The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge Read Online Free PDF

rabid physicking for the inward man, were then the specifics for lunacy,” replied the ghost. “Chains, straw, filthy solitude, darkness, and starvation; spinning in whirligigs, corporal punishment, gagging, continued intoxication; nothing was too wildly extravagant, nothing too monstrously cruel to be prescribed by mad-doctors.”
    â€œAnd what is to happen to this soul?” asked Freddie, tears gathering in his eyes as he felt unfamiliar emotions coursing through him.
    But the ghost only replied, “Remember this Christmas and what you saw here.”
    At this Freddie finally tore his eyes away from the woman and turned on his uncle. “Why did you bring me here, Uncle Ebenezer?” he cried, tears of despair and anger now streaming down his face. “Why do you show me this sight and tell me there is nothing I can do?”
    â€œThere is much you can do,” replied Scrooge calmly, exchanging a knowing smile with the ghost. “But it is time we moved on.”
    As the room dissolved around them, and the figure of the poor woman faded into the shadow that it was, and then into nothingness, Freddie heard an upwelling of cries, as if athousand other inmates of that ghastly place let out their miseries at once. As the sound seemed just about to overwhelm them, it suddenly stopped, and Freddie found himself standing in a narrow street that curved downhill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where pedestrians might become passengers of the craft that plied the waters of the Thames. At the top of those stairs, where Freddie and his companions now found themselves, was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, which must have abutted on the water when the tide was in, but now abutted only mud. The sun hung low in the sky and there was a winter chill in the air.
    â€œI know this place,” said Scrooge excitedly, pointing to the sign that hung upon the waterside warehouse. MURDSTONE AND GRINBY’S , it proclaimed. Though Freddie was still adjusting to the fact that it was no longer either nighttime or summer and that he was no longer in either St. Luke’s or his own lodgings, Scrooge grinned with delight at his realisation: Not only did the grim and grimy warehouse inhabit the end of a street in Blackfriars; it also inhabited the pages of the novel that currently rested atop Scrooge’s bedside table a few miles and some decades hence.
    The travellers ventured inside the warehouse, inured as they were to the horrors of what they would see by the factthat they visited only shadows of what had been. Within they discovered panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years. The floors and staircases were decaying and from the cellars they could hear the squeaking and scuffling of old grey rats. The dirt and rottenness of the place was worse than Freddie had imagined even from its dour exterior.
    A large room on the ground floor of the warehouse rang with stern voices, clanking of machinery, splashing of water, and a score of other noises, making conversation amongst the visitors impossible, but the Spirit led Scrooge and Freddie to a dim and quieter corner, where an especially noxious odour hung in the air. Bent over a small table was a gaunt boy who could not have been more than twelve. His face was drawn and without expression, and his vacant eyes seemed to focus on something far beyond the work of his hands. His clothes were worn and ragged and his face and hands so dirty as to make his racial origins a matter of some uncertainty. The acrid smell in his corner of the warehouse rose from a pot of glue, into which he repeatedly dipped a brush. With this smoking concoction inches from his nose, he brushed the back of a paper label, which he then transferred to an empty bottle. This process he repeated some dozens of times in the few moments that Scrooge and Freddie observed him. His handswere cracked and burned from the glue and his eyes red from the fumes. As he