The Lonely Schoolboy

The Spirit leads Scrooge to a large, dilapidated boarding school. They enter a long, bare, melancholy room where a solitary boy, the young Scrooge, is reading near a feeble fire. Scrooge weeps to see his poor forgotten self. The Spirit points to the boy, and Scrooge, in a moment of ecstasy, sees characters from his childhood reading come to life outside the window: Ali Baba, Valentine and Orson, and Robin Crusoe's parrot. Scrooge, with a voice between laughing and crying, expresses pity for his former self and wishes he had given something to the boy who sang a carol at his door the previous night.