Dickens's greatest gift was characterization, and no English writer, save Shakespeare, has drawn so many and so varied characters. It would be as absurd to interpret all of these as caricatures as to deny Dickens his great and varied powers of creation. Dickens exaggerated many of his comic and satirical characters, as was his right, for caricature and satire are very closely related, while exaggeration is the very essence of comedy. But there remains a host of characters marked by humour and pathos. Yet the pictorial presentation of Dickens's characters has ever tended toward the grotesque. The interpretations in this volume aim to eliminate the grosser phases of the caricature in favour of the more human. If the interpretations seem novel, if Scrooge be not as he has been pictured, it is because a more human Scrooge was desired--a Scrooge not wholly bad, a Scrooge of a better heart, a Scrooge to whom the resurrection described in this story was possible. It has been the illustrator's whole aim to make these people live in some form more fully consistent with their types. GEORGE ALFRED WILLIAMS. _Chatham, N.J._ THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH Table of Contents _Chirp the First_ 103 _Chirp the Second_ 132 _Chirp the Third_ 165 List of Illustrations _"Father, I am lonely in the dark. I want my eyes, my patient, willing eyes."_ 103 _"A dot and--" here he glanced at the baby--"A dot and carry--I won't say it, for fear I should spoil it; but I was very near a joke."_ 108 _Tilly Slowboy_ 112 _"That's the way I found him, sitting by the roadside! Upright as a milestone."_ 118 _When suddenly, the struggling fire illuminated the whole chimney with a glow of light; and the Cricket on the Hearth began to chirp!_ 166 [Illustration] THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH A FAIRY TALE OF HOME CHIRP THE FIRST The kettle began it! Don't tell me what Mrs. Peerybingle said. I know better. Mrs. Peerybingle may leave it on record to the end of time that she couldn't say which of them began it; but I say the kettle did. I ought to know, I hope? The kettle began it, full five minutes by the little waxy-faced Dutch clock in the corner, before the Cricket uttered a chirp. As if the clock hadn't finished striking, and the convulsive little Hay-maker at the top of it, jerking away right and left with a scythe in front of a Moorish Palace, hadn't mowed down half an acre of imaginary grass before the Cricket joined in at all!