In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses, there lived in the village of Raveloe a weaver named Silas Marner. He had come from the north fifteen years before, and nobody knew anything about his past. His cottage stood alone near a deserted stone-pit, and all day the villagers heard the strange sound of his loom. Boys who looked in at the window saw his pale face and his short-sighted, protruding eyes, and ran away. Once, a man had found him standing in a field, stiff and unseeing, like a dead man, and a minute later he walked on as if nothing had happened. After that people said that his soul went out of his body at times. Silas did not care what they said. He wanted nothing from them but work.