A weaver cast out of his chapel for a theft he did not commit settles among strangers, works fifteen years for gold he counts nightly, and loses it in a single evening — after which a fair-haired child walks out of the snow into his cottage. George Eliot wrote it quickly, between two long novels, and it came out shorter and harder than anything else she did. The man who took the gold is never punished by the law; the book arranges something worse and calls it justice. Forty-nine plates of rural solitude and labour, from Millet and Clausen among others, give the weaver's long years at the loom and the child at the door their proper weather and light.
