“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“The cobbler was an old man. He was also the sexton of a small church, the Church of England. He used to ring the bells. His wife was fifty-three, Anna. She wore glasses and had grayish white hair and was very stout and messy.

“There was a boy in the shop, too — not their son, an apprentice to the cobbler. He slept in the kitchen. His name was Albert Lang. He was eleven, I think. The cobbler and his wife had no children. She had trouble with her glasses … most people didn’t wear any. They were handmade; they had to grind the glass. They were like magnifying glasses, in a frame on her nose …

“The cobbler was comparatively well off, though not wealthy. He was fifty-three when he died. The boy, Albert, was too young to take over the shop, and for a couple of years the village had no cobbler, and the boy was a fisherman. Then another cobbler came and Albert helped out in the shop again … He finally married. His wife’s name was also Sarah. She was a cousin of Sarah Wellington’s. Most of the people in the village were related in one way or another; they had no other place to go.”

Then suddenly, I was back again, seeing the later time. “In London, I don’t know why, Albert’s wife liked to go to the bakery shops. They had fancier breads there than in the village. And Sarah … the first one … if she hadn’t burned to death, she would have died anyhow at seventeen, of tuberculosis. One lung was bad. It was a bad place to live. The village wasn’t sunny, and they kept the windows closed. There weren’t many windows anyway. The land was so rocky … and they would build a house on a slab of rock, and it was always damp. … Sarah’s dress was dirty. It was woolen, a brown natural color because it wasn’t dyed. It wouldn’t have burned so, but it had grease on it, and the grease caught the flames. …”