Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and
having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening
with his banker's book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had
once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of
rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard. The building was old
enough now, and dreary enough; for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the
other rooms being all let out as offices.
Now it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the
knocker on the door of this house, except that it was very large; also,
that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence
in that place; also, that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy
about him as any man in the city of London. And yet Scrooge, having his
key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing
any intermediate process of change, not a knocker, but Marley's face.
Marley's face, with a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a
dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but it looked at Scrooge as
Marley used to look,--with ghostly spectacles turned up upon its ghostly
forehead.
As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.
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