onscious of any distinct benefit
towards which the cakes and the letters, or even Dolly's kindness,
could tend for him.

"Ah, if there's good anywhere, we've need of it," repeated Dolly, who
did not lightly forsake a serviceable phrase. She looked at Silas
pityingly as she went on. "But you didn't hear the church-bells this
morning, Master Marner? I doubt you didn't know it was Sunday. Living
so lone here, you lose your count, I daresay; and then, when your loom
makes a noise, you can't hear the bells, more partic'lar now the frost
kills the sound."

"Yes, I did; I heard 'em," said Silas, to whom Sunday bells were a mere
accident of the day, and not part of its sacredness. There had been no
bells in Lantern Yard.

"Dear heart!" said Dolly, pausing before she spoke again. "But what a
pity it is you should work of a Sunday, and not clean yourself--if you
_didn't_ go to church; for if you'd a roasting bit, it might be as you
couldn't leave it, being a lone man. But there's the bakehus, if you
could make up your mind to spend a twopence on the oven now and
then,--not every week, in course--I shouldn't like to do that
myself,--you might carry your bit o' dinner there, for it's nothing but
right to have a bit o' summat hot of a Sunday, and not to make it as
you can't know your dinner from Saturday. But now, upo' Christmas-day,
this blessed Christmas as is ever coming, if you was to take your
dinner to the bakehus, and go to church, and see the holly and the yew,
and hear the anthim, and then take the sacramen', you'd be a deal the
better, and you'd know which end you stood on, and you could put your
trust i' Them as knows better nor we do, seein' you'd ha' done what it
lies on us all to do."

Dolly's exhortation, which was an unusually long effort of speech for
her, was uttered in the soothing persuasive tone with which she would
have tried to prevail on a sick man to take his medicine, or a basin of
gruel for which he had no appetite. Silas had never before been
closely urged on the point of his absence from church, which had only
been thought of as a part of his general queerness; and he was too
direct and simple to evade Dolly's appeal.

"Nay, nay," he said, "I know nothing o' church. I've never been to
church."

"No!" said Dolly, in a low tone of wonderment. Then bethinking
herself of Silas's advent from an unknown country, she said, "Could it
ha' been as they'd no church where you was born?"

"Oh,