enjoy their companionship. He had taken up some bricks in his floor
underneath his loom, and here he had made a hole in which he set the
iron pot that contained his guineas and silver coins, covering the
bricks with sand whenever he replaced them. Not that the idea of
being robbed presented itself often or strongly to his mind:
hoarding was common in country districts in those days; there were
old labourers in the parish of Raveloe who were known to have their
savings by them, probably inside their flock-beds; but their rustic
neighbours, though not all of them as honest as their ancestors in
the days of King Alfred, had not imaginations bold enough to lay a
plan of burglary. How could they have spent the money in their own
village without betraying themselves? They would be obliged to
"run away"--a course as dark and dubious as a balloon journey.

So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his
guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening
itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and
satisfaction that had no relation to any other being. His life had
reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any
contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. The
same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when
they have been cut off from faith and love--only, instead of a
loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research,
some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory. Strangely
Marner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant
mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced
the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has
no meaning standing apart. The prominent eyes that used to look
trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see only
one kind of thing that was very small, like tiny grain, for which