Dickens's Christmas Books - complete online versions

The Christmas Carol, The Chimes, Cricket On the Hearth, Battle Of Life
& The Haunted Man & the Ghosts's Bargain with Illustrations.

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	37-i	THE HAUNTED MAX
	wind, falling with the snow, drifting with the clouds, shining in the mooulight, and heavily looming in the darkness, were the Phantom's words, " The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!" Whither he went, he neither knew nor cared, so that he avoided company. The change he felt within him made the busy streets a desert, and himself a desert, and the multitude around him, in their manifold endurances and ways of life, a mighty waste of sand, which the winds tossed into unintelligible heaps and made a ruinous confusion of. Those traces in his breast which the Phantom had told him would "die out soon," were not, as yet, so far upon their
	way to death, but that he understood enough of what he was, and what he made of others, to desire to be alone. This put it in his mind—he suddenly bethought himself, as he was going along, of the boy who had rushed into his room. And then he recollected, that of those with whom he had communicated since the Phantom's disappearance, that boy alone had shown no sign of being changed. Monstrous and odious as the wild thing was to him, he deter­mined to seek it out, and prove if this were really so ; and also to seek it with another intention, which came into his thoughts at the same time. So, resolving with some difficulty where he was, he directed his