"I am going to speak to you boys about a boy who never reached high school. I want you to watch how that boy's life, first seen in the distance through mist and snow and storm as a faint glimmering spark, rudely blown upon by the winds of misfortune, endangered and all but ready to go out--I want you to watch how that endangered spark of a boy's life slowly begins to brighten in the distance, to grow stronger, and finally to draw nearer and nearer until at last it shines as a great light about you here in this very place. Watch, I say, how a troubled ray, low on life's horizon, at last becomes a star in the world of men, high fixed and resplendent--to be seen by human eyes as long as there shall be human eyes to see anything." 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.