ne of the last books she ever read.

Already she was learning the illimitableness of knowledge. "For my
part," she says, "I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility
of my understanding or barely knowing a fraction of the sum of objects
that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life."

About this time Mr. Evans left the farm, and moved to Foleshill, near
Coventry. The poor people at Griff were very sorry, and said, "We
shall never have another Mary Ann Evans." Marian, as she was now
called, found at Foleshill a few intellectual and companionable
friends, Mr. and Mrs. Bray, both authors, and Miss Hennell, their
sister.

Through the influence of these friends she gave up some of her
evangelical views, but she never ceased to be a devoted student
and lover of the Bible. She was happy in her communing with nature.
"Delicious autumn," she said. "My very soul is wedded to it, and if
I were a bird, I would fly about the earth, seeking the successive
autumns.... I have been revelling in Nichol's _Architecture, of
the Heavens and Phenomena of the Solar System_, and have been in
imagination winging my flight from system to system, from universe to
universe."

In 1844, when Miss Evans was twenty-five years old, she began the
translation of Strauss' _Life of Jesus_. The lady who was to marry
Miss Hennell's brother had partially done the work, and asked Miss
Evans to finish it. For nearly three years she gave it all the time at
her command, receiving only one hundred dollars for the labor.

It was a difficult and weary work. "When I can work fast," she said,
"I am never weary, nor do I regret either that the work has been begun
or that I have undertaken it. I am only inclined to vow that I will
never translate again, if I live to correct the sheets for Strauss."
When the book was finished, it was declared to be "A faithful,
elegant, and scholarlike translation ... word for word, thought for
thought, and sentence for sentence." Strauss himself was delighted
with it.

The days passed as usual in the quiet home. Now she and her father,
the latter in failing health, visited the Isle of Wight, and saw
beautiful Alum Bay, with its "high precipice, the strata upheaved
perpendicularly in rainbow,--like streaks of the brightest maize,
violet, pink, blue, red, brown, and brilliant white,--worn by the
weather into fantastic fretwork, the deep blue sky above, and the
glorious sea below." Who of us has not fe