Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing , wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous 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 made his eyes red and his thin lips blue as the Arctic ocean. Dickens uses the simile "solitary as an oyster" to describe Mr. Scrooge to show: