it, and two or three large brick-and-stone homesteads, with
well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks, standing close
upon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the rectory,
which peeped from among the trees on the other side of the
churchyard:--a village which showed at once the summits of its
social life, and told the practised eye that there was no great park
and manor-house in the vicinity, but that there were several chiefs
in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough
money from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a
rollicking fashion, and keep a jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter
tide.

It was fifteen years since Silas Marner had first come to Raveloe;
he was then simply a pallid young man, with prominent short-sighted
brown eyes, whose appearance would have had nothing strange for
people of average culture and experience, but for the villagers near
whom he had come to settle it had mysterious peculiarities which
corresponded with the exceptional nature of his occupation, and his
advent from an unknown region called "North'ard". So had his way
of life:--he invited no comer to step across his door-sill, and he
never strolled into the village to drink a pint at the Rainbow, or
to gossip at the wheelwright's: he sought no man or woman, save for
the purposes of his calling, or in order to supply himself with
necessaries; and it was soon clear to the Raveloe lasses that he
would never urge one of them to accept him against her will--quite
as if he had heard them declare that they would never marry a dead
man come to life again. This view of Marner's personality was not
without another ground than his pale face and unexampled eyes; for
Jem Rodney, the mole-catcher, averred that one evening as he was
returning homeward, he saw Silas Marner leaning against a stile with