reason than any one else to know what his brother was capable of. He
remembered no mention of the weaver between them since the time, twelve years
ago, when it was their boyish sport to deride him; and, besides, his imagination
constantly created an alibi for Dunstan: he saw him continually in some
congenial haunt, to which he had walked off on leaving Wildfire - saw him
sponging on chance acquaintances, and meditating a return home to the old
amusement of tormenting his elder brother. Even if any brain in Raveloe had put
the said two facts together, I doubt whether a combination so injurious to the
prescriptive respectability of a family with a mural monument and venerable
tankards, would not have been suppressed as of unsound tendency. But Christmas
puddings, brawn, and abundance of spirituous liquors, throwing the mental
originality into the channel of nightmare, are great preservatives against a
dangerous spontaneity of waking thought.
    When the robbery was talked of at the Rainbow and elsewhere, in good
company, the balance continued to waver between the rational explanation founded
on the tinder-box, and the theory of an impenetrable mystery that mocked
investigation. The advocates of the tinder-box-and-pedlar view considered the
other side a muddle-headed and credulous set, who, because they themselves were
wall-eyed, supposed everybody else to have the same blank outlook; and the
adherents of the inexplicable more than hinted that their antagonists were
animals inclined to crow before they had found any corn - mere skimming-dishes
in point of depth - whose clear-sightedness consisted in supposing there was
nothing behind a barn-door because they couldn't see through it; so that, though
their controversy did not serve to elicit the fact concerning the robbery, it
elicited some true opinions of collateral importance.
    But while poor Silas's loss served thus to brush the slow current of Raveloe
conversation, Silas himself was feeling the withering desolation of that
bereavement about which his neighbours were arguing at their ease. To any one
who had observed him before he lost his gold, it might have seemed that so
withered and shrunken a life as his could hardly be susceptible of a bruise,
could hardly endure any subtraction but such as would put an end to it
altogether. But in reality it had been an eager life, filled with immediate
purpose which fenced him in from the wide, cheerless unknown. It had been a
clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead
disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging. But now the fence was
broken down - the support was snatched away