and giving him time to recover.
But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him with a vague, uncertain horror to know that, behind the dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.
‘Ghost of the Future!’ he exclaimed, ‘I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear your company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?’

It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.
‘Lead on!’ said Scrooge. ‘Lead on! The night is waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know. Lead on, Spirit!’
The Phantom moved away as it had come towards him. Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which bore him up, he thought, and carried him along.

They scarcely seemed to enter the City; for the City rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its own act. But there they were in the heart of it; on ’Change, amongst the merchants, who hurried up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with their great gold seals, and so forth, as Scrooge had seen them often.
The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men. Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced to listen to their talk.
‘No,’ said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, ‘I don’t know much about it either way. I only know he’s dead.’
‘When did he die?’ enquired another.
‘Last night, I believe.’
‘Why, what was the matter with him?’ asked a third, taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuffbox. ‘I thought he’d never die.’
‘God knows,’ said the first, with a yawn.
‘What has he done with his money?’ asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.
‘I haven’t heard,’ said the man with the large chin, yawning again. ‘Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn’t left it to me. That’s all I know.’
This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.
‘It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral,’ said the same speaker; ‘for, upon my life, I don’t know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party, and volunteer?’
‘I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided,’ observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. ‘But I must be fed if I make one.’

Another laugh.
‘Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all,’ said the first speaker, ‘for I never wear black gloves, and I never eat lunch. But I’ll offer to go if anybody else will. When I come to think of it, I’m not at all sure that I wasn’t his most particular friend; for we used to stop and speak whenever we met. Bye, bye!’
Speakers and listeners strolled away, and mixed with other groups. Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the Spirit for an explanation.
The phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking that the explanation might lie here.
He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of business: very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point always of standing well in their esteem in a business point of view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.
‘How are you?’ said one.
‘How are you?’ returned the other.
‘Well!’ said the first, ‘old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?’
‘So I am told,’ returned the second. ‘Cold, isn’t it?’
‘Seasonable for Christmastime. You are not a skater, I suppose?’
‘No, no. Something else to think of. Good-morning!’
Not another word. That was their meeting, their conversation, and their parting.