Novel - The three spirits (page 6)

Courteous fellows of the free-and-simple sort, who tuft themselves on being familiar with a move or two, and being generally equivalent to the season of-day, express the extensive variety of their ability for enterprise by watching that they are useful for anything from pitch-and-hurl to murder; between which inverse extremes, almost certainly, there lies a fairly wide and exhaustive scope of subjects. Without wandering for Scrooge very as vigorously as this, I wouldn't fret approaching you to trust that he was prepared for a decent wide field of abnormal appearances, and that nothing between an infant and rhinoceros would have amazed him in particular.