their fathers and mothers hint that
Silas Marner could cure folks' rheumatism if he had a mind, and add,
still more darkly, that if you could only speak the devil fair enough,
he might save you the cost of the doctor. Such strange lingering
echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the
diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for the rude mind
with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy
conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain
from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the sense of
the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been pressed close by
primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been
illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To them pain and
mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and
enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed
desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a
perpetual pasture to fear. "Is there anything you can fancy that you
would like to eat?" I once said to an old labouring man, who was in
his last illness, and who had refused all the food his wife had offered
him. "No," he answered, "I've never been used to nothing but common
victual, and I can't eat that." Experience had bred no fancies in him
that could raise the phantasm of appetite.

And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered,
undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren parishes
lying on the outskirts of civilization--inhabited by meagre sheep and
thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the rich central
plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England, and held farms
which, speaking from a spiritual point of view, paid highly-desirable
tithes. But it was nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an
hour's journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never
reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion. It
was an important-looking village, with a fine old church and large
churchyard in the heart of 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 t