Salis Marner

“A child, more than all other gifts

  That earth can offer to declining man,

  Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.”

    –WORDSWORTH.

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the

farmhouses–and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had

their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak–there might be seen in

districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills,

certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny

country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.  The

shepherd’s dog barked fiercely when one of these alien-looking men

appeared on the upland, dark against the early winter sunset; for what

dog likes a figure bent under a heavy bag?–and these pale men rarely

stirred abroad without that mysterious burden.  The shepherd himself,

though he had good reason to believe that the bag held nothing but

flaxen thread, or else the long rolls of strong linen spun from that

thread, was not quite sure that this trade of weaving, indispensable

though it was, could be carried on entirely without the help of the

Evil One.  In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every

person or thing that was at all unwonted, or even intermittent and

occasional merely, like the visits of the pedlar or the knife-grinder.

No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and

how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who

knew his father and mother? To the peasants of old times, the world

outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and

mystery: to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a

conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back

with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts,

hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust, which would

have prevented any surprise if a long course of inoffensive conduct on

his part had ended in the commission of a crime; especially if he had

any reputation for knowledge, or showed any skill in handicraft.  All

cleverness, whether in the rapid use of that difficult instrument the

tongue, or in some other art unfamiliar to villagers, was in itself

suspicious: honest folk, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly

not overwise or clever–at least, not beyond such a matter as knowing

the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and

dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden, that they

partook of the nature of conjuring.  In this way it came to pass that

those scattered linen-weavers–emigrants from the town into the

country–were to the last regarded as aliens by their rustic

neighbours, and usually contracted the eccentric habits which belong to

a state of loneliness.