Comic Geek Speak presents A Christmas Carol, A Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens.

Stave three, the second of the three spirits.

Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together,

Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of one.

He felt that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time

for the especial purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger dispatched him through Jacob Marley's intervention.

But finding that he turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains

this new spectre would draw back, he put them every one aside with his own hands, and,

lying down again, established a sharp lookout all around the bed.

For he wished to challenge the spirit on the moment of its appearance,

and did not wish to be taken by surprise and made nervous.

Gentlemen of the free and easy sort who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two,

and being usually equal to the time of day,

express the wide range of their capacity for adventure

by observing that they are good for anything from pigeon-toss to manslaughter, between which

opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects.

Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardly as this, I don't mind calling on you to believe

that he was ready

for a good, broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and a rhinoceros

would have astonished him very much. Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not

by any means prepared for nothing. And consequently, when the bell struck one, and no shape appeared,

he was taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour went

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