hat there was no great park and
manor-house in the vicinity, but that there were several chiefs in
Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough money
from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a rollicking
fashion, and keep a jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter tide.

It was fifteen years since Silas Marner had first come to Raveloe; he
was then simply a pallid young man, with prominent short-sighted brown
eyes, whose appearance would have had nothing strange for people of
average culture and experience, but for the villagers near whom he had
come to settle it had mysterious peculiarities which corresponded with
the exceptional nature of his occupation, and his advent from an
unknown region called "North'ard". So had his way of life:--he invited
no comer to step across his door-sill, and he never strolled into the
village to drink a pint at the Rainbow, or to gossip at the
wheelwright's: he sought no man or woman, save for the purposes of his
calling, or in order to supply himself with necessaries; and it was
soon clear to the Raveloe lasses that he would never urge one of them
to accept him against her will--quite as if he had heard them declare
that they would never marry a dead man come to life again. This view
of Marner's personality was not without another ground than his pale
face and unexampled eyes; for Jem Rodney, the mole-catcher, averred
that one evening as he was returning homeward, he saw Silas Marner
leaning against a stile with a heavy bag on his back, instead of
resting the bag on the stile as a man in his senses would have done;
and that, on coming up to him, he saw that Marner's eyes were set like
a dead man's, and he spoke to him, and shook him, and his limbs were
stiff, and his hands clutched the bag as if they'd been made of iron;
but just as he had made up his mind that the weaver was dead, he came
all right again, like, as you might say, in the winking of an eye, and
said "Good-night", and walked off. All this Jem swore he had seen,
more by token that it was the very day he had been mole-catching on
Squire Cass's land, down by the old saw-pit. Some said Marner must
have been in a "fit", a word which seemed to explain things otherwise
incredible; but the argumentative Mr. Macey, clerk of the parish, shook
his head, and asked if anybody was ever known to go off in a fit and
not fall down. A fit was a stroke, wasn't it? and it was in the
nature of a stroke to pa