I'm Keith Morrison, and this is episode three of Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

Ebenezer Scrooge is back in bed, weighed down by blankets and regret.

He's reeling from all the ghost of Christmas past has shown him.

Memories of his boyhood and who he once was, visions of who he has become, sour, greedy, unlovable,

alone. He falls into a troubled sleep. And yes, Charles Dickens writes, he's snoring. But for how long? And what terrifying spectre waits to confront him now?

Awakening 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 special purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger

dispatched to him through Jacob Marley's intervention. But finding that he turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains

his new spectre would draw back, he put every one of them 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.

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 by, and yet nothing came.

All this time he lay upon his bed, the very core and center of a blaze of ruddy light,

which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour, and which, being only light,

was more alarming than a dozen ghosts as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at, and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting

case of spontaneous combustion without ever having the consolation of knowing us.

At last, however, he began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly

...