"A Pair of Blue Eyes"

I adore Thomas Hardy's "A Pair of Blue Eyes." The book is in every way brilliant and hilarious. Here's a favorite passage from Chapter 33:

He stretched out his arm to seize the projecting arris of a larger block than ordinary, and so help himself up, when his hand lighted plump upon a substance differing in the greatest possible degree from what he had expected to seize--hard stone. It was stringy and entangled, and trailed upon the stone. The deep shadow from the aisle wall prevented his seeing anything here distinctly, and he began guessing as a necessity. 'It is a tressy species of moss or lichen,' he said to himself.
But it lay loosely over the stone.
'It is a tuft of grass,' he said.
But it lacked the roughness and humidity of the finest grass.
'It is a mason's whitewash-brush.'
Such brushes, he remembered, were more bristly; and however much used in repairing a structure, would not be required in pulling one down.
He said, 'It must be a thready silk fringe.'
He felt further in. It was somewhat warm. Knight instantly felt somewhat cold.
To find the coldness of inanimate matter where you expect warmth is startling enough; but a colder temperature than that of the body being rather the rule than the exception in common substances, it hardly conveys such a shock to the system as finding warmth where utter frigidity is anticipated.
'God only knows what it is,' he said.
He felt further, and in the course of a minute put his hand upon a human head. The head was warm, but motionless. The thready mass was the hair of the head—long and straggling, showing that the head was a woman's.