A CHRISTMAS MESSAGE FROM NACC

Dear Students,

May the miracle of Christmas fill your heart with warmth and love.

Christmas is the time of giving and sharing.

It is the time of loving and forgiving.

Merry Christmas to Everyone!

Love,


Eliane & Patrícia

IT'S CHRISTMAS TIME! THE SYMBOLS

Christmas Facts

Every year more than 400 million people celebrate Xmas around the world -- that makes Xmas one of the world’s biggest religious and commercial festivities. In approximately year 300 A.D., the birthday of Jesus was determined to be on December 25, the day that has been celebrated from then till this very day. The celebration on the 25th of December starts with Christmas Eve, the evening of December 24.

The religious festival is originally a blend of pagan customs. The Romans held a festival on December 25 called Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, i.e. "the birthday of the unconquered sun.". Pagan Scandinavia celebrated a winter festival called Yule, held in late December to early January. However, it is uncertain exactly why December 25 became associated with the birth of Jesus since the Old Testament doesn’t mention a specific date of the event.

IT'S CHRISTMAS TIME: ALL ABOUT MISTLETOE

Mistletoe

Mistletoe has long been a symbol of love, peace and goodwill. In the ancient Druid society, warring clans would stop their battles and claim a temporary truce when they would chance upon mistletoe. It is possible that this embrace of goodwill among enemies may have eventually led to the traditional kiss under the mistletoe. Some cultures say that if a man kisses a woman while she is standing under mistletoe, it is a proposal of marriage! Most cultures around the world however, now just view a person standing under mistletoe as being available for a kiss!
Mistletoe can usually be spotted fairly easily in trees. If the trees have lost most of its leaves, look for roundish clumps of foliage within the bare branches, as can be seen in this photo. That's mistletoe!




Below is a photo of what mistletoe looks like up close. If you see this hanging above your head, you may suddenly find yourself locked in a kiss with someone! Happy Holidays! :)

Should You Google at Dinner?

Should You Google at Dinner?

By BRUCE FEILER

WHEN I was growing up, we used to play a game that went something like this: If you could invite any five people from history to dinner, who would it be? That game seems to have lost popularity of late, and I’m beginning to think I know why. These days, everybody I know invites the same guest to dinner. Who’s this ubiquitous invitee? The answer is sitting in your pocket.
Google.
Few rules of contemporary society seem more unanimous right now than the strict admonition against using a smartphone at mealtime. Of the 40,569 surveyors who rated restaurants for the 2011 Zagat guide to New York City restaurants, 64 percent said that texting, checking e-mail or talking on the phone is rude and inappropriate in a restaurant. “Emily Post’s Table Manners for Kids,” published in 2009, says bluntly, “Do NOT use your cellphone or any other electronic devices at the table.” As Cindy Post Senning, the book’s co-author, told The New York Times last year, “The family meal is a social event, not a food ingestion event.”
Laurie David, the Oscar-winning producer and a Hollywood doyenne, goes even further in “The Family Dinner,” her new cookbook manifesto. “Do not answer the phone at dinner,” she writes. “Do not bring a phone or BlackBerry to the table. No ringing, vibrating, answering, or texting allowed.” If someone violates this rule, she says, the host should snatch the phone immediately and keep it as long as necessary.
But wait? What if a few clicks of the smartphone can answer a question, solve a dispute or elucidate that thoughtful point you were making? What if that PDA is not being used to escape a conversation but to enhance it?
Consider the case of the banana split. Not long ago, my mother decided to make a big production over the first banana splits for her four young grandchildren. She ordered glass banana split boats, had the children paint their own designs, and then she collected all the ingredients. After dinner, she pulled out a pad of paper. “Now what type of ice cream would you like on your banana split?” she asked. Mint chocolate chip, one person screamed. Raspberry sorbet, another added. Dulce de leche.
“Hold on,” I said. “You can’t make a banana split with all these froufrou flavors. A banana split has to have strawberry, chocolate and vanilla ice cream.”
An uproar ensued, at which point I whipped out my BlackBerry and proposed I look up the origin of the dessert and ascertain the founders’ original intent. An even greater clamor then erupted. As my father put it, how could I ruin this warm family moment with something as unfeeling, untrustworthy and unhurried as a Google search? But, I countered, wasn’t the point of the exercise to teach the children a bit of Americana?
Who was right?
Many people I’ve encountered clearly believe that the blanket prohibition of cellphones at the table also extends to checking, say, what year Qatar will host the World Cup, what is Teddy Roosevelt’s relationship to Franklin or just how old Cher really is. Derek Brown, a bartender in Washington, complained on the Atlantic’s online food section recently that smartphones were “obliterating” the bartender’s traditional role as “the professor of the people.” Once upon a time, he wrote, the barkeep was “expected to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of sports, history, politics and science. If an impasse was met in opposing sides, the attention of both claimants naturally turned toward the bartender. If the bartender said so, you were wrong.”
Another reason to keep search engines out of the salad course is that they have the unfortunate tendency to produce a winner. A friend of mine was recently having a meal with his wife’s sister and her new fiancé. My friend asked his future brother-in-law what song the couple would use as their first dance. “Let My Love Open the Door” by the Who, he said. “That was actually on Pete Townshend’s solo album,” my friend corrected. The fiancé politely disagreed and promptly pulled out his cellphone. After Googling the answer, the outflanked name-that-tuner told my friend curtly, “You’re right,” before proceeding to sulk for the rest of the meal.
Despite these downsides, I’ve found far more people willing to support bringing much needed truth into dinner-table debates. These advocates include some of the most vocal critics of technology’s intrusion on contemporary life. Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley inventor who pioneered the term “virtual reality,” warned in his jeremiad, “You Are Not a Gadget,” published earlier this year, that technology is limiting the ability of humans to think for themselves.
Still, even Mr. Lanier, a well-known critic of Facebook and other social media, told me that brandishing my BlackBerry at an ice cream party was not a threat to social cohesion. “In my opinion, if your wife tells you not to Google at dinner, then she’s right,” he said. “If anybody else tells you, then you’re right.” I chuckled knowingly.
“My answer was not a joke,” he said. “It was intended to be instructive about the right way to deal with things. The moment the question becomes about the technology instead of about the people then something has gone horribly wrong.”
Finally I called Ms. David. True to form, Ms. David, a divorced mother of two teenage daughters, began with a passionate screed against bringing screens into family gatherings. “It’s really disturbing what technology is doing to family life,” she said. “Look at the recent Kaiser Family Foundation study that kids spend more than seven and a half hours a day in front of a screen. If we’re not stopping that at dinnertime, we’re in trouble, because you really can’t control it at any other time.”
But to my surprise, when I brought up my banana split standoff, Ms. David, whose book is a delightful compendium of recipes, family games and tips for keeping children at the table, quickly took my side. “First of all, situations where you need a particular piece of information don’t happen all the time,” she said. “If it’s a teaching moment, and you don’t have a dictionary or reference book handy, then, yes, it’s O.K. to Google at dinner.”
“So I’ve gotten a fundamentalist from the religion of no screens to say there is an exception?” I said.
“If it’s a learning moment, go right ahead,” she sad. “I even think there’s an exception for television. If the TV is never on at dinner and it can be invited as a special guest for elections, a debate or a great sports championship, it can be a wonderful thing.”
As for our ice cream episode, I did push forward with my search and quickly landed on a Wikipedia entry that said the banana split was invented in 1904 by a 23-year-old apprentice pharmacist at Tassel Pharmacy in Latrobe, Pa.
“The classic banana split is made with scoops of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream served in a row between the split banana,” the entry said. “Pineapple topping is spooned over the strawberry ice cream, chocolate syrup over the vanilla and strawberry topping over the chocolate. It is garnished with crushed nuts, whipped cream and maraschino cherries.”
Having proved my case, I gloated only mildly, and we all traipsed into the kitchen, only to find that the ice cream my mother had carefully laid out on the counter had completely melted into soup. My daughters quickly dissolved into tears. I may have won the battle, but I still missed the boat.

Bruce Feiler is the author of “America’s Prophet” and “The Council of Dads.” “This Life” appears monthly.

December 14, 2010

To Conquer Wind Power, China Writes the Rules

By KEITH BRADSHER

Doug Kanter for The New York Times

Employees at work on wind turbine hubs at the Gamesa factory in Tianjin, China, in October.

TIANJIN, China — Judging by the din at its factory here one recent day, the Spanish company Gamesa might seem to be a thriving player in the Chinese wind energy industry it helped create.
But Gamesa has learned the hard way, as other foreign manufacturers have, that competing for China’s lucrative business means playing by strict house rules that are often stacked in Beijing’s favor.
Nearly all the components that Gamesa assembles into million-dollar turbines here, for example, are made by local suppliers — companies Gamesa trained to meet onerous local content requirements. And these same suppliers undermine Gamesa by selling parts to its Chinese competitors — wind turbine makers that barely existed in 2005, when Gamesa controlled more than a third of the Chinese market.
But in the five years since, the upstarts have grabbed more than 85 percent of the wind turbine market, aided by low-interest loans and cheap land from the government, as well as preferential contracts from the state-owned power companies that are the main buyers of the equipment. Gamesa’s market share now is only 3 percent.
With their government-bestowed blessings, Chinese companies have flourished and now control almost half of the $45 billion global market for wind turbines. The biggest of those players are now taking aim at foreign markets, particularly the United States, where General Electric has long been the leader.
The story of Gamesa in China follows an industrial arc traced in other businesses, like desktop computers and solar panels. Chinese companies acquire the latest Western technology by various means and then take advantage of government policies to become the world’s dominant, low-cost suppliers. It is a pattern that many economists say could be repeated in other fields, like high-speed trains and nuclear reactors, unless China changes the way it plays the technology development game — or is forced to by its global trading partners.
Companies like Gamesa have been so eager to enter the Chinese market that they not only bow to Beijing’s dictates but have declined to complain to their own governments, even when they see China violating international trade agreements.
Even now, Gamesa is not crying foul — for reasons that are also part of the China story. Although the company’s market share in China has atrophied, the country’s wind turbine market has grown so big, so fast that Gamesa now sells more than twice as many turbines in China as it did when it was the market leader five years ago.
So as Gamesa executives see it, they made the right bet by coming to China. And they insist that they have no regrets about having trained more than 500 Chinese machinery companies as a cost of playing by Beijing’s rules — even if those rules have sometimes flouted international trade law. It is simply the table stakes of playing in the biggest game going.
“If we would not have done it, someone else would have done it,” said Jorge Calvet, Gamesa’s chairman and chief executive.
Entry Into China
Gamesa, an old-line machinery company that entered the wind turbine business in 1994, is a modern Spanish success story.
Its factories in Pamplona and elsewhere in Spain have produced wind turbines installed around the world. With sales of $4.4 billion last year, Gamesa is the world’s third-largest turbine maker, after Vestas of Denmark, the longtime global leader, and G.E.
With its relatively low Spanish labor costs, Gamesa became an early favorite a decade ago when China began buying significant numbers of imported wind turbines, as Beijing started moving toward clean energy. Gamesa also moved early and aggressively to beef up sales and maintenance organizations within China, amassing 35 percent of the market by 2005.
But Chinese officials had begun to slip new provisions into the bidding requirements for some state-run wind farms, requiring more and more of the content of turbines to be equipment produced within China — not imported.
Those piecemeal requirements soon led to a blanket requirement. On July 4, 2005, China’s top economic policy agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, declared that wind farms had to buy equipment in which at least 70 percent of the value was domestically manufactured.
“Wind farms not meeting the requirement of equipment localization rate shall not be allowed to be built,” stated the directive, known as Notice 1204.
Trade lawyers say that setting any local content requirement — let alone one stipulating such a high domestic share — was a violation of the rules of the World Trade Organization, the international body that China had joined just four years earlier. Joanna I. Lewis, a Georgetown University professor who is a longtime adviser to Chinese policy makers on wind energy, said she and others had repeatedly warned Beijing that the local-content policy risked provoking a W.T.O. challenge by other countries.
But the Chinese government bet correctly that Gamesa, as well as G.E. and other multinationals, would not dare risk losing a piece of China’s booming wind farm business by complaining to trade officials in their home countries.
Rather than fight, Gamesa and the other leading multinational wind turbine makers all opted to open factories in China and train local suppliers to meet the 70 percent threshold.
Mr. Calvet said Gamesa would have opened factories in China at some stage, regardless of the content policy.
“If you plan to go into a country,” Mr. Calvet said, “you really need to commit to a country.”
Ditlev Engel, the chief executive of Vestas, said in an interview, “We strongly believed that for us to be competitive in China, it was very important for us to develop an Asia supplier base.”
A top executive at a rival of Gamesa and Vestas, who insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Beijing, said that multinationals had another reason for going along with China’s dictates: “Everybody was too scared.”
There is a difference between setting up an assembly plant in a host company — as many European wind turbine companies, including Gamesa, have done in the United States, for example — and ceding the production of crucial parts to companies in the host country.
In the United States, where there are no local-content requirements, the wind turbine industry uses an average of 50 percent American-made parts. For its American operations, Gamesa relies somewhat more than that on American suppliers, but it still imports some parts from Spain, including crucial gearboxes.
Within weeks after Beijing’s issuance of Notice 1204, Gamesa sent dozens of Spanish engineers to Tianjin. The engineers did not just oversee the construction of the assembly plant, but fanned out to local Chinese companies and began teaching them how to make a multitude of steel forgings and castings, and a range of complex electronic controls.
One Chinese supplier here became so adept at making a 10-ton steel frame that keeps a wind turbine’s gearbox and generator aligned even under gale-force conditions, and making it so cheaply, that the Spanish company now ships the Chinese frame halfway around the world for turbines that Gamesa assembles at its American plant in Fairless Hills, Pa. Mr. Calvet said the American manufacturing sector had been so weakened in recent decades that for some components there were no American machinery companies readily available.
It was not until the summer of 2009, when senior Obama administration officials started looking at barriers to American clean energy exports, that the United States pressed China hard about Notice 1204. The Chinese government revoked it two months later.
But by then, the policy was no longer needed. Some Gamesa wind turbines exceeded 95 percent local content.
“The objectives of the local content requirement were achieved, and probably more achieved than anyone expected,” said Steve Sawyer, the secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council, a trade group based in Brussels that represents wind energy companies from around the world, including China.
A Battle Takes Shape
China agreed to abide by the W.T.O.’s trade rules when it joined the organization in 2001. And Chinese officials, when willing to comment on such matters at all, typically defend their actions as being within the bounds of fair play.
Li Junfeng, an official at the National Development and Reform Commission who oversees renewable energy policy, defended the local content policy.
“It was localization support,” Mr. Li said in an interview. China is a developing country, he said, and developing countries need to do what they can to foster industrial development.
But the Obama administration takes a different view. It included the local content rule in the investigation it announced on Oct. 15, an inquiry into whether China’s clean energy policies had violated W.T.O. rules. The investigation was spurred by the United Steelworkers union, which has no qualms about taking on Beijing because it has no sales contracts at risk in China.
Zhang Guobao, the director of China’s National Energy Administration, said at an Oct. 17 press conference that the United States was wrong to cite the local content rule in its investigation — because China had already abolished it. Mr. Zhang did have a point: the W.T.O.’s main redress for a local content protection is to push the offending country to revoke it.
But the United States investigation of China goes beyond local content, and the W.T.O. has other weapons at its disposal.
The trade organization, for example, has authority to order the repayment of subsidies a government gives to its export industries to the detriment of foreign competitors. The steelworkers’ petition cites various forms of subsidies and support that China has given to its industries in potential violation of international trade rules. That includes low-interest loans from state-owned banks and grants of cheap or free land, as well as other perks not available to foreign companies operating in China.
As for the state-owned wind farms that are the main buyers of wind energy equipment, China has many policies to preserve their dominance, while limiting market opportunities for foreign companies that might try to develop wind farms.
Those policies — all potential W.T.O. violations, according to some experts — are an open secret.
Earlier this autumn the Chinese wind turbine maker Ming Yang Wind Power Group made an initial public offering of its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, as prelude to entering the American wind energy market. The financial disclosures in the company’s prospectus acknowledged that “we obtained land and other policy incentives from local governments,” as well as deals requiring that the municipal governments’ wind farms buy turbines only from Ming Yang.
China Looks Abroad
Gamesa, among other multinational turbine makers, so far has benefited from the growing market in China, despite policies that have increasingly relegated those companies to fighting over ever-thinner slices of the pie.
But that dynamic could be changing. The Chinese government is now slowing the approval of new wind farms at home. The pause, whose duration is unclear, is meant to give the national electricity system time to absorb thousands of new turbines that have already been erected and not yet connected to the grid.
Gamesa had an ample order book lined up before the government applied the brakes. But the government policy means that the Chinese turbine makers, having become giants on the backs of companies like Gamesa, must now look beyond their captive national market for further growth.
Sinovel, China’s biggest wind turbine maker, has said it wants to become the world’s largest by 2015. The company’s chairman and president, Han Junliang, said in October at the annual China Wind Power industry conference in Beijing that his goal was to sell as many turbines overseas as within China.
Sinovel is among the Chinese companies now opening sales offices across the United States in preparation for a big export push next year. They are backed by more than $13 billion in low-interest loans issued this past summer by Chinese government-owned banks; billions more are being raised in initial public offerings led mainly by Morgan Stanley this autumn in New York and Hong Kong.
Multinationals are alarmed. Vestas, for example, is closing four factories in Denmark and one in Sweden, and laying off one-eighth of its 24,000-person labor force this autumn, in an effort to push its costs down closer to Asian levels, its chief, Mr. Engel, said.
The Chinese push, clouded by the Obama administration’s investigation of the steelworkers’ complaint, could complicate the climate change debate in the West. Wind farm developers in the West are worried that Western governments may be less enthusiastic about encouraging renewable energy requirements if these programs are perceived as creating jobs in China instead of at home.
The provincial government of Ontario in Canada now wants to take a page from China’s playbook by trying to require 25 percent local content for wind energy projects and 50 percent for solar power projects in the province. The Japanese government responded by filing a W.T.O. complaint against Canada in September, asserting that Ontario was violating the W.T.O. prohibition on local content requirements. By contrast, Japan has never filed a W.T.O. complaint on any issue against China, for fear of harming diplomatic relations with its large neighbor.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government is intent on turning its wind energy industry into the global leader, helping manufacturers coordinate export strategies and providing various sorts of technical assistance.
Mr. Li, the overseer of the Chinese renewable energy industry, publicly exhorted the leaders of the nation’s biggest wind turbine makers at the China Wind Power conference, a three-day event that drew hundreds of executives from around the world.
“You cannot be called a winner if you are the leader for three or five years,” Mr. Li told the Chinese executives. “You can only stand on the top line if you are the leader for 100 or 200 years.”
The Chinese presidents sat quietly and respectfully, chins down. Senior executives from the foreign manufacturers — including Vestas, G.E. and Gamesa — sat alongside them, staring straight ahead in stony silence.

The Opinion Pages

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December 13, 2010, 8:16 pm

The Human Incubator

By TINA ROSENBERG

Tags:

Hospitals, Medicine and Health, Nursing and Nurses, Premature Babies, Third World and Developing Countries

A mother in the Philippines used the warmth of her body to nurture her prematurely born daughter.

 

Sometimes, the best way to progress isn’t to advance — to step up with more money, more technology, more modernity. It’s to retreat.

Towards the end of the 1970s, the Mother and Child Institute in Bogota, Colombia, was in deep trouble. The institute was the city’s obstetrical reference hospital, where most of the city’s poor women went to give birth. Nurses and doctors were in short supply. In the newly created neonatal intensive care unit, there were so few incubators that premature babies had to share them — sometimes three to an incubator. The crowded conditions spread infections, which are particularly dangerous for preemies. The death rate was high.
Dr. Edgar Rey, the chief of the pediatrics department, could have attempted to do what many other hospital officials would have done: wage a political fight for more money, more incubators and more staff.

He would likely have lost. What was happening at the Mother and Child Institute was not unusual. Conditions were much better, in fact, than at most public hospitals in the third world. Hospitals that mainly serve the poor have very little political clout, which means that conditions in their wards sometimes seem to have been staged by Hieronymous Bosch. They have too much disease, too few nurses and sometimes no doctors at all. They can be so crowded that patients sleep on the floor and so broke that people must bring their own surgical gloves and thread. I recently visited a hospital in Ethiopia that didn’t even have water — the nurses washed their hands after they got home at night.

Proof that more money and more technology isn’t always the answer.

Rey thought about the basics. What is the purpose of an incubator? It is to keep a baby warm, oxygenated and nourished — to simulate as closely as possible the conditions of the womb. There is another mechanism for accomplishing these goals, Rey reasoned, the same one that cared for the baby during its months of gestation. Rey also felt, something that probably all mothers feel intuitively: that one reason babies in incubators did so poorly was that they were separated from their mothers. Was there a way to avoid the incubator by employing the baby’s mother instead?
What he came up with is an idea now known as kangaroo care. Aspects of kangaroo care are now in use even in wealthy countries — most hospitals in the United States, for example, have adopted some kangaroo care practices. But its real impact has been felt in poor countries, where it has saved countless preemies’ lives and helped others to survive with fewer problems.

A mother and child in Colombia, where the “kangaroo care” method was first used in the late 1970s.

 In Rey’s system, a mother of a preemie puts the baby on her exposed chest, dressed only in a diaper and sometimes a cap, in an upright or semi-upright position. The baby is strapped in by a scarf or other cloth sling supporting its bottom, and all but its head is covered by mom’s shirt. The mother keeps the baby like that, skin-to-skin, as much as possible, even sleeping in a reclining chair. Fathers and other relatives or friends can wear the baby as well to give the mother a break. Even very premature infants can go home with their families (with regular follow-up visits) once they are stable and their mothers are given training.

The babies stay warm, their own temperature regulated by the sympathetic biological responses that occur when mother and infant are in close physical contact. The mother’s breasts, in fact, heat up or cool down depending on what the baby needs. The upright position helps prevent reflux and apnea. Feeling the mother’s breathing and heartbeat helps the babies to stabilize their own heart and respiratory rates. They sleep more. They can breastfeed at will, and the constant contact encourages the mother to produce more milk. Babies breastfeed earlier and gain more weight.
The physical closeness encourages emotional closeness, which leads to lower rates of abandonment of premature infants. This was a serious problem among the patients of Rey’s hospital; without being able to hold and bond with their babies, some mothers had little attachment to counter their feelings of being overwhelmed with the burdens of having a preemie. But kangaroo care also had enormous benefits for parents. Every parent, I think, can understand the importance of holding a baby instead of gazing at him in an incubator. With kangaroo care, parents and baby go through less stress. Nurses who practice kangaroo care also report that mothers also feel more confident and effective because they are the heroes in their babies’ care, instead of passive bystanders watching a mysterious process from a distance.
The hospitals were the third beneficiaries. Kangaroo care freed up incubators. Getting preemies home as soon as they were stable also lessened overcrowding and allowed nurses and doctors to concentrate on the patients who needed them most.
Kangaroo care has been widely studied. A trial in a Bogota hospital of 746 low birth weight babies randomly assigned to either kangaroo or conventional incubator care found that the kangaroo babies had shorter hospital stays, better growth of head circumference and fewer severe infections. They had slightly better rates of survival, but the difference was not statistically significant. Other studies have found fewer differences between kangaroo and conventional methods. A conservative summary of the evidence to date is that kangaroo care is at least as good as conventional treatment — and perhaps better.

In much of the world, however, whether a mother’s chest is better or worse than an incubator is not the point. Hospitals have no incubators, or have only a few. And millions of mothers never see a hospital — they give birth at home. In very poor countries, where pregnant women are unlikely to get the food and care they need, low birth weight babies are very common — nearly one in five babies in Malawi, for example, is too small. Nearly a million low birth weight babies die each year in poor countries. But thanks to kangaroo care, many of them can be saved. The Manama Mission Hospital in southwest Zimbabwe, for example, had available only antibiotics and piped oxygen in its neonatal unit. Survival rates for babies born under 1500 grams (3.3 lbs.) improved from 10 percent to 50 percent when kangaroo care was started in the 1980s. In 2003, the World Health Organization put kangaroo care on its list of endorsed practices.

Dr. Rey took a challenge that most people would assume requires more money, personnel and technology and solved it in a way that requires less of all three. I am not a romantic who wants to abandon modern medical care in favor of traditional solutions. People with AIDS in South Africa need antiretroviral therapy, not traditional healers’ home brews. If you are bitten by a cobra in India, you should not go to the temple. You should go to the hospital for antivenin. Modern medical care is essential and technology very often saves lives.
Kangaroo care, however, is modern medical care, by which I mean that its effectiveness is proven in randomized controlled trials — the strongest kind of evidence. And because it is powered by the human body alone, it is theoretically available to hundreds of millions of mothers who would otherwise have no hope of saving their babies.
But theoretical availability is only helpful for theoretical babies. Another of kangaroo care’s important innovations is that its inventors realized that ideas don’t travel by themselves. They established a way to get the practice from Bogota into hospitals and clinics all over the world — something that takes a lot more creativity and work than it sounds. On Saturday I’ll respond to comments and talk about how kangaroo care has been able to reach the places that need it most.
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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book, “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World,” is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Safari: Where the Wild Things Are

Safari: Where the Wild Things Are

By Kavitha Rao Thursday, Dec. 09, 2010

 

It's a jungle out there: Get up close and personal with a fantastic range of Indian fauna at Kabini

Ashish Parmar

I am six meters away from an enormous tusker that looks me in the eye before returning to its meal of bamboo. Rampant poaching means that elephants are rare through most of India. But at the Kabini River Lodge — about a five-hour drive from the southwestern city of Bangalore — you can see whole herds of wild elephants. You might also spot bison, sambar deer, boars, dhole (wild dogs), sloth bears, exotic birdlife and the odd leopard. The highlight of my visit: seeing a deer escape a pack of dhole by leaping into the river.

Set on the banks of the serene Kabini, and bordering Nagarhole National Park, this was once the hunting lodge of a maharaja. It was taken over by the Indian government and reopened in 1984 under Indian-born, British conservationist Colonel John Wakefield, who presided over it until his death last April at the age of 95. (See 25 authentic Asian experiences.)

The lodge retains something of the no-nonsense feel of a colonial jungle post. The cottages are clean and spacious, and the new Maharaja bungalows offer views of the river and a hammock for lounging. But there are no telephones, TVs or swimming pools. Food is a basic but tasty Indian buffet; room service is not offered. You're not there to be waited on, but to see wildlife.
Jeep and boat safaris are available, or try a traditional coracle ride, from which you might spot a crocodile. The best time to visit is in April or May, when elephants emerge from the jungle to drink, or after the monsoons in November and December, when animals are scarce but Kabini is at its greenest. Like many sanctuaries in India, Nagarhole is threatened by development, so go while the going's good.

For foreigners, rooms start at $160 per person per night, including meals, safaris and taxes. Indian nationals are entitled to a cheaper tariff. See www.junglelodges.com

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/travel/article/0,31542,2036100,00.html#ixzz187Qt6Pvt

The Lab Rat: What If You Could Only See the World in 2-D?

By John Cloud Tuesday, December 14, 2010 | 19 comments

I don't see the world the way you do. I mean this literally. Like approximately 15 million other Americans, I arrived in November 1970 with strabismus — eyes that are visibly crossed (in my case) or, at the very least, not properly aligned. My parents got me into surgery around the age of 1 to fix, cosmetically, my severe strabismus so that I wouldn't look cross-eyed the rest of my life. But my eyes have never aligned properly.

Consequently, I lack binocular vision — what optometrists call stereopsis — which means I have very poor depth perception. Stereopsis is something you probably take for granted: the world looks 3-D to you, and when you put on those plastic glasses to see, say, Avatar, the arrows and hammerhead titanotheres pop out from the screen. If you have normal vision, even a simple glass on a table has a spherical quality to it. For me, the glass is 2-D, as though I were looking at a photograph. I enjoyed Avatar, but the mountain banshees were just flat creatures. (More on Time.com: It Had to Happen: Breasts in 3D)
When I was a child, it wasn't immediately obvious that my vision differed from that of others. But one day when I was about 10, my dad took me out to toss a football. On his first throw, the ball hit me squarely on the bridge of my nose and knocked me to the ground. My dad was horrified, and we realized something was wrong with my eyes.
Multiple sessions with optometrists ensued. One of the doctors suggested an eye patch on my left eye, the stronger one, so that the right eye could strengthen. Both eyes must be of roughly equal sturdiness to develop binocular vision, and my right eye was very weak. My mother vetoed the patch idea because I would suffer ridicule at school if I showed up looking like a pirate every day. I was already an awkward boy — incipiently gay, a poor athlete (thanks partly to the strabismus), and bookish — and she didn't want me teased further.
But the brain possesses remarkable plasticity, and eventually I learned to judge depth by monocular cues: trees in the distance look smaller than those just in front of me; shading changes as an object moves through light. I learned to notice that a ball thrown toward me grows larger as it approaches my waiting hands. But I was still terrible at sports; when I applied for a 1993 Rhodes Scholarship, I listed “hiking” in the section that required athletic accomplishments. Somehow, this embroidery was sufficient for me to win the scholarship. (More on Time.com: Why Surgeons Dread Redheads)
Years later, in 2006, The New Yorker published an article by Dr. Oliver Sacks, the acclaimed writer and neurologist. He wrote about Susan Barry, a woman who had been born with strabismus but, in her 50s, trained herself — after many hours over many weeks — to develop stereopsis. She did so by actively forcing her eyes to align. In his new book The Mind's Eye, Sacks expounds on Barry's experience. Barry spoke to Sacks of acquiring binocular vision in nearly religious terms. “The world really does look different,” she told him. Flowers looked “intensely real ... I could see the space between each [snow] flake, and all the flakes together produced a three-dimensional dance.”
I decided I had to try the same training that Barry underwent. I discovered that there are so many stereoscopic aficionados that there is even a New York Stereoscopic Society. The group, which has approximately 75 members, meets regularly to test the limits of their binocular ability by looking at complicated artwork and videos that can be seen only with advanced stereopsis. The interest in stereopsis dates back at least to the 19th century, when Oliver Wendell Holmes invented the Holmes Stereo Viewer (a kind of precursor to the View-Master) and wrote articles about stereopsis for The Atlantic. Nearly a century later, the first 3-D films began to appear.
One's eyes must align perfectly to see such art properly. If you can train your eyes to line up with precision, images jump with thrilling intensity from otherwise flat surfaces. Even if you have normal vision, you might have to practice alignment in order to see some of the more complicated 3-D artwork. These complex images aren't like watching Avatar with little glasses. Rather, even “ordinary things can look extraordinary,” Barry wrote to Sacks. After half a century, her world had changed. (More on Time.com: Digital Diagnosis 2010: The Most Popular Health Stories of the Year)
Intrigued, I made an appointment with Gerald Marks, an enthusiastic member of the New York Stereoscopic Society who owns a multitude of 3-D artwork and videos, many of his own creation. Marks, who used to teach printmaking at The Cooper Union in New York City, will turn 70 on Jan. 29. He is best known as the artist who created the 3-D videos that the Rolling Stones used during their 1989-90 tour. He did a “Painted Black” video that wowed fans around the world.
Marks has salt-and-pepper hair that grows in farcical tendrils. On the day I arrived in his studio, which is also his home, he wore cargo pants and a black fleece jumper and displayed an irrepressible passion for all his gadgets. He owns four computers and an expensive video projector mounted on the ceiling of one room. A sort of day bed with a pillow sits on the floor in front of the projector for maximum 3-D enjoyment. File boxes are stacked everywhere, and he maintains large plants in addition to all his tech equipment. I couldn't help but seeing him as a mad eye scientist even though he holds no optometry degree.
Marks put me through a set of experiments to see whether I could develop stereopsis. But I couldn't see even the simplest 3-D artwork with binocular vision even though the art had depth-perception cues such as some figures being smaller than others. I strained my eye muscles as hard as I could, but everything remained flat.
Finally, Marks gave me the toughest test: he showed me a random-dot stereogram, a stereo image he created that has no depth-perception cues whatsoever. To me, it looked like a Jackson Pollock painting: just squiggles on a flat plane. Marks told me that those who have trained themselves to have advanced binocular vision can see a box rise “above” that flat plane, and that when he moves his hand into the image, it appears as though his hand is moving into the box. (More on Time.com: Be Honest. Does this Study Make My Butt Look Big?)
Discouraged, I visited my optometrist of 13 years, Roy Cohen of Town Optical in midtown Manhattan. A few years ago, Cohen had used a new photographic technology to produce incredibly detailed images of the insides of my eyes.
It turns out I have a rare condition with a lovely name: Morning Glory Syndrome. Only about 1 in 2 million people are born with this congenital defect. There is no cure. The syndrome refers to the lack of nerve bundling in one or both eyes. (Thankfully, I got it only in my right eye.) When you are a fetus, the nerves in your eyes typically clench into a bundle. This allows the nerve endings to connect to the brain in an orderly fashion. Instead, my right eye developed with coloboma, a malformation that causes the nerves to splay into a wild configuration that means they can't reach the brain. The image looks like a bit like a morning glory flower.
In plain language, my Morning Glory Syndrome means I am mostly blind in my right eye. I was born not only with strabismus but with the syndrome. I was depressed to discover that I will never be able to enjoy a 3-D movie the way most people can or experience the transcendental vision that Sue Barry described with such avidity to Oliver Sacks. As Sacks points out, I will always have trouble threading needles — a huge chore for me — because I can see only the hole in the needle, not the roundness of the edges that makes it easier to position the thread.
But Sacks does offer a silver lining: although I am a writer, I might make a good photographer, filmmaker or painter. Such artists depend on flatness to make their images. In a footnote, Sacks points out that two Harvard neurobiologists have posited that, because of the deftness with which Rembrandt understood the flat plane, he was likely stereo-blind like me. The documentarian Errol Morris, who has an undeniable skill with images, also has strabismus so serious that he has only monocular vision. Morris told Sacks that the fascination with stereopsis was “bizarre.”
I am resigned to the fact that the world will always look flat to me, but that doesn't mean I don't see beauty. When it snows, I don't feel that I am among the snowflakes, but the way they fall on my shoulders is still moving. I may not see the world the way you do, but I appreciate its splendor just as much.
Follow me on Twitter @ JohnAshleyCloud.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/14/the-lab-rat-how-3-d-vision-works/#ixzz187QL3m7Z

What If Yemen Is the First Country to Run Out of Water?

Posted by Krista Mahr Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 5:40 am

1 Comment • Related Topics: Water , al Qaeda, water management, Yemen

Experts cited by CNN say Yemen could be the first nation to completely run out of water in a few years, a prospect that does not bode well for its young population of 24 million that is expected to double in 20 years, or anyone worried about the rising influence (and ability to get bombs on planes) of an al Qaeda branch in one of the Middle East's poorest nations.

In Sana'a, which could be the world's first capital city to go dry, the population is growing at a rate of 7% per year as people flee from the parched outer reaches of the country. Part of the problem is qat, an addictive plant like chewed by about 75% of men in Yemen that takes a whole lot of water to grow. In places where vineyards used to be, farmers now are growing the more lucrative qat, which uses five times the amount of water as grapes but can be harvested and sold relatively quickly after it's planted.
Farmers' ambition to better their lot is more than understandable in a nation where five million people — over a fifth of the population — go hungry each day. And though Yemen's qat farmers are estimated to now be using some 40% of the nation's domestic water supply, they are hardly  the only actors in this looming crisis. Yemen's water table is falling about 6.6 feet per year, yet the central government has been ineffective at managing the piecemeal drilling of water wells (the government itself estimates an astonishing 99% of water extraction in Yemen is unlicensed) or regulating water management in more farflung parts of the country. Instead, as Sana'a gets more and more water migrants, authorities have discussed relocating the capital to the coast where they might be better able to take advantage of desalination as other Middle Eastern countries have.
The water shortage is also a global problem, because, like Somalia across the Gulf of Aden, where desertification has been linked with that county's ongoing conflict, fights and desperation over water in Yemen would be exactly the kind of destabilizing factor that insurgents will need  to continue to strengthen their base in remote areas far from the halls of power. As the water crisis has gotten worse, observers have noted that the government has concentrated its efforts to manage water resources in urban centers where it has (and wants to keep) political support, and many of the outlying areas not receiving help have been overlooked before.
As Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in testimony to Congress in February: "The failure to establish local water corporations in several governorates that historically have not received much support or social services from the central government has raised fear that a resurgent al Qaeda may seek refuge there.”
Boucek goes on to list what could possibly be done, including stopping government subsidies and public purchases of qat, and constructing a better legal system to deal with the nation's increasingly scarce resource. “If such measures are not taken in the near term,” he writes, “more dramatic steps will be required in the future, such as stopping rural populations from moving to overcrowded cities, and, more drastically, relocating population centers from the center of the country to the coasts.” In other words, the government will be forced to create a lot more unhappy citizens. And that would make insurgents that find recruits in disgruntled communities very happy indeed.

Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/12/14/what-if-yemen-is-first-country-to-run-out-of-water/#ixzz187PvypUS

• News : Science : Psychology

The wealth of many Chinese has increased sharply but surveys suggest their happiness has not followed suit. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

Getting richer does not make a country happier in the long run, according to the largest-ever review of the links between a nation's wealth and the wellbeing of its citizens.
The researchers looked at life satisfaction data from 37 countries collected over various time periods, from 12 to 34 years, up to 2005. The sample included nations that are developed and developing, rich and poor, ex-Communist and capitalist.
It was specifically designed to test the paradox that although people in richer countries tend to be happier on average, as a country gets richer its inhabitants don't necessarily become happier.

The lead author of the paper, economist Richard Easterlin of the University of South California, has been studying the concept of national happiness since the 1970s, when he formulated his "Easterlin Paradox".

"Simply stated, the happiness-income paradox is this: at a point in time both among and within countries, happiness and income are positively correlated," he said. "But, over time, happiness does not increase when a country's income increases."

Until now, the long-term statistics looking at links between wellbeing and GDP have been limited to developed countries. Easterlin's study brings in developing countries and his conclusions rebut claims by other researchers over the past decade that national happiness can indeed increase (pdf) in line with wealth.

Easterlin says that any ups and downs measured by these recent studies are simply the short-term effects of, for example, economic collapse and recovery in individual countries. He says they do not seem to hold up over the long term – typically more than 10 years.
"With incomes rising so rapidly in [certain] countries, it seems extraordinary that no surveys register the marked improvement in subjective wellbeing that mainstream economists and policy makers worldwide expect to find," he said.
In the paper, Easterlin cites surveys from Chile, China and South Korea. In these countries, per capita income has doubled in less than 20 years but overall happiness does not seem to have followed the same path. In China and Chile, there appeared to be small drops in life satisfaction, but the numbers were not statistically significant. For South Korea there was a modest, again not statistically significant, increase in life satisfaction in the early 1980s, but it declined slightly from 1990 to 2005.

The results, he said, were "strikingly consistent": over the long term, the sense of wellbeing in a country's citizens did not go up with income. His work is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Where does this leave us? If economic growth is not the main route to greater happiness, what is?" said Easterlin. "We may need to focus policy more directly on urgent personal concerns relating to things such as health and family life, rather than on the mere escalation of material goods."
David Bartram, a sociologist at the University of Leicester, said that if the UK government were serious about the public's happiness, the prime minister, David Cameron, would rethink cutting public spending, "putting people out of work and undercutting the conditions for his vaunted 'Big Society' – and all for the sake of a headline growth rate that apparently depends on avoiding tax increases affecting mainly the wealthy (including corporations)."

The results come just a few weeks after the UK government unveiled plans to measure and raise the happiness and wellbeing of Britons – rather than simply relying on GDP as an index of general satisfaction. Cameron has said that "improving our society's sense of wellbeing is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times."

Commenting on the new results, Alexander Gorban, a mathematician at the University of Leicester, said it was difficult to quantify happiness because of the problem of comparing material and subjective wellbeing. "Unfortunately, both are very difficult to put in numbers. It is a priori clear that subjective happiness or satisfaction is a very fragile and non-universal concept strongly influenced by cultural and even linguistic intercultural differences. Moreover, the material wellbeing is also not easy to quantify."
He said that Easterlin had taken GDP as a major index of objective prosperity, for example, but this did not necessarily reflect the average income of a typical person in a country and therefore it might be poorly related to personal satisfaction from life.
He warned against over-interpreting the results. "Life is complex and non-linear. The connection between happiness and material wellbeing is also non-linear, and it is difficult to suggest and verify some universal conclusions in an unbiased way. The authors of the article make a valuable and very professional effort in this direction by considering a representative set of countries (developed, developing, in transition). However, the conclusions are in general dependent on concrete implementation of statistical procedures and should be handled with care, especially when taken for construction of society development programmes."

Happiness doesn't increase with growing wealth of nations, finds study

A survey of developed and developing countries suggests citizens' sense of wellbeing does not rise with increasing wealth

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/13/happiness-growing-wealth-nations-study

ALL ABOUT THE KING GEORGE V: MOVIE WINS 6 GOLDEN GLOBES

Culture : The King's Speech

Golden Globes nominations: The King's Speech wears the crown

Royal drama rewarded with seven nominations in the US Golden Globes film awards, edging ahead of The Social Network and The Fighter, which took six each

WATCH THE VIDEO: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/dec/14/golden-globes-nominations-kings-speech

In what looks set to be hailed as a triumph for British cinema, The King's Speech today led the field at the Golden Globe award nominations, making the shortlist in seven categories including best dramatic film.

1. The King's Speech
2. Production year: 2010
3. Countries: Rest of the world, UK
4. Directors: Tom Hooper
5. Cast: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon
6. More on this film

The nominations anointed three very different films – and three very different heroes, a boxer, a geek as well as the stuttering king – as frontrunners for awards glory next year.
Hot on the heels of the British film was David O Russell's boxing saga The Fighter and David Fincher's The Social Network, an unauthorised biopic of the billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, both tied on six nominations apiece. Early evidence, however, suggests that the monarch may just take the crown. The winners will be announced in Hollywood on January 16.

The King's Speech stars Colin Firth as George VI and Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, the Australian speech therapist who helps the monarch find his voice in the run-up to the second world war. Hailed by Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw as "a handsomely produced, massively confident crowd-pleaser", it was shot on a comparatively meagre budget of £4.5m with help from the now defunct UK Film Council. The picture picked up acting nominations for Firth, Rush and Helena Bonham Carter, who plays plays Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother. There was also a director nod for its British film-maker, Tom Hooper.

Other British hopes include Christian Bale, nominated for his supporting role in The Fighter, and rising star Andrew Garfield. Born in the US but raised in England, Garfield was shortlisted for his performance in The Social Network. He has since been cast as Spider-Man in the reboot of the superhero series of films.
Joining The King's Speech on the best dramatic film shortlist were Inception, Black Swan, The Fighter and The Social Network. Elsewhere, Alice in Wonderland, Burlesque, The Kids Are All Right, Red and The Tourist were all nominated for best comedy/musical.
Today's announcement spelled good news for Johnny Depp, who picked up two nominations in the best comedy/musical category for his performances in Alice in Wonderland and The Tourist. But the sentimental favourite in the acting race is likely to be Michael Douglas. Currently battling stage-four cancer, Douglas was nominated for his barnstorming role as a semi-reformed Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

The Golden Globes are traditionally regarded as a crucial dress rehearsal for the all-important Academy awards. But its reputation as a reliable guide to Oscar glory is no longer what it was. Slumdog Millionaire is the only film in the past six years to have followed a Golden Globe with a best picture Oscar. Last year's best film and director Globes went to James Cameron for Avatar. That decision was later upended at the Academy awards when Kathryn Bigelow won for her tense Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker.

READING: A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens

A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens

Stave 1: Marley's Ghost

arley was dead: to begin with.  There is no doubt whatever about that.  The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.  Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.  Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind!  I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail.  I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.  But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.  You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead?  Of course he did. How could it be otherwise?  Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years.  Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner.  And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from.  There is no doubt that Marley was dead.  This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.  If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot -- say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance -- literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley.  The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley.  Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge.  No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him.  No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.  Foul weather didn't know where to have him.  The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect.  They often "came down" handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, "My dear Scrooge, how are you?  When will you come to see me?"  No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge.  Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, "No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!"

But what did Scrooge care?  It was the very thing he liked.  To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call "nuts" to Scrooge.

Once upon a time -- of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve -- old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.  It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.  The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already -- it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air.  The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.  To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters.  Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal.  But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part.  Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

"A merry Christmas, uncle!  God save you!" cried a cheerful voice.  It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

"Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!"

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's nephew.  "You don't mean that, I am sure."

"I do," said Scrooge.  "Merry Christmas!  What right have you to be merry?  What reason have you to be merry?  You're poor enough."

"Come, then," returned the nephew gaily.  "What right have you to be dismal?  What reason have you to be morose?  You're rich enough."

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said "Bah!" again; and followed it up with "Humbug."

"Don't be cross, uncle!" said the nephew.

"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I live in such a world of fools as this?  Merry Christmas!  Out upon merry Christmas!  What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?  If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.  He should!"

"Uncle!" pleaded the nephew.

"Nephew!" returned the uncle, sternly, "keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine."

"Keep it!" repeated Scrooge's nephew.  "But you don't keep it."

"Let me leave it alone, then," said Scrooge.  "Much good may it do you!  Much good it has ever done you!"

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew.  "Christmas among the rest.  But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded: becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark for ever.

"Let me hear another sound from you," said Scrooge, "and you'll keep your Christmas by losing your situation.  You're quite a powerful speaker, sir," he added, turning to his nephew.  "I wonder you don't go into Parliament."

"Don't be angry, uncle.  Come!  Dine with us tomorrow."

Scrooge said that he would see him -- yes, indeed he did.  He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

"But why?"  cried Scrooge's nephew.  "Why?"

"Why did you get married?"  said Scrooge.

"Because I fell in love."

"Because you fell in love!" growled Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas.  "Good afternoon!"

"Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened.  Why give it as a reason for not coming now?"

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be friends?"

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute.  We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a party.  But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my Christmas humour to the last.  So A Merry Christmas, uncle!"

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"And A Happy New Year!"

"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.

His nephew left the room without an angry word, notwithstanding.  He stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned them cordially.

"There's another fellow," muttered Scrooge; who overheard him: "my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas.  I'll retire to Bedlam."

This lunatic, in letting Scrooge's nephew out, had let two other people in.  They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge's office.  They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him.

"Scrooge and Marley's, I believe," said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list.  "Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?"

"Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years," Scrooge replied.  "He died seven years ago, this very night."

"We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner," said the gentleman, presenting his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits.  At the ominous word "liberality," Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.

"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time.  Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."

"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.

"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

"And the Union workhouses?"  demanded Scrooge.  "Are they still in operation?"

"They are.  Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish I could say they were not."

"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?"  said Scrooge.

"Both very busy, sir."

"Oh!  I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge.  "I'm very glad to hear it."

"Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude," returned the gentleman, "a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink and means of warmth.  We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.  What shall I put you down for?"

"Nothing!" Scrooge replied.

"You wish to be anonymous?"

"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge.  "Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer.  I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry.  I help to support the establishments I have mentioned -- they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there."

"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.  Besides -- excuse me -- I don't know that."

"But you might know it," observed the gentleman.

"It's not my business," Scrooge returned.  "It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's.  Mine occupies me constantly.  Good afternoon, gentlemen!"

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the gentlemen withdrew.  Scrooge returned his labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.

Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way.  The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there.  The cold became intense.  In the main street at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture.  The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowing sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice.  The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed.  Poulterers' and grocers' trades became a splendid joke; a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do.  The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up to-morrow's pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

Foggier yet, and colder!  Piercing, searching, biting cold.  If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit's nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose.  The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of --

 

"God bless you, merry gentleman!
May nothing you dismay!"

Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.

At length the hour of shutting up the countinghouse arrived.  With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.

"You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?" said Scrooge.

"If quite convenient, sir."

"It's not convenient," said Scrooge, "and it's not fair.  If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?"

The clerk smiled faintly.

"And yet," said Scrooge, "you don't think me ill-used, when I pay a day's wages for no work."

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!" said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin.  "But I suppose you must have the whole day.  Be here all the earlier next morning."

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl.  The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman's-buff.

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, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.  It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.  The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands.  The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large.  It is also a fact, 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, even including -- which is a bold word -- the corporation, aldermen, and livery.  Let it also be borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last mention of his seven years' dead partner that afternoon.  And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that 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.  It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.  It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead.  The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless.  That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part or its own expression.

As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue.  But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished, turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.

He did pause, with a moment's irresolution, before he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half-expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said "Pooh, pooh!" and closed it with a bang.

The sound resounded through the house like thunder.  Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant's cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own.  Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by echoes.  He fastened the door, and walked across the hall, and up the stairs; slowly too: trimming his candle as he went.

You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall and the door towards the balustrades: and done it easy.  There was plenty of width for that, and room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom.  Half a dozen gas-lamps out of the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge's dip.

Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that. Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.  But before he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms to see that all was right.  He had just enough recollection of the face to desire to do that.

Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room.  All as they should be.  Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had a cold in his head) upon the hob.  Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall.  Lumber-room as usual.  Old fire-guards, old shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on three legs, and a poker.

Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom.  Thus secured against surprise, he took off his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.

It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter night.  He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel.  The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures.  There were Cains and Abels, Pharaohs' daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts -- and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came like the ancient Prophet's rod, and swallowed up the whole.  If each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old Marley's head on every one.

"Humbug!" said Scrooge; and walked across the room.

After several turns, he sat down again.  As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building.  It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing.  It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour.  The bells ceased as they had begun, together.  They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine merchant's cellar.  Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.

The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.

"It's humbug still!" said Scrooge.  "I won't believe it."

His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes.  Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I know him; Marley's Ghost!" and fell again.

The same face: the very same.  Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head.  The chain he drew was clasped about his middle.  It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent, so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.

Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.

No, nor did he believe it even now.  Though he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before: he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

"How now!" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. "What do you want with me?"

"Much!" -- Marley's voice, no doubt about it.

"Who are you?"

"Ask me who I was."

"Who were you then?"  said Scrooge, raising his voice.  "You're particular, for a shade." He was going to say "to a shade," but substituted this, as more appropriate.

"In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley."

"Can you -- can you sit down?"  asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.

"I can."

"Do it then."

Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation.  But the ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.

"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.

"I don't." said Scrooge.

"What evidence would you have of my reality, beyond that of your senses?"

"I don't know," said Scrooge.

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"Because," said Scrooge, "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 underdone potato.  There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then.  The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him.  There was something very awful, too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own.  Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.

"You see this toothpick?"  said Scrooge, returning quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned; and wishing, though it were only for a second, to divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.

"I do," replied the Ghost.

"You are not looking at it," said Scrooge.

"But I see it," said the Ghost, "notwithstanding."

"Well!" returned Scrooge, "I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation.  Humbug, I tell you!  humbug!"

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon.  But how much greater was his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if it were too warm to wear indoors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!

Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.

"Mercy!" he said.  "Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?"

"Man of the worldly mind!" replied the Ghost, "do you believe in me or not?"

"I do," said Scrooge.  "I must.  But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?"

"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, 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 cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!"

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.

"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling.  "Tell me why?"

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "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?"

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "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 laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!"

Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing.

"Jacob," he said, imploringly.  "Old Jacob Marley, tell me more.  Speak comfort to me, Jacob!"

"I have none to give," the Ghost replied.  "It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of men.  Nor can I tell you what I would.  A very little more, is all permitted to me.  I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot 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!"

It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets.  Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did so now, but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his knees.

"You must have been very slow about it, Jacob," Scrooge observed, in a business-like manner, though with humility and deference.

"Slow!" the Ghost repeated.

"Seven years dead," mused Scrooge.  "And travelling all the time!"

"The whole time," said the Ghost.  "No rest, no peace.  Incessant torture of remorse."

"You travel fast?"  said Scrooge.

"On the wings of the wind," replied the Ghost.

"You might have got over a great quantity of ground in seven years," said Scrooge.

The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the Ward would have been justified in indicting it for a nuisance.

"Oh!  captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the phantom, "not to know, that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed.  Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness.  Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused!  Yet such was I!  Oh!  such was I!"

"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again.  "Mankind was my business.  The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.  The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"

It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.

"At this time of the rolling year," the spectre said "I suffer most.  Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode!  Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!"

Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the spectre going on at this rate, and began to quake exceedingly.

"Hear me!" cried the Ghost.  "My time is nearly gone."

"I will," said Scrooge.  "But don't be hard upon me!  Don't be flowery, Jacob!  Pray!"

"How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell.  I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day."

It was not an agreeable idea.  Scrooge shivered, and wiped the perspiration from his brow.

"That is no light part of my penance," pursued the Ghost.  "I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate.  A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer."

"You were always a good friend to me," said Scrooge.  "Thank `ee!"

"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by Three Spirits."

Scrooge's countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost's had done.

"Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?"  he demanded, in a faltering voice.

"It is."

"I -- I think I'd rather not," said Scrooge.

"Without their visits," said the Ghost, "you cannot hope to shun the path I tread.  Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one."

"Couldn't I take `em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?"  hinted Scrooge.

"Expect the second on the next night at the same hour.  The third upon the next night when the last stroke of twelve has ceased to vibrate.  Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!"

When it had said these words, the spectre took its wrapper from the table, and bound it round its head, as before.  Scrooge knew this, by the smart sound its teeth made, when the jaws were brought together by the bandage.  He ventured to raise his eyes again, and found his supernatural visitor confronting him in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over and about its arm.

The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open.  It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did.  When they were within two paces of each other, Marley's Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer.  Scrooge stopped.

Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory.  The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.

Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity.  He looked out.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went.  Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free.  Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives.  He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step.  The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist enshrouded them, he could not tell.  But they and their spirit voices faded together; and the night became as it had been when he walked home.

Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door by which the Ghost had entered.  It was double-locked, as he had locked it with his own hands, and the bolts were undisturbed.  He tried to say "Humbug!" but stopped at the first syllable.  And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose; went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.

 

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