when he was a small boy without shoes or stockings? That was the first thought that darted across Silas's blank wonderment. Was it a dream? He rose to his feet again, pushed his logs together, and throwing on some dried leaves and sticks, raised a flame; but the vision remained. The flame only lit up more distinctly the little round form of the child and its shabby clothing. It was very much like his little sister.

"He had a dreamy feeling that this child was somehow a message come to him from that far-off life; it stirred fibres that had never been moved in Raveloe -quiverings of tenderness-old impressions of awe at the presentiment of some Power presiding over his life.

"But there was a cry on the hearth; the child had awakened, and Marner stooped to lift it on his knee. It clung round his neck, and burst into loud cries of Mammy, mammy!' Silas pressed it to him, and almost unconsciously uttered sounds of soothing tenderness, while he bethought himself that some of his porridge, which had got cool by the dying fire, would do to feed the child with if it were only warmed up a little.

"He had plenty to do through the next hour.

The porridge, sweetened with some dry brown sugar which he had refrained from using for himself, stopped the cries of the little one, and made her lift her blue eyes with a wide quiet gaze at Silas, as he put the spoon into her mouth.

Presently, she slipped from his knee and began to toddle about, but with a pretty stagger that made Silas jump up and follow her lest she should fall against anything that would hurt her. But she only fell in a sitting posture on the ground and began to pull at her boots, looking up at him with a crying face, as if the boots hurt her. He took her on his knee again, but it was some time before it occurred. to Silas's dull bachelor mind that the wet boots were the grievance, pressing on her warm ankles. He got them off with difficulty, and baby was at once happily occupied with the primary mystery of her own toes, inviting Silas, with much chuckling, to consider the mystery too.

"But the wet boots had at last suggested to Silas that the child had been walking on the snow; and under the prompting of this new idea, he raised the child in his arms and went to the door.

he had opened it, there was the cry of

As soon as

mammy'

again, which Silas had not heard since the child's first hungry cry.

Bending forward, he could just see the marks made by the little feet on the virgin snow, and he followed their track to the furze-bushes. Mammy!' the little one cried again and again, stretching itself forward so as to almost escape from Silas's arms, before he himself was aware that there was something more than the bush before him—that there was a human body, with the head sunk low in the furze and half-covered with the shaken snow."

This was the little child's mother, a poor creature, who had been overtaken by the storm, and had fallen unconscious within a few feet of Silas Marner's cottage. The little one had slipped from her arms, and guided by the bright light which shone through the open door, had made her way towards the warm fire, where she had soon fallen asleep, to awake to new love and care; while the mother lying outside in the snow, passed into that long sleep, from which she would awake in the land where there is no more cold or weariness.

To the surprise of every one, Silas decided to keep the child.

"The mother's dead, and I reckon it's got no father," he said. "It's a lone thing, and I'm a lone thing. My money's gone, I don't know where, and this is come from I don't know where."

The baby clung to him; and as there was nobody to dispute his claim, it was decided that he should keep her. The villagers thought it odd that he should desire to be burdened with the wants of a little girl. They did not understand what the coming of this sweet child was to the lonely man. It seemed to him a miracle; as if the God whom he had worshipped in his early manhood had suddenly remembered him, and had sent him something to fill his empty heart.

Unlike his gold which had separated him from his neighbors, and condemned him to selfish solitude, little Eppie, as he called her, became a living link between him and the men and women he had fomerly shunned.

"The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all its

pauses a holiday, re-awakening his senses with her fresh life.

"When the sunshine grew strong and lasting, so that the buttercups were thick in the meadows, Silas might be seen in the sunny mid-day, or in the late afternoon, strolling out with uncovered head to carry Eppie beyond the Stone-pits to where the flowers. grew, till they reached some favorite bank where he could sit down, while Eppie toddled to pluck the flowers, and make remarks to the winged things that murmured happily about the bright petals, calling 'Dad-dad's' attention continually by bringing him the flowers.

"Sitting on the banks in this way, Silas began to look for the once familiar herbs again; but as the leaves, with their unchanged outline, lay on his palm, there was a sense of crowding remembrances from which he turned away timidly, taking refuge in Eppie's little world, that lay lightly on his enfeebled spirit.

"As the child's mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into full consciousness.