In the early years of the nineteenth century a linen-weaver named Silas Marner worked at his vocation in a stone cottage that stood among the nutty hedgerows near the village of Raveloe, and not far from the edge of a deserted stone-pit.

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.  To the villagers among whom he had come to settle he seemed to have mysterious peculiarities, chiefly owing to his advent from an unknown region called “North’ard.”  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 wheel-wrights’; he sought no man or woman, save for the purposes of his calling, or in order to supply himself with necessaries.

At the end of fifteen years the Raveloe men said just the same things about Silas Marner as at the beginning.  There was only one important addition which the years had brought; it was that Master Marner had laid by a fine sight of money somewhere, and that he could buy up “bigger men than himself.”

But while his daily habits presented scarcely any visible change, Marner’s inward life had been a history and a metamorphosis as that of every fervid nature must be when it has been condemned to solitude.  His life, before he came to Raveloe, had been filled with the close fellowship of a narrow religious sect, where the poorest layman had the chance of distinguishing himself by gifts of speech; and Marner was highly thought of in that little hidden world, known to itself as the church assembling in Lantern Yard.  He was believed to be a young man of exemplary life and ardent faith, and a peculiar interest had been centred in him ever since he had fallen at a prayer-meeting into a trance or cataleptic fit, which lasted for an hour.

Among the members of his church there was one young man, named William Dane, with whom he lived in close friendship; and it seemed to the unsuspecting Silas that the friendship suffered no chill, even after he had formed a closer attachment, and had become engaged to a young servant-woman.

At this time the senior deacon was taken dangerously ill, and Silas and William, with others of the brethren, took turns at night-watching.  On the night the old man died, Silas fell into one of his trances, and when he awoke at four o’clock in the morning death had come, and, further, a little bag of money had been stolen from the deacon’s bureau, and Silas’s pocket-knife was found inside the bureau.  For some time Silas was mute with astonishment, then he said, “God will clear me; I know nothing about the knife being there, or the money being gone.  Search me and my dwelling.”

The search was made, and it ended in William Dane finding the deacon’s bag, empty, tucked behind the chest of drawers in Silas’s chamber.