ing
purpose? Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by
repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred
a want, which is incipient habit? That will help us to understand how
the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose
imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no
purpose beyond it. Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a
square, and then into a larger square; and every added guinea, while it
was itself a satisfaction, bred a new desire. In this strange world,
made a hopeless riddle to him, he might, if he had had a less intense
nature, have sat weaving, weaving--looking towards the end of his
pattern, or towards the end of his web, till he forgot the riddle, and
everything else but his immediate sensations; but the money had come to
mark off his weaving into periods, and the money not only grew, but it
remained with him. He began to think it was conscious of him, as his
loom was, and he would on no account have exchanged those coins, which
had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces. He
handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the
satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was only in the night, when his
work was done, that he drew them out to 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 functi