Marley 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. Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the
ware-house 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. But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone,
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,
shrivelled 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
dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.