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More "Undertaker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... death. "The saddest thing about the life of a Denver minister," writes Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, "is the number of lonely funerals that he is called upon to attend. Often I have been hastily summoned to say a prayer over some poor body at the undertaker's {106} shop, where there would be present just the undertaker and the minister, with perhaps the keeper of the boarding-house where the lad died or an officer of the Charity Organization Society. I look ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... Washington scientific men to examine it in advance of a public exhibition. The first feature to strike the critical observer was that the arms of the fossil were crossed over the breast in the most approved undertaker's fashion, showing that if the woman had ever existed, she had devoted her dying moments to arranging a pose for the approval of posterity. Little more than a glance was necessary to show that the fossil was simply baked clay. Yet the limbs were hard and stiff. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... were found a little time after, when an undertaker came by orders of the Chief of Police to prepare the dead for honorable burial. Following his example, a few noble fellows about his office had contributed out of their pay, and thus poor Chester was saved from a ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... we are fallen into a fanatical terror for the national salvation, we shall then be ready to throw ourselves,—in a sort of precipitate trust, some strange disposition of the mind jumbled up of presumption and despair,—into the hands of the most pretending and forward undertaker. One such undertaker at least he has in readiness for our service. But let me assure this generous person, that however he may succeed in exciting our fears for the public danger, he will find it hard indeed to engage us to place ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... salvation of poor sinners. The whole work of salvation is laid on Christ, and the Father is glorified in him, who is his Servant and his Chosen, whom he upholdeth and furnisheth for the work, Isa. xlii. 1,2. He is called the covenant itself. He is the undertaker in the covenant of redemption and in the covenant of grace; all is founded on him; all the good things of it are given out by him; all the grace by which we close with it, and accept of him according to it, is given by him. Now, in this gospel ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... preventing this abuse had not proved, effectual, they resumed their inquiry, and proceeded with, uncommon vigour on the information they received. A great number of persons who had been pressed were discharged by order of the house; and captain Winter, the chief undertaker for this method of recruiting the army, was carried by the sergeant before the lord chief justice, that he might be ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... second half of A Life's Atonement was written under difficulties which would have been absolutely insurmountable if it had not been for that spirit of camaraderie which distinguished the jolly little Bohemian set amongst whom I had fallen. One chum who lived over an undertaker's shop in Great Russell Street found me house-room, and I had a resource from which, for the space of some ten weeks, I was entitled to draw one pound a week, which came to me in rather an odd fashion. ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... depend on our report of this—of this sad event. We may tell them that the female pope of our great religion"—he bent his big neck reverently—"was wafted to her heavenly abode by the angels. But there are the officers of the law, the undertaker, the cemetery people, to be considered. Shall we acknowledge that our founder has died like any other human—in bed, of a fever? And who is to be her successor? ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Sam jerked his thumb back to show that he meant Si Lee; "sounds like a Chinese laundry. I guess that's the only thing he isn't. He can do any mortal thing but get on in life. He's been a soldier an' a undertaker an' a cook He plays a fiddle he made himself; it's a rotten bad one, but it's away ahead of his playing. He stuffs birds—that Owl in the parlour is his doin'; he tempers razors, kin doctor a horse ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... is the ambition of every one of the class we are discussing to live fashionably, so it is their chief wish to be laid in the grave in the same style. The undertaker at a fashionable funeral is generally the sexton of some fashionable church, perhaps of the church the deceased was in the habit of attending. This individual prescribes the manner in which the funeral ceremonies shall be conducted, and advises certain styles of mourning for the family. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... chimney, the merry wrangling of sleigh-bells, the sonorous clash of fire-bells, and the manuscript grew under my pen, as if by magic. I came to love the nurslings of my fancy as no one else will. I liked the cold, cynical features of Mr. Flint, with his undertaker's aspect; the child-spirit, Bell; Daisy Snarle's eyes; the heart-broken old sailor; the pale book-keeper; Tim, the office boy; Mr. Hardwill, the great publisher; Joe Wilkes, and all ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the hatchway! Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault. Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does. Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop? I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir? Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker? Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning it into something else. Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, inter-meddling, monopolizing, heathenish old scamp, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... which led into the next room was partly open. I saw the undertaker's people removing the coffin in order to place it in the hearse. This was a fresh cause for anxiety. I knew that that black, mysterious-looking box contained the cold, pale, sleeping form of my mother; but I could ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the waiter and we left the cafe. On the way to Mary's I stopped at the undertaker's and made arrangements for Jim's burial. The man in charge was the saddest looking person I have ever seen. He had a woebegone look about him that was infectious—made you want to weep for him or with him. He discussed ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... is suffered to prevail upon its own principle; the whole is so frittered down and disjointed, that scarcely a trace of the original scheme remains. Thus, between the resistance of power, and the unsystematical process of popularity, the undertaker and the undertaking are both exposed, and the poor reformer is hissed off the stags ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker called in to help them to ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... to let the dead rest. He simply won't hear of it. He wants remains. He wants to have 'em out in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls. He don't act subdued or proper about it either, or kind of buttery sad, like a first-class undertaker. He's gleeful. Let him find the skeleton of something as big as a freight car, that perished far in the dead past, and he's as tickled as a kid shooting at little sister ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... ever-shifting groups held sober discourse in front of business places. He hurried by them and struck off up the road, his mind so intent upon what lay ahead of him that he failed to notice that Jack Trentman had detached himself from the group in front of the undertaker's and was following swiftly after him. He was nearly half-way home when he turned, in response to a call from behind, and beheld ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... about the Browning woman and the interest he was supposed to have in her. I tapped him gently and so indirectly on the subject that I could see he knew nothing about her. The undertaker's card he had found in the hall and brought in and laid on the table, where I chanced to pick it up, little thinking I would take it as corroborative of anything that might be said against him. He declared he had not left the house that night. Smith's men had simply ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... Thompson, who was high and narrow in build—shaped something like a lath, with a face something like an undertaker's—sang at length. First a doleful ditty ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... coffin, to be sure! You see, I am the city undertaker, and the people are dying here so fast, that I can hardly supply the demand for coffins. You will have to wait until your turn comes, which will be ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... short blue coat, he should travel with a screen. A man in just such a rig attracted no end of comment in a fashionable hotel. The caricaturing effect of his trousers and coat were unspeakably comical. The wearer had a face as grave as an undertaker's and the air of a serious-minded college professor; but he had the nondescript look of a scarecrow composed of whatever available garments could be obtained from the cast-off wardrobe of ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... cloth-covered casket with silver mountings is considered in the best taste, and the pall-bearers are given at most a white scarf and a pair of black gloves. Even this is not always done. At one time the traffic in these returned bands and gloves was quite a fortune to the undertaker. Mourning is very expensive, and often costs a family more than they can well afford; but it is a sacrifice that even the poorest gladly make, and those who can least afford it often wear the best mourning, so tyrannical is custom. They consider it—by what process of reasoning no one ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... Presently the white undertaker, a silent little man with a brisk yet sympathetic air, came and made some measurements. He talked to Peter in undertones about the finishing of the casket, how much the Knights of Tabor would pay, what Peter wanted. Then he spoke of the hour of burial, and mentioned a somewhat early hour ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... came forward. The undertaker's man, on seeing them look for the inscription, civilly turned it round towards them, and each read, almost at one moment, by the ruddy light of ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... landlord was sympathetic and offered to feed him. But the young man was too much upset to eat, and having fasted for three days fell seriously ill. He rapidly grew worse, and the landlord, fearing he would not recover, had him moved straight to the undertaker's shop. In a short time the whole of the undertaker's staff was collected round him, offering sympathy and bringing him food. Gradually he got better and was able to walk ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... "Riffraff!" Possibly he would have shouted it; and, certainly, most people believed a story that went round the town just after Mrs. Amberson's funeral, when Georgie was eleven. Georgie was reported to have differed with the undertaker about the seating of the family; his indignant voice had become audible: "Well, who is the most important person at my own grandmother's funeral?" And later he had projected his head from ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... and departed to another market town. Timothy, dressed in a sombre suit of black, very much like an undertaker, was provided with a horse, with the following directions: to proceed leisurely until he was within half a mile of the town of ——, and then to gallop in as fast as he could, stop at the best inn in the place, and order apartments for the Great Aristodemus, who might be ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... said the cook, insisting on carrying the kettle, 'but we are in such confusion; and the nurse-maid, whose place it is, has been up most of the night with Mr. Leonard, and must have just dropped asleep somewhere, and I was just giving their breakfast to the undertaker's young men, but I'll call her ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... each side of the front step. A servant threw open the door of the breakfast room, and Delme mechanically entered it. It was filled with strangers; on some of these the spruce undertaker was fitting silk scarfs; while others were ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... own attending physicians, all of whom have performed remarkable cures. It is a full and complete list of fifty-eight physicians in good professional standing, and I will dispose of it at a moderate compensation to any apothecary or undertaker who desires to purchase. ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... pathos—their blind stoniness toward the sky. Against such a background, Bibbs was not incongruous, with his figure, in black, so long and slender, and his face so long and thin and white; nor was the undertaker's coupe out of keeping, with the shabby driver dozing on the box and the shaggy horses standing patiently in attitudes without hope and without regret. But for Mary Vertrees, here was a grotesque setting—she was a vivid, ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... with credit at a marriage, having no natural aptitude for gaiety, and being haunted with anxiety lest any "hicht" should end in a "howe," but the parish had a genius for funerals. It was long mentioned with a just sense of merit that an English undertaker, chancing on a "beerial" with us, had no limits to his admiration. He had been disheartened to despair all his life by the ghastly efforts of chirpy little Southerners to look solemn on occasion, but his dreams were satisfied ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... Harald Williams, has the most dreadful cover of any book that we have come across for some time past. It is possibly intended to symbolise the sorrow of the world, but it merely suggests the decorative tendencies of an undertaker and is as depressing as it is detestable. However, as the cowl does not make the monk, so the binding, in the case of the Savile Club school, does not make the poet, and we open the volume without prejudice. The first poem that we come to is a vigorous attack on those wicked and misguided ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... air, helped also to complete the Young America expression. Mother Hubbard's mingled consternation and pride at each successive achievement of her astonishing puppy were inimitable. Each separate illustration made its point. Patriotism, especially, came in when the undertaker, bearing the pall with red-lettered border,—Rebellion,—finds the dog, with upturned, knowing eye, and parted jaws, suggestive as much of a good grip as of laughter, half risen upon fore-paws, as far from "dead" as ever, mounting guard over ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... borne by the undertaker's men, passed through the west door, the delicious rays of a winter sun fell on the faces of the women and the roses lying on the coffin. Grouped on either side of the parvis, a few young men from the great colleges sought the faces ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... has been recorded of an English lady of good social position who fell in love with an undertaker at her father's funeral and insisted on marrying him. It is known that some men have been so abnormally excited by the funeral trappings of death that only in such surroundings have they been able to effect coitus. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... undertaker. With his own hands he "rived" the planks, made the coffin, and buried Nancy Hanks, that remarkable woman. There was no pastor, no funeral service. The grave was marked by a wooden slab, which, long years after, in 1879, was replaced by a ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... in the parlour, amid a mass of flowers. Miss Laura, for love of him and of the colonel, with her own hands prepared his little body for the last sleep. The undertaker, who hovered around, wished, with a conventional sense of fitness, to remove old Peter's body to a back room. But the colonel ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... heaven's name were you doing with those two men?" Egavine inquired, twitching his eyebrows disapprovingly up and down. The doctor was a tall, thin man in his forties, dressed habitually in undertaker black, with bony features and intense dark eyes. He added, "They appeared to be unconscious ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... Dan Dalzell, "if seven undertakers call, all within five minutes, won't it be a delicate way of conveying the hint that a Board of Education that thinks it can stop football is composed of dead ones? You see, there'll be an undertaker for each member of the Board. Don't you think the idea—-the hint—-would soak through even those seven dull ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... him to a loss in the hottest of his chase, and to cause honour to fly away so much the faster, by how much it is more eagerly pursued. Finally, he is an importunate suitor, a corrupt client, a violent undertaker, a smooth factor, but untrusty, a restless master of his own, a bladder puffed up with the wind of hope and self-love. He is in the common body as a mole in the earth, ever unquietly casting; and, in one word, is nothing but a confused ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... fellow, always dressed like a country sexton, and with a face like an undertaker. And the Baron Three Francs Sixty-eight, an old bird, was fool enough to be taken in by him! For he was taken in. He had a face like a man whose chimney is on fire, when he came to tell us, mamma and myself, that Favoral had ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... fourth was McFadden. The name of her first and third was Smyth, while that of her second, oddly enough, was Smith. Soon after her return from her last wedding-tour she was visited by Mr. Toombs, the undertaker, who called ostensibly to correct an error in his last bill. When Mrs. Banger entered the parlor, Mr. Toombs greeted ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... in the Palazzo Chiaromonte within an hour of her brother-in-law's death; she locked the drawers of his private desk herself, sent for the notary and had the customary seals placed on the doors of the inner apartments 'in the name of the heirs'; she spoke with the undertaker and made every arrangement for the customary lying in state of the body during the following night and day; saw to the erection of the temporary altar at which masses for the dead would be celebrated almost ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... Street presented an appearance of unusual festivity. The long, narrow parlor had been liberally draped with smilax and sparingly decorated with ex-table-d'hote roses, until it resembled the mortuary chapel of a Mulberry Street undertaker; and this effect was, if anything, heightened by four dozen camp-chairs that had been procured from the sexton of Mrs. ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... great misfortune of my life that I have never been able to escape from the Irish question. It was discussed round my cradle by a nurse whom my parents selected for her sound Protestant principles. The undertaker will give his views of the Irish question to his assistant while he drives the nails into the lid of my coffin. I should not have supposed that any one could have hit on an aspect of it wholly new to me. But Mrs. ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... figured daily in the narratives thereafter—Joe, who drove a carriage, a motor, or a hay wagon, as the occasion required, for his uncle who owned a livery stable, but whose ambition was to buy out old Scanlon, the local undertaker, and ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... care," cried Bostock. "It ain't any of my interests. I haven't underwrote your life. Only I'm blest if I'm not sorry for the cannibal as tries to eat your head. And what I recommend is a cheap, smart coffin and a good undertaker. See if you can find a house to give you credit for a coffin! Look at your friend there: he's got some sense; he's laughing at you so as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sort of convent and monastery mixed," replied the witch. "I am connected with it officially. I undertook to manage it, yet I forget what the proper word for me is. Not undertaker, is it?" ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... and amusing—"so very droll, don't you know." He recites things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and mimics public characters. He is a type of a class, and I take him to be one of the elementary forms of animal life, like the acalephae. His presence is capable of adding a gloom to an undertaker's establishment. The last time I fell in with him was on a coaching trip through Devon, and in spite of what I have said I must confess to receiving an instant of entertainment at his hands. He was delivering a little dissertation on "the English and American languages." As there ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... made appropriate to the occasion or situation. In fact, so thoroughly did he exhibit just such a demeanor as suited a confidential secretary at the inquest of his murdered employer, that I involuntarily thought what a fine undertaker he would have made. For, in my experience, no class of men so perfectly adapt themselves to varying ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... surely kill poor Lucy, if nothing else did. I know, and you know, and the other doctor who attended her knows, that Mrs. Westenra had disease of the heart, and we can certify that she died of it. Let us fill up the certificate at once, and I shall take it myself to the registrar and go on to the undertaker." ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... Hotel Broker, an Insect Exterminator, a Junk Dealer, a Kalsomine Manufacturer, a Laundryman, a Mausoleum Architect, a Nurse, an Oculist, a Paper-Hanger, a Quilt Designer, a Roofer, a Ship Plumber, a Tinsmith, an Undertaker, a Veterinarian, a Wig Maker, an X-ray apparatus manufacturer, a Yeast producer, or a Zinc Spelter." He closed the book. "There is only one thing to do. I must starve in the gutter. Tell me—you know New York better than I do—where is ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the subject in different literatures, and then we should send him on a tour round the great public and private libraries of Great Britain and the Continent. This, of course, applies only where the undertaker is in thorough earnest, and wishes to spare himself a good deal of expense and a good deal of mortification. Illustrated catalogues are of very indifferent value, especially those of auctioneers, which too often offer the result of sophistication so cleverly disguised that to ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... nobody ever paid any attention to him at all; but he was one of those empty-headed village talkers who are always trying to look as if they were behind the scenes, always trying to walk with important people. Everybody knows them. They whisper to the undertaker at funerals; and during campaigns they have something confidential to communicate to United States Senators. They meddle and intrude and waste as much time for ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... Trumet, and a place to put your head in nights. Long's Sol was alive and could do his cobblin' we managed to get along somehow. What I could earn sewin' helped, and we lived simple. But when he was taken down and died, the doctor's bills and the undertaker's used up what little money I had put by, and the sewin' alone wouldn't keep a healthy canary in bird seed. Dear land knows I hate to leave the old house I've lived in for fourteen years and the town I was born in, but I've got to, for all I see. Thank mercy, I can ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... pleasure, and even joy, to the moment when my physician would come for the last time in his professional capacity and go to work on me officially. Then the county would be obliged to pay him, and the undertaker could take charge of the fragments left by ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... directions about everything and meant to have a funeral "beyond his betters." This was true; for old Featherstone had not been a Harpagon whose passions had all been devoured by the ever-lean and ever-hungry passion of saving, and who would drive a bargain with his undertaker beforehand. He loved money, but he also loved to spend it in gratifying his peculiar tastes, and perhaps he loved it best of all as a means of making others feel his power more or less uncomfortably. If any one will here contend that there must have been ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... sit in his little bank and watch the world go by. And I guess he's got a nice bunch of brothers-in-law on his hands. Poor old Amzi! There was always something amusing about the cuss, even when he was a smug little roly-poly as a boy. But I passed his bank this morning and it looked like an undertaker's office. The contrast between that old tomb and your plant pleases me, Will; it soothes my family pride. You are an able man and I congratulate you on your success. Sam liked to cut didoes on thin ice a little too well; but you're a born banker—inherited it from ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... consent, Benjamin Crane took charge of Blair's affairs. The funeral took place in an undertaker's establishment and the body was placed in a receiving vault, until Blair's people could be heard from. His immediate possessions remained in the studio rooms, for the lease had still six months to run, and the police ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... have a fashionable funeral. He must, to the last, bear witness to the power of Mrs. Grundy. It is to please her, that the funeral cloaks, hatbands, scarves, mourning coaches, gilded hearses, and processions of mutes are hired. And yet, how worthless and extravagant is the mummery of the undertaker's grief; and the feigned woe of the mutes, saulies, and plume bearers, who are paid for ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... as piety tell us these are proper."—Family Commentary, p. 64. "For without it the critic, as well as the undertaker, ignorant of any rule, have nothing left but to abandon themselves to chance."—Kames, El. of Crit., i, 42. "And accordingly hatred as well as love are extinguished by long absence."—Ib., i, 113. "But at every turn the richest melody as well ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... this as he looked through his disguises, selecting one suitable for the work he had in hand. He had just decided that the most appropriate disguise would be "Number 13, Undertaker," and had picked up the close black wig, and long, drooping mustache, when he had another thought. Given a bag sufficiently loose to permit free motion of the hands and arms, and a man, even in ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham—the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own particular armchair. Fettes was an old drunken Scotchman, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... much of a reader, and if she had been, there were no books within her reach but the Bible and a cookery book, on the former of which, for private reading, Jenny looked as a mere precursor of the undertaker. ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... said to the undertaker's men, and called them in, and young Master Jasper, he followed me along the ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... my looks. I will excuse your congratulations, Mr. Turner," said I, impatiently; for the recollection of the banqueting-house, and the undertaker whom Turner was so eager to introduce, came full into my mind. "Go on, if you please; five minutes is all I am at present able to give to any business, and you sent me word you had something ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... stipulated that although they were to be employed only in suppressing the rising, the officers should have permanent rank.[16] So, as was shown in Mrs. Clarke's case, a patent for raising a regiment might be a source of profit to the undertaker, who again might get it by bribing the mistress of a royal duke. The officers had, according to the generally prevalent system, a modified property in their commissions; and the system of sale was not abolished till our own days. We may therefore say ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... that "Sis had got a beau," I was pleased at the prospect of her becoming a minister's wife. On inquiry, however, I found that the somewhat solemn look which I had noticed was indeed a professional one, but not clerical. He was a young undertaker, who had just succeeded to a thriving business. Things, I believe, are going on well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the landlady's daughter and her mother. Sextons and undertakers are the cheerfullest people in the world ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... amazement at his brother, who had turned quite white at the sight of the undertaker's wagon standing in front of the miser's home. He had halted and gone off to one side of the road to lean against a tree, where he stood now, mopping his face ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... that kind of taste," said Judy in defence, "an' whin her eyes was blue an' her hair yalla, I dunno but high colors wint well enough. Her father always dhressed her well. Anyhow she's goin' to make up for all the years she had to dhress like an undertaker. Yistherday it was a gran' opery-cloak, as soon as Artie tould her he had taken four opery sates ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... composing it"!—which want of leisure in the credulous Bishop, our readers will regret with us, especially those inventive geniuses, who, like the projector in the reign of George I., published a scheme for manufacturing pine plank from pine saw-dust, or the still more ingenious undertaker of later times, who proposed to make pine plank out of oak saw-dust, by the mere ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... symptoms of a turn of fashion toward coloured coats and bright buttons, which may be successful, because the fashionable world abhors monotony. The flame coloured coats, long curls, and pink under waistcoats of George IV., were succeeded by the solemn sables of an undertaker; the high tight stock made way for a sailor's neckcloth. For a time shawl waistcoats, of gay colours, had their hour. Then correct tight black yielded to the loosest and shaggiest garments that could be invented. Perhaps the year 1852 may see our youth arrayed ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... woman of about fifty, small and prim. Prim with an unconquerable primness that neither storm nor battle nor accident could shake. If she had been killed in the runaway she would have looked prim in death while awaiting the undertaker. She must have been wet almost to those unfractured bones which she had been feeling; her black silk dress, with its white ruching about the neck, was torn and bedraggled; her black hat, with its jet ornaments, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... when Mr. Lyken, the little undertaker from Ghost Lake, arrived with several assistants, a casket, and what he ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... came forward. Lord Kenmure was accompanied by an undertaker, to whom the care of his body was to be entrusted; he was also attended by a surgeon, who directed the executioner how to perform his office, by drawing his finger over that part of the neck where the blow was to be given. Lord Kenmure then kissed the officers and gentlemen on the scaffold, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... principal personage? Presently, quite alone, up the side steps, and unobserved, came a thin but tallish man in black, with a tail coat, and, almost unrecognised, took the vacant front seat. He might have been, so far as dress went, a clerk in a counting-house, or an undertaker. But the face was no ordinary one. The wide brow, the sharp nose of the Burke type, the compressed lips and strong chin, were suggestive of intellect and of suppressed emotion. There was no applause, for nothing was known to the crowd, even of ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... happened one must bury the other. And Nellie saw her husband dying. This terrible event presented itself to her in every detail. She saw the coffin, the candles, the deacon, and even the footmarks in the hall made by the undertaker. ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the chief. "I'm down here to meet Braceway now. He and Withers are in conference. Braceway doesn't want to go to the inquest. I'm to take him by the undertaker's to look at the body, and then he wants to run up to see you. Says he won't learn anything important at the inquest; ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... sot endur'd, Who all his time in taverns spent, While his affairs in ruin went. Once as insensible he lay, She dress'd him in a corpse's array, And with the undertaker's aid, Into a burying vault convey'd. The fumes dispersed, the man awakes; All for reality he takes. When by the glimmering of a lamp He saw his mansion drear and damp, Reflecting how his life had pass'd, A forced repentance came at ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... mad cow. Ann Harriet was not so fortunate; her size prevented her running, and a fiery peony on her bosom attracted the animal's attention, so that, with a loud roar, the beast rushed directly upon her. Had Ann Harriet been—as she was a few weeks before—an unprotected female, the undertaker of Peonytown would have had a 'big job' that day; but luckily, he who had just sworn to love and protect her saw that now was his time and chance to begin; so, drawing his sword, he stepped in front of his trembling bride, and, as the cow approached with head ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tomb—a radio loud-speaking outfit permanently set at 327 meters wave-length, which was to be the wave-length of his endowed broadcasting station. I don't know how Remington Solander first got his remarkable idea, but just about that time an undertaker in New York had rigged up a hearse with a phonograph so that the hearse would loud-speak suitable hymns on the way to the cemetery, and that may have suggested the loud-speaking tomb to Remington Solander, but it is not important where he got the idea. ...
— Solander's Radio Tomb • Ellis Parker Butler
... finally secured was in an unfashionable locality; there was a tailor shop next door and an undertaker across the street, and a clanging trolley car screeched on the curve at the end of the block; but the dignity of the pillared doorway, and the carved window casings, had appealed to Maurice; and also ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... kicks rained on him in that last valorous chapter of his life. He heard the decision placing the responsibility on the men from Denver, saw the sheriff and his deputies step forward and lay firm hands on their arms and lead them away; and then was aroused by the heavy entrance of the camp undertaker to make ready, for the quiet sleep, the body of ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... the tiny graveyard situated among the maize-fields to the north of Marosfalva, and which is the local Jewish burial ground, the suicide was quietly laid to rest. There was no religious service, for there was no minister of his religion present; an undertaker came down from Arad and saw to it all; there was no concourse of people, no singing, no flowers. Ignacz Goldstein—home the day before from Kecskemet—alone followed the plain deal coffin on its lonely journey from ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... with it a fresh supply of the genuine Oporto, which our merry companion, Blackstrap, called "his old particular." One of his stories, relative to a joke played off upon the Bolton trotters, by his friend Sable, the travelling undertaker, is too good to be lost. In Lancashire the custom of hoaxing is called 255trotting, and in many instances, particularly at Bolton, is still continued, and has frequently been played off upon strangers with a ruinous success. Sable had, it would appear, taken up his quarters at a commercial ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... one point connected with the deceased upon which the court is particularly anxious, namely, that the fiction of a full-sized coffin should be preserved, though there is so little to put in it. Upon the undertaker's stating in the Sol's bar in the course of the day that he has received orders to construct "a six-footer," the general solicitude is much relieved, and it is considered that Mr. Smallweed's ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... in Port Agnew, Donald called upon one Sam Carew. In his youth, Mr. Carew had served his time as an undertaker's assistant, but in Port Agnew his shingle proclaimed him to his world as a "mortician." Owing to the low death-rate in that salubrious section, however, Mr. Carew added to his labors those of a carpenter, and when outside jobs of carpentering ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... all right," she said at last. "I thought you were—well, never mind that. What about this Wheeler family? Are they going to settle with the undertaker? Because I tell you flat, I can't and won't. She owed me a month's rent, and her clothes won't bring over seventy-five or ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... house all day, dreading to see the undertaker's wagon drive up. But it did not come—not that day, nor the next, nor ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... in the greatest possible hurry as though they never could go quick enough; and then the coachmen would drive very fast also, though they did not know why, for a fast pace of movement is another of those contagious diseases. And then again the sportsmen would move at an undertaker's pace, when the fox had traversed and the hounds would be at a loss to know which was the hunt and which was the heel; and then the carriage also would go slowly, and the ladies would stand up and talk. And then the time for lunch came; ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... or three weeks after their original publication. One of these had reference to the "Fight with Fate," which was then being played at the Surrey Theatre; and as Mr. Banting and his famous cure (the stout undertaker lived but two doors from Leech, in The Terrace at Kensington, and struck up a pleasing friendship with the artist) were then the talk of the town, "The Arrow" suggested a revised version, "A Fight with Fat," with a disciple of Mr. Banting as ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... shop of modern times where goods are repaired or manufactured. They represent customs which now are irregular, but which formerly were permanent methods. It was a simple system, requiring no capital, no undertaker or manager, no middleman. Gradually these customs were replaced by many varied methods, such as the establishment of the laborer in his individual shop, who at first only made the raw material, which people brought him, into the finished product; later he was required ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... has been often used to signify inflammation of the peritoneum covering the intestines. On the other hand, no case of typhus or typhoid fever is mentioned as giving rise to dangerous consequences, with the exception of the single instance of an undertaker mentioned by Mr. Travers, who seems to have been poisoned by a fluid which exuded from the body. The other accidents were produced by dissection, or some other mode of contact with bodies of patients who ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... Here belong, besides formal crimes against property, games of chance,(332) usurious speculations ( 113) and measures taken to entice customers away from other competitors. Again, scientific experiments, means of communication etc., may be entirely unproductive in the individual economy of the undertaker, and yet be of more profit to mankind in general, than they have cost the former.(333) In this respect the nation's economy holds a middle place between individual economy and the world's economy.(334) Strictly speaking, only those employments ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... dress he wore: 'Ay, and if some that I could name possessed the hearts of mice, ye should have had me long ago. Mark me, my lad—and you about him do the same. There are a score among ye whom I see now and know, who are dead men from this hour. Begone! and rob an undertaker's while you can! You'll want some coffins ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... musing; "you wouldn't like a very little pony, with only one eye and a rat-tail, I suppose—it might look absurd with your long legs, I'm afraid—or else Mrs. Meek, the undertaker's widow, has got a very quiet one that poor Meek used to ride—a child could manage it:—there's the butcher's fat mare, but she won't stir a step without the basket on her back, and it would be so troublesome for you ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... that made them disinfect their houses," cried he, "and invented a little oven or something to steam mattresses and things. You are the man that nursed them and buried them when the undertaker died. You digged graves with your own hands—I say, I should like to ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... a blunt, hard-looking man, self-sufficient and formal. A woman said the undertaker brought him. Icier than the pitiless storm outside, yes, colder than ice were his words. He read a few verses from the Bible, and warned "the bereaved mother against rebellion at the divine decrees." He made a ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... might be well for some of that body to meet the incoming ship. Coroners Feinberg and Holtzhauser with Coroner's Physician Weston arranged to go down the bay on the Patrol, while Coroner Hellenstein waited at the pier. An undertaker was notified to be ready if needed. Fortunately ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... perceive that you are to have a funeral here very shortly. I am an undertaker, and shall be glad to take charge of furnishing the coffin and whatever else ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... BAZOUGE, an undertaker's assistant who lived in an attic of the same tenement-house as the Coupeaus and the Lorilleux. He was generally drunk and made ribald jests about his dismal calling. It was he who buried Gervaise Coupeau after she was found dead in an ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... clothing—and the relatives—he had no chance to save. At last he broke down, and the doctor told him it was an outdoor life, with absolute freedom from the strain of serving a man like Burgeman—or the undertaker for him. So he went to Burgeman, asked him to loan him the money to invest in a fruit-farm, and let him pay it off as fast ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... with the undertaker creeping around in his black, sneaking way, and I found when it was all over that she had secretly incorporated a face-bleach company and sold all she owned to it, complexion mask and all, and lost the whole of what she got on that year's Derby. I've understood from the boarding-house ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... 'you gentlemen have been very entertaining this morning. One would think Polly and I had come out for a stroll with a couple of undertaker's-men. There's surely time enough to think of such things yet! None of us ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... the undertaker did accordingly, with a visage of professional length and most grievous solemnity, distribute among the pall-bearers little cards, assigning their respective situations in attendance upon the coffin. As this precedence is supposed ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... borrowed from the guillotined, is a rallying point for anti-revolutionaries, whereupon, the next day, wigs are denounced at the Commune-council, and suppressed; "Barere roared with laughter on alluding to this piece of fun." The humor of an undertaker and the dexterity of a commercial drummer: he plays with Terror.—In like manner he plays with his reports, and at this latter exercise, he improvises; he is never embarrassed; it is simply necessary to turn the faucet and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... shape that future. But how can he amass money? Surely by enterprise. His being where he is proves that he has capacities, that he can take risks; is it remarkable, then, that sooner or later his unbridled acquisitiveness will turn him into a restless capitalist undertaker? Here again we have cause and effect. He undervalues the present; he overvalues the future. Hence his activities are such as they are. Is it too much to say that even today American civilization has something of the unfinished ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... here, assures me that those people who never need a doctor until they are well advanced in life are not likely to require a physician's services more than once. The next call is for the undertaker." ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... were called, differed widely from the Norman invaders of a former age. The Norman generally espoused the cause of some native chief, and took his pay in land; what he got by the sword he held by the sword. But the Undertaker was usually a man of peace—a courtier like Sir Christopher Hatton—a politician like Sir Walter Raleigh—a poet like Edmund Spencer, or a spy and forger like Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork. He came, in the wake of war, with his elastic "letters patent," ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... the assistant on a Peddletonian weekly, who made his little annual joke about the "first egg laid on our table," and who was the menial of every tradesman in the village and under bonds to him for frequent "puffs," except the undertaker, about whose employment he was recklessly facetious. In Washington he was an important man, correspondent, and clerk of two house committees, a "worker" in politics, and a confident critic of every woman and every man in ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... like to grouse and pretend every fall that the team's shot full of holes and that the world is a dark, dreary, dismal place and that winning from Claflin is only a hectic dream. For the love of lemons, fellows, chuck the undertaker stuff and cheer up. Talk about something interesting, or, if you must talk your everlasting football, cut out ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... that felt greasy to the touch and taste. The coffin was in a four-wheeled trap, for the solitary hearse that Mudgee boasted then was to meet them some three miles out of town—at the racecourse, as it happened, by one of those eternal ironies of fate. (Jones, the undertaker, had had another job that morning.) The long string of buggies and carts and horsemen; other buggies and carts and horsemen drawn respectfully back amongst the trees here and there along the route; male hats off and held rigidly vertical with right ears as the coffin passed; and drivers waiting ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... have made a shift to struggle in my part of the performance of this opera; which, as mean as it is, deserves at least a pardon, because it has attempted a discovery beyond any former undertaker of our nation; only remember, that if there be no north-east passage to be found, the fault is in nature, and not in me; or, as Ben Jonson tells us in "The Alchymist," when projection had failed, and the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... and two intimate friends, Mr. Henderson (one of the trustees and executors of the deceased) and Mr. Hayes (for many years his medical attendant), and was received by the council and officers of the Royal Academy, and their undertaker and his attendants, with every mark of respect. The body was then deposited in the smaller Exhibition-room, on the ground-floor, which was hung ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself. His walk was soft, his voice was melancholy, his long, lanky fingers were hooked like claws. He might have been a parson, or an undertaker, or anything else you like, except what he really was." Then as to Cuff's methods: He is introduced to the reader with the usual air of mystery. He makes no allusion whatever to the business he had been hurriedly summoned to investigate, but "he admired the grounds, and remarked that he felt the ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... complete manufacture either for money, for labour, or for other goods, over and above what may be sufficient to pay the price of the materials, and the wages of the workmen, something must be given for the profits of the undertaker of the work, who hazards his stock in this adventure. The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of their employer ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... a Litry Guy who would don his Undertaker's Regalia and the White Satin Puff Tie and go out of an Afternoon to read ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... Hence he is said to lay "help upon one that is mighty," "mighty to save" (Psa 89:19; Isa 63:1) and hence it is again, that God did even of old promise to send his people "a Saviour, a great one" (Isa 19:20). To save is a great work, and calls for almightiness in the undertaker: hence he is called the "Mighty God, the wonderful Counsellor," &c. Sin is strong, Satan is also strong, death and the grave are strong, and so is the curse of the law; therefore it follows, that this Jesus must needs be, by God the Father, accounted almighty, in that he hath given his elect ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... arrangements with the undertaker for the care of the body as soon as the coroner released it, seemed ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... Conduct—The Manners and Management of the Widow Goe: her successful Attention to Business: her Decease unexpected—the Infant Boy of Gerard Ablett dies: Reflections on his Death, and the Survivor his Sister-Twin— The Funeral of the deceased Lady of the Manor described: her neglected Mansion: Undertaker and Train: the Character which her Monument will hereafter display—Burial of an Ancient Maiden: some former drawback on her Virgin Fame: Description of her House and Household: her Manners, Apprehensions, Death—Isaac ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... a way. I am not brutal; I am only just, and I tell you there is only one way of treating a man who has robbed you dishonestly of the woman you love, and that is to finish him so completely that the first man called in will be the undertaker—not the surgeon. I am not talking at random—I know a case in point, which always sets me blazing when I think of it. He was at the time attached to our embassy at Berlin. I hear now that he has returned to England and is dying—dying, ...
— Homo - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... lay huddled in the United Brethren Church on Avondale Avenue, according to O. H. Ossman, an undertaker, who explored the flood district in ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... murmured the dying woman. 'Meg, I've settled all about my burial with the undertaker and Mr Grigg downstairs; and you'll have nothing to do but stay here till they take me away. If you like, you and Robin and baby may walk after me; but be sure see everybody out, and lock the door safe afore ...
— Little Meg's Children • Hesba Stretton
... before their time, and they will expect us ministers to preach about them as though they were the victims of early piety; and after a high-class funeral, with silver handles at the side of their coffin of extraordinary brightness, it will be found out that the undertaker is cheated out of his legitimate expenses! Do not send to me to preach the funeral sermon of a man who dies like that. I would blurt out the whole truth, and tell that he was strangled to death by his wife's ribbons! The country is ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... warms nobody. The only thing they seem likely to be lavish in is funeral expenses, which come in the wake of leaky shoes and imperfect clothing. These funeral expenses at last swallow all, since nobody can dispute an undertaker's bill. One pities these joyless beings. Economy, instead of a rational act of the judgment, is a morbid monomania, eating the pleasure out of life, and haunting ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... threstle, ye'd be looking like a pin-cushion dress-making day. It's dangerous, I call it, to lave splinters like thim with their ends up. Some day a thoughtless brakesman like yeerself will take a careless breath in the vicinity—and there ain't an undertaker this side ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... lawyer so common in our centers of population today, such as one sees chasing ambulances through the streets with a business-card in one hand and a contract in the other; such as arrives at the scene of wreck, fire, and accident along with the undertaker, and always ahead ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Our skipper had made other arrangements. However, the way I figgered it, we was long past needin' a doctor, and you can get an undertaker 'most anywhere. We went through the village like a couple of shootin' stars, Tobias about a length ahead, his hat blowed off, his hair—what little he's got—streamin' out behind, and that blessed ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... "I don't know how this got out, but it's quite true," he said. He had a long face, like a horse's. At least, he looked like pictures of horses I'd seen. As he spoke, he pulled it even longer and became as doleful as an undertaker at ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... you take a fall to it that I'm joshin'? You sure are the melancholiest stretch of bones and hide I ever seen. Somehow you always make a fella come down to cases every time, with that sad-lookin' mug of yourn. You sure would 'a' made a good undertaker. I'll get them chaps." ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... the verge of a white apoplexy, though he did not move from his seat. The cadaverous maid lifted an embroidered bodice from one of the chairs and laid it in one of the black trunks; she looked like a female undertaker laying a dead baby in its coffin. The fat maid showed all her teeth and laughed at Schreiermeyer and cleared the other chair, and brought up both together ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... at the Court of King Arthur." In this regard the humour of our transatlantic cousins cannot wholly escape a charge of debasing the moral currency by buffoonery. It has no reverence for the awful mystery of death and the Great Beyond. An undertaker will place in his window a card bearing the words: "You kick the bucket; we do the rest." A paper will head an account of the hanging of three mulattoes with "Three Chocolate Drops." It has no reverence for the names and phrases associated ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... beside McGregor was the daughter of an undertaker who lived upstairs over his shop near the bakery. He had seen her in the evening standing in the stairway by the shop door. After the story told him by the black-haired boy he had been embarrassed about her. When he passed her standing in the stairway ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... "is Day Bly, although I'm commonly called Day, for short. I was dragged up in London, and when I was twelve years of age I was apprenticed to an undertaker. I used to take care of the shop, clean the hearse, and sleep in a coffin, with old pieces of mouldy velvet thrown over me to keep me warm in ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... There is one point connected with the deceased upon which the court is particularly anxious, namely, that the fiction of a full-sized coffin should be preserved, though there is so little to put in it. Upon the undertaker's stating in the Sol's bar in the course of the day that he has received orders to construct "a six-footer," the general solicitude is much relieved, and it is considered that Mr. Smallweed's ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... hope some God, Some God hath put his mercy in your manhood Whereto heel infuse powre, and presse you forth Our undertaker. ...
— The Two Noble Kinsmen • William Shakespeare and John Fletcher [Apocrypha]
... I am to be ruined by expense, let it come in the shape of the washerwoman's and linen-draper's bills, not in those of the apothecary and undertaker." ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... ornamental—and starve. Where a man can have the choice of a thousand girls who can't even stitch a button on a pillow-case, the feminine expert in domestic economy will go on economising all by herself, until the only man who takes any real interest in her is the undertaker! It is all very strange, and very unaccountable. But I suppose it will forever continue thuswise until the world ceases to lay its laurels at the foot of Mary and to give ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... Alice died I started out for Mr. Miller's; he wuz the undertaker. The night wuz powerful dark, 'nd it wuz all the darker to me, because seemed like all the light hed gone out in my life. Down near the bridge I met Bill; he weaved round in the road, for he ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... Snorky reflectively, "she turned up in time. We'd have had Nuisance ready for the undertaker by the morning." ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... about for three days, compelled to attend to everything. At first, as Christine had been picked up half dead, he had been obliged to have her carried to the Hopital de Lariboisiere; then he had gone from the municipal offices, to the undertaker's and the church, paying everywhere, and full of indifference so far as that went, since the priests were willing to pray over that corpse with a black circle round its neck. Among the people who were waiting he as yet only perceived some neighbours, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... shows her dying in the poorhouse before she is twenty, after one year of sinful indulgence and one year of lingering death. The third shows her coffin, if the photographer is successful in snapping it tomorrow as the hearse leaves the undertaker's rooms, for her friends are too ashamed to give her burial from their home. These and all the others in this book are actual photographs, correctly named and in no way made up or misrepresented. The story of Daisy is told over ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... yard or so away from him, were two visitors of whom at first glance I formed a most unfavorable opinion. One was a flashily dressed, middle-aged man, with fair mustache, puffy cheeks, and a superfluity of jewelry. The other I might at first have taken for an undertaker's mute. He had an exceedingly red nose, watery eyes, and was dressed in ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... delay—there is no cunning devise of learned counsel, no writs of error, by which even a miserable miser, or voluptuous millionaire, can gain a moment's delay when death issues his summons. The miser was called for, and he knew his time had come. He sent for the undertaker, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... "Well, them undertaker folk are driving a pretty trade in London. Well-nigh every lady we saw in a carriage had hired one o' them plumes for the day, and had it niddle noddling on her head. It were the Queen's Drawing-room, ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... state of his mind, manifest in his air, helped also to complete the Young America expression. Mother Hubbard's mingled consternation and pride at each successive achievement of her astonishing puppy were inimitable. Each separate illustration made its point. Patriotism, especially, came in when the undertaker, bearing the pall with red-lettered border,—Rebellion,—finds the dog, with upturned, knowing eye, and parted jaws, suggestive as much of a good grip as of laughter, half risen upon fore-paws, as far from "dead" as ever, mounting guard ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... "and live out our lives together in single blessedness! Will you? We can have a perfectly good time until the undertaker knocks." ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... difference who did it? Why, it's a cinch. Get this! Lilas comes home broke. She's sick, and sees the undertaker flirting with her, so she decides to spill the whole story and take the consequences—understand? It's conscience." Mr. Melcher laughed lightly at his little joke. "A sick woman's conscience is an expensive thing; it takes money to square it. Merkle won't stand, and Wharton ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... manifested itself in words, and only now and then, on rare occasions, flashed out in a lightning glance, or blazed up in a fiery countenance. For the most part Jack was calm as a mill-pond, deep as the Atlantic, straightforward and grave as an undertaker's clerk and good-humoured as an unspoilt ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... to cost?—these questions one could discern revolving almost visibly beneath his short-haired scalp. At last the priests left the high altar and came down to the coffin, to sprinkle it and do whatever was now possible for its occupant; and in a few minutes the church was empty save for the undertaker's men, myself, and the Bellini. It is truly a lovely picture, although perhaps a thought too mild, and one should go often to ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... yourself, Louise," warned Frederick Augustus in the voice of an undertaker, and I really think he meant it. But I wasn't in the mood ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... had got a beau," I was pleased at the prospect of her becoming a minister's wife. On inquiry, however, I found that the somewhat solemn look which I had noticed was indeed a professional one, but not clerical. He was a young undertaker, who had just succeeded to a thriving business. Things, I believe, are going on well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the landlady's daughter and her mother. Sextons and undertakers are the cheerfullest people in the world at home, as comedians and circus-clowns are the most ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... my pocket now, but that doesn't matter. I had to send him after somethin'! Say, Serena, is it real necessary to have that undertaker hangin' over us ALL the time? Every time he looks at me I feel as if he was takin' my measure. Has EVERY meal ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... dying, and W. don't much affect our Dutch determinations. I dine with him on Thursday, provided l'oncle is not dined upon, or peremptorily bespoke by the posthumous epicures before that day. I wish he may recover—not for our dinner's sake, but to disappoint the undertaker, and the rascally reptiles that may well wait, since they will ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... they never say what they mean, seldom speak from the heart. One is in the dust, and another on the throne, and they all die in like manner, to be buried most probably by a man they would not have dared address without an introduction, measured by an undertaker they could not have been seen walking with in the street, and to mix with thousands of spirits whose ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... unthought pathos—their blind stoniness toward the sky. Against such a background, Bibbs was not incongruous, with his figure, in black, so long and slender, and his face so long and thin and white; nor was the undertaker's coupe out of keeping, with the shabby driver dozing on the box and the shaggy horses standing patiently in attitudes without hope and without regret. But for Mary Vertrees, here was a grotesque setting—she was a vivid, living creature of a beautiful world. And a graveyard is not the ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... toward coloured coats and bright buttons, which may be successful, because the fashionable world abhors monotony. The flame coloured coats, long curls, and pink under waistcoats of George IV., were succeeded by the solemn sables of an undertaker; the high tight stock made way for a sailor's neckcloth. For a time shawl waistcoats, of gay colours, had their hour. Then correct tight black yielded to the loosest and shaggiest garments that could be invented. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... done East Lynne and Hamlet, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Macbeth, and every once in a while the local literary man, who was also the undertaker, wrote a play based on local traditions. Of course they gave The Village School and Memory's Garland, and if you don't remember those delectable home-made entertainments, so much the worse for you. It is true that in the allegorical tableau at the end of Memory's Garland the wreath, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... ambition of every one of the class we are discussing to live fashionably, so it is their chief wish to be laid in the grave in the same style. The undertaker at a fashionable funeral is generally the sexton of some fashionable church, perhaps of the church the deceased was in the habit of attending. This individual prescribes the manner in which the funeral ceremonies shall be conducted, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... step down from the car, so that the bigger man changed his mind and climbed back in his seat, like a king reascending his throne. And they all sat there so sedate and non-committal and dignified, rather like dusty pallbearers in an undertaker's wagonette, that I promptly decided they had come to foreclose a mortgage and take my Dinky-Dunk's land away from him, ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... rushing for the stage and giving congratulations with both hands to Simon of Cyrene as he lightens the Cross from the shoulder of the sufferer, and to Nicodemus who voted an emphatic "No" at the condemnation, and to Joseph of Arimathea who asks the honour of being undertaker ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... brought him to the Hotel Clericy at once, where he found the ladies already apprised of their bereavement. He and I set off again for Passy, by train this time, as our need was more urgent. I despatched instructions to the Vicomte's lawyer to follow by the next train—bringing the undertaker with him. There was no heir to my patron's titles, but it seemed necessary to observe every formality at this the dramatic extinction of a long and ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... husband was undertaker. With his own hands he "rived" the planks, made the coffin, and buried Nancy Hanks, that remarkable woman. There was no pastor, no funeral service. The grave was marked by a wooden slab, which, long years after, in 1879, was replaced by a ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... obsequies of the old Senator Boligand were a distinguished success: a fashionable, proper function, ordered by the young widow with exquisite taste, as all the world said, and conducted without reproach, as the undertaker and the clergy very heartily agreed. At the Church of the Lifted Cross, the incident of the child, the blonde lady and the mysteriously veiled man, who sat in awe and bewildered amazement where the shadows gave deepest seclusion, escaped notice. ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... refreshed me and rejuvenated me. Now I do two men's work, and have grown from a skinny, fretful, nervous wreck into a hearty, happy man. This has been a great surprise to my friends and a great disappointment to the undertaker. I am an editor in the daytime and ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... o' mountains. 'Twas no place for a short-handed schooner. Believe me, sir, 'twas no place at all! 'Twas time t' run for harbour, come what might; so we asked the cook t' take charge. The cook says t' me that he'd rather be a cook than a skipper, an' a skipper than a ship's undertaker, but he've no objection t' turn his hand t' anything t' 'blige a party o' friends: which he'll do, says he, by takin' the schooner t' Broad Cove o' the Harbourless Shore, which is a bad shelter in a nor'east gale, says he, but the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... looked like a martyr in the dismal black coat and white tie, which he described as a mixture of the livery of a waiter and the mourning of an undertaker. At dances, he propped himself against a wall, in a doorway or in some coign of vantage about the staircase, looking limp and miserable, but keenly observant all the time. When he found a congenial soul, whether man or woman, to talk to, he brightened, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... interruption as a fight; because, although a Chinaman does not think much about his soul after he dies, he thinks a vast deal about his dead body, and, in order to be perfectly sure that he will not be cheated by the undertaker, he buys his coffin before he is sick, and sees that he has a good bargain. And so, having a good coffin, he wants a good funeral; and it is said some men spend nearly half of their fortune in having a grand procession when they are carried to their grave. ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... must be suppressed. I should blush myself black in the face to say what he would relate with a very quiet smile of self-satisfaction. However, as regrets are quite unavailing, unless, like the undertaker's, they are paid for, I shall exclaim, with the French soldier, who found his long military queue in the hands of a pursuing English sailor, "Chivalry of the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... her mission of duty and affection. Gay was her all, but she had room in her heart for a good deal more than the worthy butcher-undertaker's great, fat image. She had no children of her own yet, but, as she often said, in her cheery, optimistic ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... incidentally, too, what some people thought of him. The third showed him the "shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us." He saw himself dead, uncared for, unwept, unwatched, his effects plundered by the charwoman, laundress, and undertaker's man and realized the end to which he must come unless he led an altered life. Holding up his hands he prayed to have his fate reversed and saw the Ghost shrink and dwindle ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... English chiefs on the Council of Munster, and also with the leading men among the Undertakers as they were called, among whom more than half a million of acres of the escheated and desolate lands of the fallen Desmond were to be divided, on condition of each Undertaker settling on his estate a proportionate number of English gentlemen, yeomen, artisans and labourers with their families, who were to bring the ruined province into order and cultivation. The President and Vice-President of the Council were the two Norreys, John and Thomas, two of the most gallant ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... hebdomadal journal. We can but allude, and hint, and suggest, and illustrate our position in an 'off-at-a-tangent' sort of way. Look, for instance, at his ingenious quaintness in the matter of onomatology. What a name, he would say, is Lamb for a soldier, Joy for an undertaker, Rich for a pauper, or Noble for a tailor; Big for a lean or little person, and Small for one who is broad in the rear and abdominous in the van; Short for a fellow six feet without his shoes, or Long for him whose high heels barely elevate him to the height ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... low places of the Strand blossom with white cravats, those lilies of the valley, types of meekness and humility, at least in the pious palmer—and why not of similar virtues in the undertaker, the concert-singer, the groom, the tavern-waiter, the croupier at the gaming-table, and Frederick Augustus Lord Scoutbush, who, white-cravated like the rest, is just getting into his cab at the door of the Never-mind-what ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the labours of a groom of the chambers? or can the gamekeeper arrange in tempting order the carcasses of the birds he has shot, strew them with flowers, and garnish them with piquant sauces? It would be as reasonable to expect a gallant soldier to act as undertaker, and conduct the funeral of the enemy he ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... shearers raised a little purse To help a mate, as shearers will, 'To pay the doctor and the nurse, And if there should be something worse — To pay the undertaker's bill.' ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... She hesitated, then added in explanation: "When we came West I told myself that I must not allow myself to deteriorate in rough surroundings, and I have made it a rule never to mingle with any but the best, Mr. Disston. My father," impressively, "was a prominent undertaker in Philadelphia, and as organist in a large Methodist church in that city I came in contact with the best people, so you understand," blandly, "don't you, ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... several severe articles he wrote criticizing officials and institutions seems to have appeared—an attack on an undertaker whose establishment formed a branch of the coroner's office. The management of this place one day refused information to a Call reporter, and the next morning its proprietor was terrified by a scathing denunciation of his firm. It began, "Those body-snatchers" ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... gutters smoke, the buildings tremble as the heavy drays pass and collide at the corners of the narrow streets. Suddenly the marquis stops; he has found what he wanted. Between a charcoal dealer's dark shop and an undertaker's establishment, where the spruce boards leaning against the wall cause him to shudder, is a porte-cochere surmounted by a sign, the word "BATHS" on a dull lantern. He enters and crosses a damp little garden where a fountain weeps in a basin of artificial rockwork. That is just ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... frettin' over what couldn't possibly happen, I was half dead of the fidgets. Stay and cheer me up, there's a good feller. I'd just about reached the stage where I had the girl and boy stove to flinders under that pesky auto. I'd even begun to figger on notifyin' the undertaker. Tell me I'm an old fool and then talk about somethin' else. They'll ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Adieu, thou machine! Although I have given thee from time to time some glimpses of people dear to me, old family portraits,—back with you to the picture dealer's shop, to Madame de T——-, and all the rest of them; take your place round the bier with undertaker's mutes, for ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... diminish in my hand like the Magic Skin of Balzac, is frightful. Now you understand me, do you not? and you will no longer bid me take care of myself. No; if you still pray to God, ask him to send me speedily to the undertaker's." ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... fooled me all right," she said at last. "I thought you were—well, never mind that. What about this Wheeler family? Are they going to settle with the undertaker? Because I tell you flat, I can't and won't. She owed me a month's rent, and her clothes won't bring over ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... valorous chapter of his life. He heard the decision placing the responsibility on the men from Denver, saw the sheriff and his deputies step forward and lay firm hands on their arms and lead them away; and then was aroused by the heavy entrance of the camp undertaker to make ready, for the quiet sleep, the body ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... all right. All that remained was for the buzzard to flap his wings once or twice in a speech; then the jury would hold a short consultation, a few words would follow from the presiding Judge, and the carcass would be ready for the official undertaker, the prison Warden. ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other direction." In fact, he might have pleased his father by becoming a minister if a certain preacher that he knew had not, to use his own words, "looked and talked so like an undertaker." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... go quick enough; and then the coachmen would drive very fast also, though they did not know why, for a fast pace of movement is another of those contagious diseases. And then again the sportsmen would move at an undertaker's pace, when the fox had traversed and the hounds would be at a loss to know which was the hunt and which was the heel; and then the carriage also would go slowly, and the ladies would stand up and talk. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... eyes were too bright. As to his age, if one had attempted to guess it, one might have said forty-seven, then corrected himself and said seventy-four. He was really twenty-eight. Emaciated he was; as much, perhaps, as he dared be, with a needy undertaker at Bentley's Flat and a new and enterprising coroner at Sonora. Poverty and zeal are an upper and a nether millstone. It is dangerous to make a third ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... thing—I really cannot. It is preposterous. How could the chaplain have put my sword into the hands of an undertaker?—Get me a hammer; I will knock ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... being received in the same style as your father or my brother; namely, to one of our better dinners, and perhaps something better to drink than I can afford every day; but just think with what uneasy compassion Mr. Morley would regard our poor ambitions, even if you had an occasional cook and an undertaker's man. And what would he do without his glass of dry sherry after his soup, and his hock and champagne later, not to mention his fine claret or tawny port afterwards? I don't know how to get these things good enough for him without laying in a stock; and, that you ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... mortality would disappear. It only costs twopence to put a piece of thick felt or cork into the bottom of a boot or shoe, and the difference is often between that and a doctors bill, with, perhaps, the undertaker's besides."—Daily Telegraph, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... the landlord takes his third for betraying you to him. Nay, more, as soon as ever your blood goes down the stair in that basin there, the landlord will see it or smell it, and send swiftly to his undertaker and get his third out of that job. For if he waited till the doctor got downstairs, the doctor would be beforehand and bespeak his undertaker, and then he would get the black thirds. Say I sooth, old Rouge et ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... suffered to prevail upon its own principle; the whole is so frittered down, and disjointed, that scarcely a trace of the original scheme remains! Thus, between the resistance of power, and the unsystematical process of popularity, the undertaker and the undertaking are both exposed, and the poor reformer is hissed off the stage both ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... composition of the former and that of the latter essay. Whether the inconsistency be a sign of mental growth or deterioration my readers must judge for themselves. I will merely say here that the man or woman, whose views remain absolutely fixed and stereotyped for seven years, is cheating the undertaker. What I conceive the true significance of this particular change in opinions to be is set forth in the essay ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... unctuously; "setting up with the sick, and laying out the dead. Faith, sometimes, I have to be nurse and undertaker, ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... Windy, had his fingers but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister would have talked in the same way—blatantly and without knowledge—of the virtues of the dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved husband, in new black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious undertaker kept moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... soon as they arrived, languished and finally died unless their parents speedily removed them to the safe shelter of their homes. The cure of Nanterre went so often to Bethlehem with his black vestments and his silver crucifix, the undertaker had so many orders for coffins for the house, that it was talked about in the neighborhood, and indignant mothers shook their fists at the model nursery, but only at a safe distance if they happened to have in their arms a little pink and white morsel of humanity to shelter from all the contagions ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... drinks, of which he was inordinately proud. One he had dubbed "Tarantula Juice;" the other he called "Whisper of Death." He told me that the amateur who took three drinks of the latter would have no further need for his services; the only person whose services he would require would be the undertaker. ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... the gods gave them the lie by arranging a first-class murder straight away,' said George, with a shrug. 'But why everybody should be in such a state I can't see. The palace is like an undertaker's establishment when business is dull. The only person who seems at all ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... came in, a blunt, hard-looking man, self-sufficient and formal. A woman said the undertaker brought him. Icier than the pitiless storm outside, yes, colder than ice were his words. He read a few verses from the Bible, and warned "the bereaved mother against rebellion at the divine decrees." He made a prayer ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... die to home, instead of being carted all the way down there and then have to send the remains back. She had to promise him she would send them back, though it did seem a pity with the beautiful "semetary" they had there, and full of Northern folks as it would hold and the undertaker a perfect gentleman, if she ever saw one. But the widow hoped she knew her duty, and she would not wish to be ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... found a little time after, when an undertaker came by orders of the Chief of Police to prepare the dead for honorable burial. Following his example, a few noble fellows about his office had contributed out of their pay, and thus poor Chester was ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... saw Mr. Turfmould, the sexton and undertaker, who seemed to be in a pensive meditation upon all the dead that he had ever buried. He looked upon men in a mild and pitying manner, as if he forgave them for being in good health. You could not help feeling that he gazed upon you with ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Aunt Rose. Voices no longer came from the drawing-room. Mr. Batty, genuinely sad in the loss of an old friend, had gone; the undertaker had tiptoed off to his gloomy lair, and Henrietta went downstairs, but when she saw her aunt she dared not ask her if she knew about Christabel Sales. Rose had a look of invulnerability; perhaps she knew, but it was impossible to ask, and if she knew, it had made no difference. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... ladies' slippers, which, it had been more than once hinted, was the trade of his early youth. It was now charged upon him, though I do not assert it of my own knowledge, that he had found it profitable to become the assassin of criticism and the undertaker of literature, for which offices he was amply qualified, notwithstanding the very serious writers in Putnam's Magazine thought he ought to be transported to Sandy Hook, there to do penance among the breakers a whole November. And this punishment they would ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... barred, Raymond is barred, I am barred. I told them about my baseball career out West. The directors said some pretty plain things about you, Worry, I'm sorry to tell. You're a rotten coach. In fact, you ought to be a coach at an undertaker's. Homans gets the credit for the work of the team. They claim you are too hard on the boys, too exacting, too brutal, in fact. Andrews recited a record of your taking sandwiches from us and aiding and abetting Murray in our slow starvation. ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... combination van and hearse with the coffin under the driver's box, and John Storm (as the only discoverable mourner) with the undertaker on ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... married woman should be harried about in this way, and gathered up a bag and eight parcels and went. The remaining four passengers sat on for a while, until a solemn-looking man in the corner, who, from his dress and general appearance, seemed to belong to the undertaker class, said it put him in mind of dead baby; and the other three passengers tried to get out of the door at the ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... mad undertaker in the autumn," continued Malkiel, with conscious pride; "he floated past ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... finally applied for the prize, and carried Oliver away with him, which, for the poor boy, was a matter of falling from the frying pan into the fire, and in his short career as undertaker's assistant he even sighed for the workhouse,—miserable as his life there had been. At the undertaker's, Oliver's bed was in the shop. The atmosphere seemed tainted with the smell of coffins. The recess behind the ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... fanatical terror for the national salvation, we shall then be ready to throw ourselves,—in a sort of precipitate trust, some strange disposition of the mind jumbled up of presumption and despair,—into the hands of the most pretending and forward undertaker. One such undertaker at least he has in readiness for our service. But let me assure this generous person, that however he may succeed in exciting our fears for the public danger, he will find it hard indeed to engage us to place any confidence ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... tiptoe; the florist's wagon drove to the door again and again, and the house began to smell of tuberoses. Reporters came, waiting patiently for interviews, sitting on the leather chairs in the dining-room, or writing rapidly on a corner of the dining-table, the cloth pushed back. The undertaker's assistants went about in their shirt-sleeves, working very hard, and toward the middle of the afternoon the undertaker himself tied the crepe to the ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... suddenly and her mother entered. She was bristling with curiosity. "Say, Emarine!" She lowered her voice, although there was no one to hear. "Where d' you s'pose the undertaker's a-goin' up by here? ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... side, and a turnpike gate on the other. Mr. Wopsle in a comprehensive black cloak, being descried entering at the turnpike, the gravedigger was admonished in a friendly way, "Look out! Here's the undertaker a coming, to see how you're a getting on with your work!" I believe it is well known in a constitutional country that Mr. Wopsle could not possibly have returned the skull, after moralizing over it, without dusting his fingers on a white napkin taken from his breast; ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker called in to help them to bury ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me that those people who never need a doctor until they are well advanced in life are not likely to require a physician's services more than once. The next call is for the undertaker." ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... a visit to the sick man. Samuel bore himself with portentous gravity, but spoke only a few commonplaces, affecting hope; he bestowed upon Nancy's hand a fervent pressure, and strode away with the air of an undertaker who had ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... ask if they would mend it, and the fellow answered: "Certainly, madam, we have quite a trade in hot-water bottles and "nature's rivals."" I have also found out that the only place to buy burnt wood is at Mr. Trepaning's the undertaker ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... say so!" replied the astonished Mrs. Ellis. "Why, I declare his grandfather laid her grandfather out! Old Whiston was an undertaker, and used to make the handsomest coffins of his time. And he is going to marry Miss Morton! What next, I'd like to know! He walks exactly like the old man. I used to mock him when I was a little girl. He had ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... in amazement at his brother, who had turned quite white at the sight of the undertaker's wagon standing in front of the miser's home. He had halted and gone off to one side of the road to lean against a tree, where he stood now, mopping his face ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... shutter, just as you may see a shop-boy do of a morning at his master's window. In this case too a large sheet of plate- glass was uncovered, and to form an idea of the etalage you must imagine that a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has struck an unnatural partnership with an undertaker. The black mummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered and gloved, glittering with votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of death and life; the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... situated among the maize-fields to the north of Marosfalva, and which is the local Jewish burial ground, the suicide was quietly laid to rest. There was no religious service, for there was no minister of his religion present; an undertaker came down from Arad and saw to it all; there was no concourse of people, no singing, no flowers. Ignacz Goldstein—home the day before from Kecskemet—alone followed the plain deal coffin on its lonely journey from ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... displayed a set of teeth that rivalled crimped skate in their whiteness—a month afterwards they became man and wife. For some years they toiled on together—he, like a caterpillar, getting a living out of cabbages, and she, like an undertaker, out of departed soles! Latterly, however, Jack discovered that his spouse was rather addicted to 'summut short,' in fact, that she drank like a fish, although the beverage she affected was a leetle stronger than water. Their profit (unlike Mahomet) permitted them the same baneful ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... genius, Walter. When you die, I expect you will leave a clause in your will, to the effect that the undertaker shall be a man of good, plain, common sense. O dear! What a dull life you ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against time has an antagonist not ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... they were to be employed only in suppressing the rising, the officers should have permanent rank.[16] So, as was shown in Mrs. Clarke's case, a patent for raising a regiment might be a source of profit to the undertaker, who again might get it by bribing the mistress of a royal duke. The officers had, according to the generally prevalent system, a modified property in their commissions; and the system of sale was not abolished till our own days. We may therefore say that the ruling class, on ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... looked up to find a queer little old man, jerking and twitching in the doorway. He was dressed in rusty black, with a very broad brimmed top-hat and a loose white necktie—the whole effect being that of a very rustic parson or of an undertaker's mute. Yet, in spite of his shabby and even absurd appearance, his voice had a sharp crackle, and his manner a quick intensity ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seen from its negation or opposite, for only the meanest of men are called infamous. They are utterly without fame, utterly nameless; but if fame implied only notoriety then infamous would possess no marked significance. Fame is an undertaker that pays but little attention to the living, but who bedizens the dead, furnishes out their funerals and follows them ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... white drapery swathed round her in a manner that perplexed me sorely, until I suddenly realised with a creeping of my flesh that it must be a winding-sheet, that burial accessary so often minutely described to me by the son of the village undertaker. Though interesting, I did not think it at all becoming, and would have preferred to see any other style of garment. Streaming over her neck and shoulders were thick masses of long, wavy, golden hair, which was ruffled, but only slightly ruffled, by the gentle summer breeze. ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... anything, except perhaps a butcher or an undertaker? Yet I can only keep myself alive with music. That's the jest of the Arch Humorist. My father was a clergyman. He droned out services for fifty years in a hamlet, with a little square church like a wooden money-box. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... considered rich. You may have noticed his name printed on most everything but the undertaker's and the jail as you came up from the station. The elevator and the bank he inherited from his pap. Mort's got a finger in ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... illegitimate son of a young lady who has lapsed from virtue under circumstances of great temptation, but still lapsed from virtue, and who dies in giving him birth. He is brought up as a pauper child in a particularly ill-managed workhouse, and apprenticed to a low undertaker. Thence he escapes, and walks to London, where he falls in with a gang of thieves. His legitimate brother, an unutterable scoundrel, happens to see him in London, and recognizing him by a likeness to their common father, bribes the thieves to recapture him when ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... abuse had not proved, effectual, they resumed their inquiry, and proceeded with, uncommon vigour on the information they received. A great number of persons who had been pressed were discharged by order of the house; and captain Winter, the chief undertaker for this method of recruiting the army, was carried by the sergeant before the lord chief justice, that he might ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... who attended her knows, that Mrs. Westenra had disease of the heart, and we can certify that she died of it. Let us fill up the certificate at once, and I shall take it myself to the registrar and go on to the undertaker." ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... am alive I shall be delighted to see him, and if I am dead he will be glad to see me." When some ladies bantered him on his want of feeling in attending to see the terrible Lord Lovat's head cut off—"Why," he said, "I made amends by going to the undertaker's to see it sewed on again." And yet this was the same individual who delighted in the first words and in the sunny looks of childhood; whose friendship seems to have partaken of all the softness of female affection; and whose heart was never hardened against the wretched and depressed. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... the unfortunate inventor had been removed to the nearest undertaker's for interment, at the expense of Mrs. Crull. The apartments had been diligently searched, and the personal effects of the deceased examined, under the direction of the coroner. A number of documents ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... after the undertaker squad carried me to the operating room or "pictures," as we called them because of the funny films we see under ether, and the operation was performed. It was a wonderful piece of surgery, and a marvelous success. From now on that doctor ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... that row of lady typists, either. Honest, I never faced such a battery of friendly smiles in all my more or less cheerful career. Even Miss Muggs, who wears a business face that would have a head undertaker lookin' frivolous, loosens up her mouth corners for a second; while as for some of the other self-startin' queens—well, they had me rosy in the ears, all right. I hurries past to where Mr. Piddie is tryin' to make ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... church: during Gottesdienst (Divine service) he used to stand sentinel at the church door, wearing a white armlet with black stripes and a silver tassel, leaning on a cane with a curved handle. By trade he was an undertaker. His name was Sami Witschi. He was very tall and thin, with a slight stoop, and he had the clean-shaven solemn face of an old peasant. He was very pious and knew better than any one all the tittle-tattle of the parish. Babi and Sami were thinking of getting married: they appreciated ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... over them, and about three miles from town, I understand that old Doc Mason has been kept pretty busy since midnight sewing up their heads. Lyman didn't tell me, but I got it pretty straight that somebody stole the pistol out of his room; and if it hadn't been for that the undertaker would have had no cause to complain of the dullness ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... pork; to give intelligence to the undertaker of a funeral; metaphor borrowed from the raven, whose note sounds like the word pork. Ravens are said to ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... the jotting, "I lodged with the cheeriest little undertaker in the world, who had a capital low-class practice. His wife, four children, and whoever happened to be the lodger, were all pressed into the merry service. We sang Funiculi funicula as we drove in the nails. When I make coffins ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... practice as a wake, and the merry-making about the corpse, carry us back to the twilight of the world, with the poor savage in his bewildered misery, pretending that his dead still lived. Our funeral with its black trappings and its elaborate ceremonies is the lineal descendant of a merry-making. Our undertaker is, by evolution, a genial master of ceremonies, keeping things lively at the death-dance. Thus have the ceremonies and the trappings of death been transformed in the course of ages till the forced gaiety is gone, and the ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... the opera of The Inca, and that heart-breaking episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... is so absurd for the old man to have left instructions for all this meretricious romance to surround his end. As for old Girtle, he seems to delight in it, and goes about the house rubbing his hands like an undertaker." ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... a deal of gin that the Mullhollands had a liking for. I was continually going for it, and the Mullhollands were continually drinking it; and the whole neighborhood liked it, and in 'Nightmare's Alley' the undertaker found a profitable business. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... Freddy, musing; "you wouldn't like a very little pony, with only one eye and a rat-tail, I suppose—it might look absurd with your long legs, I'm afraid—or else Mrs. Meek, the undertaker's widow, has got a very quiet one that poor Meek used to ride—a child could manage it:—there's the butcher's fat mare, but she won't stir a step without the basket on her back, and it would be so troublesome for you to carry that all the way. ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... way. These old patriarchs and prophets have got ages the start of you; they know more in two minutes than you know in a year. Did you ever try to have a sociable improving-time discussing winds, and currents and variations of compass with an undertaker?" ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain
... trade-notices is visible all the time. You see it in the newspapers and in the shops. I found a children's millinery shop in New York with this laconic indication of its scope, in permanent letters, on the plate- glass window: "Lids for Kids." A New York undertaker, I am told, has affixed to all his hearses the too legible legend: "You may linger, but I'll get ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... whose large family was always reducing itself by the most surprising feats in infant mortality. She helped in the house. She earned her keep by doing little things for the dying babies, and interviewing the undertaker and bargaining for special terms, seeing what a good customer her sister was, when those poor babies were dead. But that great source of crisis in the households of the poor—the mother-in-law—came to live in the Herodian household, and Emma Jane had such a ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Lord Stevenage, the one that was engaged to a notorious baby-snatcher, Lady Tonbridge—in a high fever he'd unfortunately said "Yes"—meets her, and you guess the rest. No, you don't. You couldn't possibly guess Mrs. Badger, relict of an undertaker and now in the old-clothes line, who has social ambitions. (I must here say in parenthesis that Mrs. Badger is a double stroke of genius on the part both of Miss JENNINGS the author and of Miss SYDNEY FAIRBROTHER. You don't know which to admire most, the things she says [Miss J.] or the way ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... has been sick for the last six weeks has been waiting for him to come home—and I don't blame them. When that over-harbour doctor married the undertaker's daughter at Lowbridge people felt suspicious of him. It didn't look well. You and the doctor must come down soon and tell us all about your trip. I suppose you've ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... upon the dead with awe and wonder and terror. Constantly meeting it and seeing it and procuring it will doubtless make it more commonplace. To the seasoned soldier in the army it means less than it did before he became a soldier. Probably the undertaker thinks less of death than almost any other man. He is so accustomed to it that his mind must involuntarily turn from its horror to a contemplation of how much he makes out of the burial. If the civilized savages have their way ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... hour Mr. Wallace arrived; Diotti told the story of the night. After the undertaker had taken charge of the body he found on the dead man's neck, just to the left of the chin, a dullish, black bruise which might have been caused by the pressing of some blunt instrument, or by a man's thumb. Considering it of much importance, he notified the ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... a sort of convent and monastery mixed," replied the witch. "I am connected with it officially. I undertook to manage it, yet I forget what the proper word for me is. Not undertaker, is it?" ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... Silius! Silius!" The original motive of this cry—which has its modern parallel in the case of a dead Pope—was to make sure that the man was actually dead and beyond reply. This point made certain, the professional undertaker is called in and instructed to take charge of all the proceedings usual in such cases. It is he who will provide the persons who are to wash and anoint the body and lay it in state, and also, on the day of the procession, the musicians, the wailing-women, the builders ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... was not only voted an entire success by the villagers, but the seal of professional approval was set upon it by an undertaker from Saco, who declared that Mrs. Tarbox could make a handsome living in the funeral line anywhere. Providence, who always assists those who assist themselves, decreed that the niece Lyddy Ann should not arrive until the aunt ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... are held at the house the relatives and intimate friends are invited into the back parlor, dining room, or upstairs, and make their appearance only when the services begin. The undertaker attends to seating people, ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... of twenty nodded, felt to see if he had a revolver in his pocket, and pointed at an undertaker's wagon standing in front of one of a row of ...
— The Bradys Beyond Their Depth - The Great Swamp Mystery • Anonymous
... assurance that they would respect one bearing the Stars and Stripes. The urgency of the matter being explained to him, however, he reluctantly issued the necessary laisser-passer, though intimating quite plainly that our mission would probably end in providing "more work for the undertaker, another little job for the casket-maker," and that he washed his hands of all responsibility for our fate. But by two American flags mounted on the windshield, and the explanatory legends "Service Consulaire des Etats-Unis d'Amerique" and "Amerikanischer Consular ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... merely because the consequences had been lifted from his shoulders. If he had failed once to provide for his little friend, there should never be any trouble on that score again. So he made it all sure and definite now, by the legal-sounding paper he drew up; and Henry Bloom, the undertaker on the next block, who was also a notary public, came in and certified the signature. And he too declined his fee for his trouble, to the wealthy young ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... we sat round the fire; we managed to bottle the scorpions, but though we wounded the snake it escaped; I was very anxious to methylate him also, but it appeared he had other ideas, and I should not be at all surprised if a pressing interview with his undertaker was one ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... unsolved when I stepped out of the train on my return from the City. To gain time for reflection I resolved to make a detour. As I struck into an unfamiliar side street, I looked up, and there in front of me stood an undertaker's shop. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... who was high and narrow in build—shaped something like a lath, with a face something like an undertaker's—sang at length. First a doleful ditty ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... "the Doctor") sets in. Gentle at first, by noon it is rushing and roaring through the town in a perfect gale, to drop and die away entirely by 4 p.m. By a most convenient arrangement, the land breeze, disagreeably known as "the Undertaker," drops down from the Liguanea Mountains on to the sweltering town about 11 p.m., and continues all through the night. It is this double breeze, from sea by day, from land by night, that renders life in Kingston tolerable. Owing to the sea ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... but he did not have the Tubes to enable him to Spout. When he got up to Talk, it was all he could do to hear himself. The Juries used to go to sleep on him. He needed a Megaphone. And he had about as much Personal Magnetism as an Undertaker's Assistant. ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... the man who's walled up in green cardboard boxes, and sometimes has the blinds down, and sometimes sits so solemn staring like a sphinx, and always there's a look of the sepulchral, something of the undertaker, the coffin, and the dusk about horse and driver? Do tell me—but the doors slammed. We shall never meet ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... he received two thousand and nine hundred and forty pairs of gloves. Of these, though dead men's gloves did not have a very good market, he sold through various salesmen and dealers about six hundred and forty dollars worth. One wonders that he did not "combine" with the undertaker or sexton who furnished the gloves to mourners, and thus do a ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... went out together, parting on the doorstep, and Philip went to a telegraph office in order to send a message to Leonard Upjohn. Then he went to an undertaker whose shop he passed every day on his way to the hospital. His attention had been drawn to it often by the three words in silver lettering on a black cloth, which, with two model coffins, adorned ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... they "shot square" and became American citizens. Rock and Blankovitch had been taken with the men from Diablo Island to the jail at the county-seat. The body of Mascola was still in the custody of the local undertaker and Bandrist had been removed to a hospital. But of the men themselves little was said. An era of universal ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... That old undertaker has joined the throng On the other side of the River, But I'm still unhappy to think I'm a "long," And a tape-line makes ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... bestrides him, And the pretty daughter rides him, And I meet him oft o' mornings on the Course; And there kindles in my bosom An emotion chill and gruesome As I canter past the Undertaker's Horse. ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... his office in Shoe Lane. He contrived for a time to elude their vigilance; and in order to prevent the seizure of his paper, he resorted to an expedient which was equally ingenious and laughable. Close by his little shop in Shoe Lane there was an undertaker, whose business, as might be inferred from the neighbourhood, as well as from his personal appearance and the homeliness of his shop, was exclusively among the lower and poorer classes of the community. With him Mr. Cleave ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... live a little longer, understand? And don't let me see you make a move toward your hip or your friends will be asked to identify you at the morgue to-morrow morning. When I'm bad, I'm called the Undertaker's Friend, so I am, and I'm that bad to-night that I'm scared of myself. They'll have to revise the census returns before I'm done with this place. Come on, now, I'm getting tired waiting. I come to ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
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