“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We have an excellent stone fireplace in the living room of the hill house, and often during the winter months I used to build a fire in it at suppertime; we ate while sitting on the couch. Jane and I really enjoyed all of the deep implications conjured up by the wood fires. We had the fireplace cleaned a couple of years ago, however, and with that break in routine I gave up using it: By then my time had become so taken up each day with what seemed like an endless list of things to do—with trying to help Jane, with working, with running the house, with answering the mail and so forth—that I just stopped making fires.

Early this morning we heard strange scratching sounds on the other side of the closed fireplace damper. These soon became intermixed with a series of musical chitterings and chatterings. A bird, or birds? We didn’t think so. Next we speculated about squirrels, since there are plenty of them living in the woods out back—yet the sounds didn’t seem quite right for one or more of those creatures, either. The noises stopped after an hour or so.

They hadn’t resumed by session time. Jane leaned back on the couch with her feet up on the coffee table, and I sat facing her with my notebook propped up on one knee; the fireplace was only a couple of feet in back of me. Soon after 8:20 Jane began to “feel Seth around.” Right away I learned that the session was to be one of her slower ones. I’ve indicated just a few of the many long pauses she used in trance.)