thousand pounds for the loss of time it has occasioned me. Imagine it--I
had contracts with countless members of The Lords--and the war came. Then
I was sent to the front by The Sphere--and here I am, every day costing
me dear, rotting away in this horrible place. The time I have wasted here
has already cost me a fortune."

He paused directly in front of the door and spoke with solemnity: "A man
might as well be dead."

Scarcely had the words passed his lips when I almost jumped out of my
skin, for directly before us on the other side of the wall arose the very
noise which announced to Scrooge the approach of Marley's ghost--a dismal
clanking and rattling of chains. Had Marley's transparent figure walked
straight through the wall and up to the Dickensian character at my side,
I would have been less surprised than I was by what actually happened.

The doors opened with an uncanny bang and in the bang stood a fragile
minute queer figure, remotely suggesting an old man. The chief
characteristic of the apparition was a certain disagreeable nudity which
resulted from its complete lack of all the accepted appurtenances and
prerogatives of old age. Its little stooping body, helpless and brittle,
bore with extraordinary difficulty a head of absurd largeness, yet which
moved on the fleshless neck with a horrible agility. Dull eyes sat in the
clean-shaven wrinkles of a face neatly hopeless. At the knees a pair of
hands hung, infantile in their smallness. In the loose mouth a tiny
cigarette had perched and was solemnly smoking itself.

Suddenly the figure darted at me with a spiderlike entirety.

I felt myself lost.