Silas Marner, George Eliot [books suggested by bill gates .txt] 📗

o or three large brick-and-stone homesteads, withwell-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks, standing closeupon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the rectory,which peeped from among the trees on the other side of thechurchyard:--a village which showed at once the summits of itssocial life, and told the practised eye that there was no great parkand manor-house in the vicinity, but that there were several chiefsin Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enoughmoney from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in arollicking fashion, and keep a jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and Eastertide.

It was fifteen years since Silas Marner had first come to Raveloe;he was then simply a pallid young man, with prominent short-sightedbrown eyes, whose appearance would have had nothing strange forpeople of average culture and experience, but for the villagers nearwhom he had come to settle it had mysterious peculiarities whichcorresponded with the exceptional nature of