“What do you call wasting of it?” asked old Joe.

“Putting it on him to be buried in, to be sure,” replied the woman, with a laugh. “Somebody was fool enough to do it, but I took it off again. If calico ain’t good enough for such a purpose, it isn’t good enough for anything. It’s quite as becoming to the body. He can’t look uglier than he did in that one.”

Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror. As they sat grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by the old man’s lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and disgust which could hardly have been greater, though they had been obscene demons marketing the corpse itself.

“Ha, ha!” laughed the same woman when old Joe producing a flannel bag with money in it, told out their several gains upon the ground. “This is the end of it, you see! He frightened everyone away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!”