Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 38, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 October 1905 — WHERE GEORGE ELIOT WROTE. [ARTICLE]

WHERE GEORGE ELIOT WROTE.

Little House in Which She CreSted “Middlemurch” Described. You raise your eyes from the roses and see before you a little old house, almost hidden behind the screen of ivy and of roses on its walls, "says a writer in the Pilgrim. The tiny, dla-mond-paned windows of the second story you do not observe at first—not until a ray of that blinking sun filters between the dark green leaves and glints from them. The path, in which you stand, leads to a door, so low you must stoop to pass within. To either side are long, narrow windows set into the wall horizontally, also diamond-paned and opening outward on their hinges like the others. To the right of the house stands an ancient cider mill and all to the left is garden. Roses there in rank profusion grow, and honeysuckle and great, staring Dutchman’s pansies, with a row of overseeing hollyhocks behind, and again beyond a lattice, blue with morning glories. The hedge of hawthorn breaks and runs around this fairy play-yard, and the house, leaning in its age, is so miniature as to seem, almost, the abiding place of pixies and of elves. To the left of the hallway leading from the fairy door is another opening into a room with lowering celling and a floor but ton feet square. Before you, close against the wall, is a couch with a queer old-fashioned writing board fastened to the pillow at the end nearest the window. Across

one corner of the ’•oom is a low bookcase and desk 200 years old, with a quaint carved buffet on beyond. It is to see this room you’ve tramped the lohg three miles, for here the novel “Middlemarch” was written. Discovered by her on a ramble through historic Surrey one day, George Eliot entered the historic room and fell upon this sofa tired of tramping. She begged the privilege of remaining just a week. That one week lengthened Into many and those who lived thereabouts came to know the sad-eyed woman who lay upon this coach and wrote and wrote, never leaving the task before her, save for one brief hour each day at sunset, when she would go out into the road between the hawthorn hedges and there walk back and forth before the fairy house