enough to discuss great questions and think great thoughts. And
yet she was affectionate, tender, and gentle.

Mary Ann Evans was born Nov. 22, 1819, at Arbury Farm, a mile from
Griff, in Warwickshire, England. When four months old the family
moved to Griff, where the girl lived till she was twenty-one, in a
two-story, old-fashioned, red brick house, the walls covered with
ivy. Two Norway firs and an old yew-tree shaded the lawn. The father,
Robert Evans, a man of intelligence and good sense, was bred a builder
and carpenter, afterward becoming a land-agent for one of the large
estates. The mother was a woman of sterling character, practical and
capable.

For the three children, Christiana, Isaac, and Mary Ann, there was
little variety in the commonplace life at Griff. Twice a day the coach
from Birmingham to Stamford passed by the house, and the coachman
and guard in scarlet were a great diversion. She thus describes, the
locality in _Felix Holt_: "Here were powerful men walking queerly,
with knees bent outward from squatting in the mine, going home to
throw themselves down in their blackened flannel, and sleep through
the daylight, then rise and spend much of their high wages at the
alehouse with their fellows of the Benefit Club; here the pale, eager
faces of handloom weavers, men and women, haggard from sitting up late
at night to finish the week's work, hardly begun till the Wednesday.
Everywhere the cottages and the small children were dirty, for the
languid mothers gave their strength to the loom."

Mary Ann was an affectionate, sensitive child, fond of out-door
sports, imitating everything she saw her brother do, and early in
life feeling in her heart that she was to be "somebody." When but four
years old, she would seat herself at the piano and play, though she
did not know one note from another, that the servant might see that
she was a distinguished person! Her life was a happy one, as is shown
in her _Brother and Sister Sonnet_:--

"But were another childhood's world my share,
I would be born a little sister there."

At five, the mother being in poor health, the child was sent to a
boarding-school with her sister, Chrissy, where she remained three or
four years. The older scholars petted her, calling her "little mamma."
At eight she went to a larger school, at Nuneaton, where one of the
teachers, Miss Lewis, became her life-long friend. The child had the
greatest fondness for reading, her first b