Marley was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt about that. Scrooge had been his partner for many years, and Scrooge signed the paper at his funeral. Seven years later the name over the warehouse door still read Scrooge and Marley. Scrooge was a squeezing, grasping, hard old man. The cold inside him froze his old face and made his thin lips blue. Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say a kind word. On Christmas Eve he sat in his counting house, and his clerk, Bob Cratchit, worked in a dismal little room beyond with a very small fire. "A merry Christmas, uncle!" cried a cheerful voice. It was Scrooge's nephew. "Bah! Humbug!" said Scrooge. "What right have you to be merry? You are poor enough." "What right have you to be dismal? You are rich enough." "Christmas is a time for paying bills without money," said Scrooge. "Keep it in your own way, and let me keep it in mine."