's blood-horse all the way from church, and had come home rampant. "Not coming upon Christmas Day!"

Martha did n't like to see him disappointed, if it were only a joke: so she came out prematurely from behind the closet-door, and ran into his arms; while the two young Cratchits hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the wash-house, that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper.

"And how did little Tim behave?" asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart's content. "As good as gold," said Bob, "and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see."

Bob's voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.

His active little crutch was heard upon the floor; and back came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by his brother and sister to his stool beside the fire. And while Bob, turning up his cuffs, as if, poor fellow! they were capable of being made more shabby,- compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and round, and put it on the hob to simmer, Master Peter and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.

Such a bustle ensued, that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds, -a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course; and, in truth, it was something very like it in that house. Mrs. Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with, incredible vigor; Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and, mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs. Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the long-expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board; and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly cried, "Hurrah!"

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovelful of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass, two tumblers and a custard-cup without a handle.

-

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:

"A merry Christmas to us all, my dears! God bless us!" Which all the family re-echoed.

"God bless us every one!" said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

Bob then proposes the health of Mr. Scrooge; and although his wife does not relish the toast, yet, at the solicitation of her husband, she consents to drink it for her husband's sake and the day's.

Again the scene changes, and Scrooge finds himself in the bright gleaming house of his nephew, where a merry company are enjoying themselves, and are laughing at his surly refusal to join in their Christmas festivities.

The third and last spirit comes at the same hour, and introduces itself as the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. It shows Scrooge a room in which a dead man is lying, and in which a motley crowd is joking and laughing, and casting lots for the very curtains surrounding the bed on which the body lies. The spirit points to the head, covered by the thin sheet; but Scrooge has no power to pull it aside, and view the features. As they leave the room, however, he beseeches the spirit to tell him what man it is who lies there so friendless and uncared for. The ghost does not answer, but conveys him hurriedly to a churchyard, neglected, overgrown with weeds, "choked up with too much burying, fat with repleted appetite. A worthy place!” The spirit stands among the graves, and points down to one; and

Scrooge beholds upon the stone of the neglected grave his own

"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried upon his knees.

The spirit pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

"No, spirit! Oh, no, no!"

The finger still was there.

Scrooge asks if there is no hope; if these sights are the shadows of what must, or what may come to him? The kind hand trembles; and Scrooge sees room for hope.

"I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons they teach. Oh! tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

...

Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bed-post.

Yes! and the bed-post was his own; the bed was his own; the room was his own, - best and happiest of all, the time before him was his own to make amends in!

And he does make amends most amply. The lesson of his dream is not forgotten. He instantly sends a prize turkey to the Cratchits, twice the size of Tiny Tim, and gives half a crown to the boy that goes and buys it for him. He surprises his nephew by dining with him, and the next day raises Bob Cratchit's salary. In short, "he became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world."

Tiny Tim. See CRATCHIT, TIM.

Topper, Mr.

One of the guests at Fred's Christmas dinner-party;

a bachelor, who thinks himself a wretched outcast because he has no wife, and consequently gets his eye upon one of Scrooge's niece's sisters. (Stave iii.)

Wilkins, Dick. A fellow 'prentice of Scrooge's. (Stave ii.)

The Life and Adventures of Martin

Chuzzlewit.

THIS novel was begun after Mr. Dickens's return from his first visit to America in 1841-42, and was issued in twenty monthly shilling parts, the first part making its appearance January 1, 1843. The work was completed and published in three volumes in 1844. It was illustrated with twenty etchings on steel by "Phiz " (Hablot K. Browne), and was dedicated to Miss Burdett Coutts.

"My main object in this story," says the author in his preface, "was to exhibit in a variety of aspects the commonest of all the vices; to show how selfishness propagates itself, and to what a grim giant it may grow from small beginnings." Another object was to call attention to "the want of sanitary improvements in the neglected dwellings of the poor," and to the system of ship-hospitals and the character of workhouse nurses.

Fresh from his travels in the United States, and with a vivid recollection of the people he had met and the places he had seen, and especially of what was most ridiculous and most censurable in American life and manners, Mr. Dickens yielded to the temptation of making his hero follow his footsteps, and pass through a variety of experiences, -some trying, and some laughable, but all of them unnecessary to the development of the main plot, and constituting a mere episode in the story, though, it must be confessed, an exceedingly humorous and interesting one. Of this portion of the book Mr. Dickens says in his preface, that it "is in no other respect a caricature than as it is an exhibition, for the most part, of the ludicrous side of the American character,-of that side which is, from its very nature, the most obtrusive, and the most likely to be seen by such travellers as young Martin and Mark Tapley. As I have never, in writing fiction, had any disposition to soften what is ridiculous or wrong at home, I hope (and believe) that the good-humored people of the United States are not generally disposed to quarrel with me for carrying the same usage abroad." Our author's American readers did, however, quarrel with him very generally and very seriously, as they had previously done for his strictures on their social usages and political institutions in his "American Notes." But, as Emerson says (in his essay on "Behavior,” in

"The Conduct of Life"), "the lesson was not quite lost: it held bad manners up, so that the churls could see the deformity." On his second visit to the United States, Mr. Dickens frankly and gracefully, and "as an act of plain justice and honor," bore testimony (in his farewell speech at New York, April 18, 1868) to the astonishing progress which had taken place in the country during the quarter of a century that had elapsed since his first visit. It is "a duty," he said, "with which I henceforth charge myself, not only here, but on every suitable occasion whatsoever and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense of my second reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony to the national generosity and magnanimity; also to declare how astounded I have been by the amazing changes that I have seen around me on every side, - changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the press, without whose advancement no advancement can be made anywhere. Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose, that, in five and twenty years, there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn, and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first."

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED.

Bailey, junior. The "boots' at Mrs. Todgers's "Commercial Boarding-house; a small boy with a large red head, and no nose to speak of. He afterwards becomes "Tiger" to Tigg Montague, and finally engages with Mr. Sweedlepipe in the barber-business. (Ch. viii, x, xi, xxvi-xxix, xxxviii, xli, xlii, xlix, lii.) Bevan, Mr. A sensible, warm-hearted Massachusetts man, whom Martin Chuzzlewit meets at his boarding-house in New York, and who afterwards advances him money to enable him to return to England. (Ch. xvi, xvii, xxi, xxxiii, xxxiv, xliii.)

Bib, Julius Washington Merryweather. An American gentleman in the lumber line; one of a committee that waits upon the Honorable Elijah Pogram. (Ch. xxxiv.)

Brick, Jefferson. The war correspondent of "The New-York Rowdy Journal." (Ch. xvi.) He is introduced by Colonel Diver, the editor of the newspaper, to Martin Chuzzlewit, who had at first supposed him to be the colonel's son.

"My war correspondent, sir, Mr. Jefferson Brick!"

Martin could not help starting at this unexpected announcement and the consciousness of the irretrievable mistake he had nearly made.