It’s not even Christmas yet and Vazra is already practicing his miserly look. He feels Scrooge was too nice a character; only a cat could have done the part true justice. But to be perfectly honest, although he looks like a grumpy old coot, he’s quite the opposite… most of the time.
To paraphrase Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:
Oh! But he was a tight-pawed hand at the grind-stone, Vazra! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, scratching, biting, clutching, covetous, shedding, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his flat nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes yellow, his thin lips black; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice, disarming though it was for its constant purring. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.
