"
Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.
She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence,
his presence in the room was almost forgotten.
"I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do know that our
souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive."
The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged
with serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were
breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of
a gallows.
"What--really now? And is it so, maidy?" he said.
"A very easy way to feel 'em go," continued Tess, "is to lie on the
grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by
fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds
and hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to
want at all."
The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his
wife.
"Now that's a rum thing, Christianer--hey? To think o' the miles
I've vamped o' starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or
trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least
notion o' that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch
above my shirt-collar.
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