The Kentucky Warbler

by James Lane Allen

He saw that he had caught their attention. Their sympathy reacted upon him.

"Before I speak of the boy I wish to speak of a book. I hope all of you have read one of the very beautiful stories of English literature by George Eliot called Silas Marner. If you have, none of you will ever forget that Silas Marner belonged to a class of pallid, undersized men who, a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, under pressure upon the centres of population in England and through competition of trade, were driven out of the towns into the country. There, as strangers, as alien-looking remnants of a discredited race, there in districts far away among the lanes or in the deep bosom of the hills, perhaps an hour's ride from any turnpike or beyond the faint sound of the coach-horn, they spent their lives as obscure weavers and peddlers.

"You will never forget George Eliot's vivid, powerful, touching picture of Silas Marner at work in a little stone cottage near a deserted stone pit, amid the nut-bearing hedgerows of the village of Raveloe. When the schoolboys of the village came to the hedges in autumn to gather nuts or in spring to look for bird-nests—you boys still do that, I hope—when they came and heard the uncanny sound of the loom, so unlike that of the familiar flail on threshing floors, they would crowd around the windows and peep in at the weaver in his treadmill attitude, weaving like a solitary spider month after month and year after year his endless web. Silas Marner, pausing in his work to adjust some trouble in his thread and discovering them and annoyed by the intrusion, would descend from the loom and come to his door and gaze out at them with his strange, blurred, protuberant eyes; for he was so near-sighted that he could see distinctly only objects close to him, such as his thread, his shuttle, his loom.

"If for a few days the sound of the loom stopped, it was because the weaver, with his pack on his feeble shoulders, was away on journeys through fields and lanes to deliver his linen to those who had ordered it or who might haply buy.

"The village of Raveloe, as you remember, lay on the rich, central plain of Merry England, with wooded hollows and well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks and church spires rising peacefully above green tree-tops. But Silas Marner saw nothing of the Merry England through which he peddled his cloth. He walked through it all with the outdoor loneliness of those who cannot see. His mother had bequeathed him knowledge of a few herbs; and these were the only thing in nature that he had ever gropingly looked for along hedgerows and lanesides—foxglove and dandelion and coltsfoot.

"Now, if you have read the story, you have a far more living, touching picture of the life of a weaver in those distant times that I could possibly paint. The genius of George Eliot painted it supremely and I point to her masterpiece rather than to any faint semblance I could draw. What I want you to do is to get deeply into your minds what the life of a weaver in those days meant: a little further on you will understand why.

"Next I want you to think of Silas Marner as an all too common figure of the present time. He is a type of those of us who go through our lives all but blind to the surpassingly beautiful life of the planet on which it is our strange and glorious destiny to spend our human days. He is a type of those of us who, in town or city, see only the implements of our trade or business ever close to our eyes—our shuttle, our thread, our loom, of whatever kind these may be. When we go out into the world of nature, he is also a type of those of us, who recognise only the few things we need—our coltsfoot, our foxglove, our dandelion, of whatever kind these may be. In the midst of woods and fields we gaze blankly around us with vision blurred by ignorance—not born blind but remaining as blind because we do not care or have not learned to open and to train our eyes. We have the outdoor loneliness of Silas Marner."

He waited a few moments to allow his words to make their impression, and long accustomed to the countenance of listeners, he felt sure that they were following him in the road he pursued: then he led them forward:

"Now, about the period that George Eliot paints the life of her poor English weaver there lived, not in Merry England but in Bonnie Scotland—and to be bonnie is not to be merry—there lived in the little town of Paisley, in the west of Scotland, a man by the name of Alexander Wilson, a poor illiterate distiller. He had a son—the boy I am to tell you about.

"The poor illiterate distiller and father desired to give his son his name but not to assign him his place in life, not his own road; he named him Alexander and he wished him to be not a distiller but a physician. The boy's mother was a native of an island of the Hebrides—your geographies will have to tell you where the Hebrides are, for doubtless you have all forgotten! The inhabitants of those wild, bleak, storm-swept islands thought much of danger and death and therefore often of God. Perhaps the natives of small islands are, as a rule, either very superstitious or very religious. His mother desired him to be a minister. You may not know that the Scotch people are, perhaps, peculiarly addicted to being either doctors of the body or doctors of the soul. The entire Scottish race would appear to be desirous of being physicians to something or to somebody—not submitting easily, however, to be doctored!