nough to prevent
surprise. To connect the fact of Dunsey's disappearance with that of
the robbery occurring on the same day, lay quite away from the track of
every one's thought--even Godfrey's, who had better reason than any one
else to know what his brother was capable of. He remembered no mention
of the weaver between them since the time, twelve years ago, when it
was their boyish sport to deride him; and, besides, his imagination
constantly created an _alibi_ for Dunstan: he saw him continually in
some congenial haunt, to which he had walked off on leaving
Wildfire--saw him sponging on chance acquaintances, and meditating a
return home to the old amusement of tormenting his elder brother. Even
if any brain in Raveloe had put the said two facts together, I doubt
whether a combination so injurious to the prescriptive respectability
of a family with a mural monument and venerable tankards, would not
have been suppressed as of unsound tendency. But Christmas puddings,
brawn, and abundance of spirituous liquors, throwing the mental
originality into the channel of nightmare, are great preservatives
against a dangerous spontaneity of waking thought.

When the robbery was talked of at the Rainbow and elsewhere, in good
company, the balance continued to waver between the rational
explanation founded on the tinder-box, and the theory of an
impenetrable mystery that mocked investigation. The advocates of the
tinder-box-and-pedlar view considered the other side a muddle-headed
and credulous set, who, because they themselves were wall-eyed,
supposed everybody else to have the same blank outlook; and the
adherents of the inexplicable more than hinted that their antagonists
were animals inclined to crow before they had found any corn--mere
skimming-dishes in point of depth--whose clear-sightedness consisted in
supposing there was nothing behind a barn-door because they couldn't
see through it; so that, though their controversy did not serve to
elicit the fact concerning the robbery, it elicited some true opinions
of collateral importance.

But while poor Silas's loss served thus to brush the slow current of
Raveloe conversation, Silas himself was feeling the withering
desolation of that bereavement about which his neighbours were arguing
at their ease. To any one who had observed him before he lost his
gold, it might have seemed that so withered and shrunken a life as his
could hardly be susceptible of a bruise, could hard