breakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well,
and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediate
promptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to the
unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He hated the thought
of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and
fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future
was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him.
Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, now its old narrow
pathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the
bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves.

But at last Mrs. Osgood's table-linen was finished, and Silas was
paid in gold. His earnings in his native town, where he worked for
a wholesale dealer, had been after a lower rate; he had been paid
weekly, and of his weekly earnings a large proportion had gone to
objects of piety and charity. Now, for the first time in his life,
he had five bright guineas put into his hand; no man expected a
share of them, and he loved no man that he should offer him a share.
But what were the guineas to him who saw no vista beyond countless
days of weaving? It was needless for him to ask that, for it was
pleasant to him to feel them in his palm, and look at their bright
faces, which were all his own: it was another element of life, like
the weaving and the satisfaction of hunger, subsisting quite aloof
from the life of belief and love from which he had been cut off.
The weaver's hand had known the touch of hard-won money even before
the palm had grown to its full breadth; for twenty years, mysterious
money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the
immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the
years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the
_purpose_ then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of