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Mortuary   Listen
noun
Mortuary  n.  (pl. mortuaries)  
1.
A sort of ecclesiastical heriot, a customary gift claimed by, and due to, the minister of a parish on the death of a parishioner. It seems to have been originally a voluntary bequest or donation, intended to make amends for any failure in the payment of tithes of which the deceased had been guilty.
2.
A burial place; a place for the dead.
3.
A place for the reception of the dead before burial; a deadhouse; a morgue.
4.
A funeral home.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mortuary" Quotes from Famous Books



... bishop, being concerned that many were being interred in unconsecrated ground, purchased three acres of land in West Smithfield outside the city boundaries, known as "no man's land," and consecrated it for purposes of burial, and erected also a mortuary chapel. The whole he called Pardon Churchyard and Chapel. It was situated adjoining the north wall of the garden of the monastery, and extended from St. John Street to Goswell Street. In 1349 additional ground was required, and Sir Walter de Manny bought thirteen acres and a rood ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... do honour in his pages to each of his lieutenants as they drop out of the ranks, recognising misfortune and death—both "devil's inventions," as Ruskin calls them—as toll-gates on the path of life, with sorrow as the tax; so that these more solemn articles and mortuary elegies seem to mark the way, like milestones set by loving hands. To Evans one of these was raised, and we read in it that "they who inscribe these lines to his memory will never lament a more kind, more genial, or more ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... the covering of a species of well, down which, with some quakings for the safety of limbs and body, our adventurer was persuaded to follow his guides, and they reached, at the end of a long flight of steps, an immense mortuary chamber. There, on a bed of cocoa-nut fibre, he found his patient, from whose mummified and hideous appearance he at once concluded that she was entirely given over to Satan and had long been a lost soul. As spiritually, so also physically, she was past all human ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... son," she murmured amid her sobs as she stood beneath the mortuary canopy; "there lies your happiness and mine. May it please God that our hopes may not also have expired with him who was but a few short hours ago the glory and the greatness of his kingdom! The sturdy tree has fallen, and the saplings are still weak and frail. The mission of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... of the head and the fulness of the hair about the ears. The bust was by Gerard Johnson or Janssen, who was a Dutch stonemason or tombmaker settled in Southwark. It was set up in the church before 1623, and is a rudely carved specimen of mortuary sculpture. There are marks about the forehead and ears which suggest that the face was fashioned from a death mask, but the workmanship is at all points clumsy. The round face and eyes present a heavy, unintellectual expression. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... With these mortuary evidences also are found domestic implements, stone clubs, arrow points and, particularly valuable, prayer sticks and religious implements that clearly show the archaeologist a connection with the pueblo-dwelling peoples who still live, under similar communal ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock

... than that? No collection of salient facts (without reduction to tabular form) could be more succinctly stated than is done in the first stanza by the surviving relatives, and no more concise and comprehensive program of farewells, post-mortuary general orders, etc., could be framed in any form than is done in verse by deceased in the last stanza. These things insensibly make us wiser and tenderer, and better. ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain

... look with abhorrence on the Chinese crime of infanticide, and to believe that the statements of travellers and missionaries are incredible; but a careful examination of the mortuary tables of London, Paris, New York, Dublin, Moscow, and other cities, will show that infanticide is far more common than supposed. It is a crime easily hidden and hard to trace. Take the foundling hospitals as a guide to some approximate estimate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... but it was beyond his means; so he determined to get rid of them. He threw them into the canal; but had to fish them out again, as the bargemen complained. They said it made them feel quite faint. And, after that, he took them one dark night and left them in the parish mortuary. But the coroner discovered them, and made a ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome

... the mortuary of the asylum, with all speed, and the relatives of the poor man telegraphed for, and when Dr. Shielding returned home he found that his wife had insisted upon keeping Mollie and Millicent as their guests until Jack's return, to which arrangement ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... replied. "He was stabbed by some one who stole in through the bathroom—they say that he couldn't ever have moved again. The Commissioner of Police is upstairs. The ambulance is round at the back to take him off to the Mortuary." ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the hospital next day I was served with a notice to assist at the post-mortem of the unfortunate Lane, whose body was lying in the Shadwell mortuary; and that same afternoon I met by appointment Doctor Tatham, of the London Hospital, who, as is well known, is an ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux

... burning question in Scotland, and about Annie's time the flames raged with peculiar ferocity. Her father, Sir Robert Laurie, was a bitter enemy of the Covenantry, and his name finds a somewhat unenviable fame in mortuary verses of ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell

... clandestine exercises of spiritual jurisdiction by Roman Catholic priests, and actually appear to have kept private prisons of their own. They exacted tithes from Roman Catholics of everything titheable. The eels of the rivers and lakes, the fishes of the sea paid them toll. The dead furnished the mortuary fees to the 'alien church' in the shape of the best clothes which the wardrobe of the defunct afforded. The government of Wentworth, better known as the Earl of Strafford, is highly praised by high churchmen and admirers of Laud, but was execrated ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... internally a small chamber generally decorated with sculptures. The walls slope at an angle of seventy-five or eighty degrees externally, but in the interior are perpendicular. The roof is composed of large flat stones. Strictly speaking, the chambers are not actual tombs, but mortuary chapels. The embalmed body of the deceased, encased in its wooden coffin (Gen. 1. 26), was not deposited in the chamber, but in an excavation under one of the walls, which was carefully closed up ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... notorious;" and the bones of St. Justus and St. Pastor, the tutelar saints of the university of Alcala. Amid solemn litanies the relics of Fray Diego were laid upon the prince's pillow, and the sudarium, or mortuary cloth, which had covered his face, was ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... he did NOT stand on his head or call out a confederate youth from a closet, as the woman might have expected. To the left was a green baize door, outlined with brass-studded rivets like a cheerful coffin-lid, and bearing the mortuary inscription, "Private." This he pushed open, and entered the Mayor's ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte

... very frequent sight. Chinese custom requires that the remains of the dead be brought back to their native place, no matter how far they may have wandered during life, and as the carriage of a single body would often be expensive, they are generally interred in temporary cemeteries or mortuary villages, until a sufficient number can be got together to form a large convoy. Mandarins, however, in death as in life, travel alone and with retinue. One coffin we met which rested upon poles supported on the shoulders of thirty-two men. Above ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... thoroughly practised the piece, to walk round me in a circle playing all the while. Several of those who witnessed the procession from their windows assured me that the effect of the procession was indescribably and sublimely solemn. After we had placed the coffin in the little mortuary chapel of the Catholic cemetery in Friedrichstadt, where Madame Devrient met it with a wreath of flowers, we performed, on the following morning, the solemn ceremony of lowering it into the vault. Herr Hofrat Schulz ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... for the fact on the theory that the surgeon wished to prevent any one from finding his visitor lest the secret should be divulged. He was not a nervous man, and had no especial horror of being left alone in a mortuary chamber for a few minutes. He looked about him, and saw that the room was high and vaulted. One window alone gave air, and this was ten feet from the floor and heavily ironed. He reflected with a ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford

... extremis; in the jaws of death, in the agony of death; going off; aux abois [Fr.]; one one's last legs, on one's death bed; at the point of death, at death's door, at the last gasp; near one's end, given over, booked; with one foot in the grave, tottering on the brink of the grave. stillborn; mortuary; deadly &c (killing) 361. Adv. post obit, post mortem [Lat.]. Phr. life ebbs, life fails, life hangs by a thread; one's days are numbered, one's hour is come, one's race is run, one's doom is sealed; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... XVIII. seemed to the people a mortuary triumph of Royalty over the Revolution and the Empire. The profanations of 1793 were expiated. Napoleon was left with the willow of Saint Helena; the descendant of Saint Louis and of Louis XIV. had the basilica of his ancestors as a place of sepulture, and the links of time's chain ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... in the affirmative, I felt my mortified vanity a little consoled, and pitying the poor man's distress, which appeared to be considerable, promised to supply him. The waggon has accordingly gone this day to Northampton loaded in part with my effusions in the mortuary style. A fig for poets who write epitaphs upon individuals! I have written one that serves two ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... to Shiba Park. Until 1887 this formed the grounds of a great Buddhist temple, and here are still preserved the mortuary temples of several Tokugawa Shoguns, Ieyasu, the founder of that dynasty, having chosen it as the temple where the funeral tablets of himself and of his descendants should be enshrined. There are several temples in the park, and they rank ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... ever; I had feared his strongly religious nature would lead him to see a "judgment" upon him and her for having exaggerated her indisposition to gain a political point. And I had mapped out what I would say to induce him to go on. Instead, after a few of those stereotyped mortuary sentences, he shifted to politics and was presently showing me that her death had hardly interrupted his plannings for the presidential nomination. As for the "judgment," I had forgotten that in his religion his deity was always ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... naturally the moral of Mrs Mallow's question: if their wealth was to be assumed, it was clear, from the nature of their admiration, as well as from mysterious hints thrown out (they were a little odd!) as to other possibilities of the same mortuary sort, what their further patronage might be; and not less evident that should the Master become at all known in those climes nothing would be more inevitable than a run of Canadian custom. Peter had been present before at runs of custom, colonial and domestic—present ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.

... mortuary discourses, solemnized 21 hymeneal ceremonies, delivered 17 lectures, of which 16 were on secular and all the rest on religious subjects; made 39 addresses, of which all but 27 were on matters most nearly touching the vital religious concerns of ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous

... to the worms of the earth. A second-hand book-shop always reminds me of a Necropolis. It is a kind of Serapeum where lies buried the kings and princes with the helots and underlings of literature. Ay, every book is a mortuary chamber containing the remains of some poor literary wretch, or some mighty genius.... A book is a friend, my brothers, and when it ceases to entertain or instruct or inspire, it is dead. And would you sell a ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... It was the mortuary ground of these Indians that occupied the only level spot we could get for the block-house. Their dead were buried in canoes, which rested in the crotches of forked sticks a few feet above-ground. The graveyard was not large, containing probably from forty to fifty canoes in a fair state ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan

... hours of his fight with the Gorilla, Dam found himself on sentry-go over what was known in the Regiment as "the Dead 'Ole"—which was the mortuary, situated in a lonely, isolated spot beyond a nullah some half-furlong from the Hospital, and cut off from view of human habitation by a belt ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... Father and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or mortuary or memorial laureate ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... considered this to be the noblest bit of mortuary verse ever written; but since reading the article in the Sydney paper I have changed my opinion, and now think it poor. Bonaparte, however, was a great subject, and even the most unintelligent mortuary verse-maker could not fail to achieve distinction when the Longwood visitors' ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke

... cannot resist giving it the mortuary of capital letters) had been, as my readers know, that I should be exclusively and consecutively dedicated through the whole of my life, 'to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised service of the Lord'. That had been the aspiration of my Mother, and at her death she had bequeathed ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... emotion of the visitor would probably match it for frankness. This fact alone forbade further attention, though during the time he stayed he remained vaguely conscious of his neighbour, a middle-aged man apparently, in mourning, whose bowed back, among the clustered monuments and mortuary yews, was constantly presented. Marcher's theory that these were elements in contact with which he himself revived, had suffered, on this occasion, it may be granted, a marked, an excessive check. The autumn day was ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James

... called back one must go to some priest— Buddhist or Shinto—who knows the rite of incantation. And the mortuary tablet, or ihai, of the dead must be ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... omnibus came plunging through the fog, scattering the filth of the road on the hurrying pleasure-goers, and stopped at the corner to add to its grievous load of damp humanity. Those already in the darkened interior sat stiffly motionless, like corpses in a mortuary wagon, as the new-comers scrambled in, scattering mud and water over them, feeling for the overhead straps. Colwyn did not attempt to enter. Even a Smithfield tram-car would be better than the interior of a ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees

... forth shuddering, home-bound citizens, nerved by the tankards within to their fearsome journey adown that eldrich avenue lined with the bloodstained weapons of the fighting dead. What street could live inclosed by these mortuary relics, and trod by these spectral citizens in whose sunken hearts scarce one good ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... to grudge him. It was long after dark when his bed was ready, and by the light of a couple of lanterns we laid him down in the great rest. The graveyard and the funeral had few of those accessories of the modern mortuary which are supposed to be the characteristics of civilized sorrow. There was no mute, no crape, no parade—nothing of that imposing array of hat-bands and horses by which man, even' in the face of the mighty mystery, seeks still to glorify the miserable conceits of life; but the silent ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler

... have read the will, and is interested in the mortuary bequest, but, curiously enough, supposes Martin to be older than Thomas. Perhaps this error arose from the testator's desire to settle Natford upon Martin. This does not seem to have been so settled. Martin had his five marks, married an heiress, Margery East, settled ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes

... morning, Madame Jules, after lying in a mortuary chapel at the door of her house, was taken to Saint-Roch. The church was hung with black throughout. The sort of luxury thus displayed had drawn a crowd; for in Paris all things are sights, even true grief. There are people who stand at their windows to see how a son deplores ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... Alcock, LL.D., Master of the Rolls. Bishop of Rochester; afterwards of Worcester; translated to Ely. Founder of Jesus College, Cambridge. Bishop Alcock built the elaborate mortuary chapel in which his remains lie buried, and much of the Episcopal Palace ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous

... laid out in vineyards hedged by the prickly cactus, or lightly sprinkled with myrtles and cystus, and all those odoriferous plants which now perfumed the balmy night air. Embowered in these, we had remarked some mortuary chapels, the burying-places of Ajaccian families. One of them, high up on the hill-side, was in the form of a Grecian temple; and we now passed another, standing among cypresses, close to the shore. Nearer the city, two stone pillars stand at the entrance of an avenue leading ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... the supply. In Russia several attempts to gain an anatomy act have been made, but have always been opposed by those in authority, and there is good reason to believe that bodies are procured by bribing hospital and mortuary attendants. It is said that the army contributes a large percentage of the total number. In Turkey no facilities for dissecting the dead body exist, as the practice is against the Mahommedan religion; the German pathologists in Turkey, however, insist on making ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... replaced the weapon—with its mortuary statistics—doffed the broad-brimmed hat with its snake-skin garniture, and placed a forefinger athwart an area of his shining scalp which is said by a certain pseudoscience to shield several of man's more spiritual ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... San Francisco water rat thug and "Barbary Coast" pirate might flout a policeman, but he discovered that he could not disobey a man who wears Uncle Sam's uniform without imminent risk of being counted in that abstract mortuary list usually designated ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... said Polke. "He'll have to be taken down to the town mortuary. We'd better see to it at once. What are you going to do, Starmidge?" he asked, as the detective ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher

... in thy possessing Are better than the bishop's blessing:— A wife that makes conserves; a steed That carries double when there's need: October store, and best Virginia, Tithe-pig, and mortuary guinea: Gazettes sent gratis down, and frank'd, For which thy patron's weekly thank'd: A large Concordance, bound long since: Sermons to Charles the First, when prince: A Chronicle of ancient standing; A Chrysostom to smooth thy band in: The Polyglot—three parts—my text, Howbeit—likewise—now ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... of net, with an inner one of the bark of the papyrus tree enveloping the corpse. According to the singular practice of uncivilised peoples of providing for the wants of those who have nothing more to do with earthly things, some weapons were deposited with the deceased in this novel kind of mortuary habitation, and a little beyond was a rill ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... chiefly employed at this date for mortuary purposes, he has less opportunity of being indefinite, since there were but three notabilities, Scheemakers, Rysbrack, and Roubillac,—all foreigners. Of these Scheemakers, whom Chesterfield regarded as a mere stone-cutter, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson

... by now almost completely automated box-making and gravedigging, with some interesting assembly lines and packaging arrangements; there still remained the jobs of management and distribution. The President of General Mortuary, an ebullient fellow affectionately called Sarcophagus Sam, put it well. "As long as I have a single prospective customer, and a single Stockholder," he said, mangling a stogie and beetling his brows at the one reporter who'd showed up for the press conference, "I'll try ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)

... a third mortuary, if it may so be called, and here Maqueda pointed out the skeleton of a man, in front of which stood a tray piled up with what evidently had been the medicine bottles of the period and among them a ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard

... enough to keep his eyes shut while she, on her knees beside him, slopped water on his forehead and begged him to speak to her, and told him her heart was broken and she desired to die and repose in mortuary simplicity beside ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers

... just who you are," said Fall, calmly, "but why you should come here under the impression that the late Mr. Farrington is an inmate of this establishment I do not understand. We are a lunatic asylum, not a mortuary," he ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace

... however, they really had outstripped the train, but it had been Cleek's pleasure to make two calls on the way, one at Saxmundham, where the paralysed Murple lay in the infirmary of the local practitioner, the other at the mortuary where the body of Tolliver was retained, awaiting the sitting of the coroner. Both the dead and the still living man Cleek had subjected to a critical personal examination, but whether either furnished ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew

... Square. It is very creditable to the Republican Party that they exercised such control over their feelings when the day for unveiling the LINCOLN Monument arrived. Some parties might have made a demonstration on the occasion of post-mortuary honors being accorded to a leader whom they professed to worship while he lived, and whom they demi-deified after his death. No such extravagant folly can be laid at the door of the Republican Party. "Let bygones be bygones" is their motto. They allowed their ...
— Punchinello Vol. 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870 • Various

... crags; and thus, much sooner than we had anticipated, we found ourselves stopping at the Post in Taufers. Rather Sand in Taufers, the single appellation being used chiefly for the parent church, which, with a mortuary chapel and a house for the "young and sick," stands apart. Sand and Moritz, two prosperous villages, cluster with this group of buildings at the head of the valley, gathering like fiefs at the foot of the fine old castle, still one of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... sewerage is shamefully defective. Indeed, in the older parts of the town, the surface gutters receive and convey all the accumulated filth, so that the atmosphere is most unfavorably influenced. The published mortuary statistics have been unfairly given, as the mortality is larger in percentage than in any other part of Spain, which, as a rule, is far from possessing a healthy climate. We doubt if physicians any longer advise their patients to resort thither, certainly they ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... the mortuary, of course," said she, in answer to Reginald's question. "Where else do ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... by a missionary society in West Haven to contribute to a fund for the widows in India, to induce them not to mount their husbands' funeral pyres and permit themselves to be consumed by mortuary flames, ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes

... this he would not go. In a mortuary silence, the colonel, seated beneath a gasalier adorned (the mockery of it!) with a sprig of mistletoe, sipped his half-pint of sherry, and ate his way through three courses of a sufficiently good dinner. But better, says Solomon, is a dinner of ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... with openings are so numerous that it is difficult to make a selection. That known as La Justice, near Beaumont-sur-Oise, consists of a small vestibule and a very long mortuary chamber, separated by a slab pierced with a round opening. We must also mention the megalithic monument of Villers-Saint-Sepulchre at Trie (Oise) (Fig. 70), that of Grand-Mont, with many of those of Morbihan, of which that of Kerlescant has an oval opening; ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... Her heart had just stopped. I saw her, with the long lashes on the cheeks, with the smile about the lips, with the flowers all about her. The stem of a white lily rested in her hand so that the spike of flowers was upon her shoulder. She looked like a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles that were all about her, and the white coifs of the two nuns that knelt at her feet with their faces hidden might have been two swans that were to bear her away to kissing-kindness land, or wherever it is. Leonora showed her to me. She would not ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... exacting as to prevent our lapsing into the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest again. The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in some mediaeval church we cast down our eyes to muse over a fresco of Giotto, and are reminded of the transitoriness of life by the mortuary tablets under our feet. The vast superiority of Bunyan over Spenser lies in the fact that we help make his allegory out of our own experience. Instead of striving to embody abstract passions and temptations, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... of Mgr. de Laval lay in state for three days in the chapel of the seminary, and there was an immense concourse of the people about his mortuary bed, rather to invoke him than to pray for his soul. His countenance remained so beautiful that one would have thought him asleep; that imposing brow so often venerated in the ceremonies of the Church preserved all its majesty. But alas! ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath

... which the facile Venetian Muse shall sing for him. If his child is brought happily through the measles by Dottor Cavasangue, the Nine shall celebrate the fact. If he takes any public honor or scholastic degree, it is equal occasion for verses; and when he dies the mortuary rhyme shall follow him. Indeed, almost every occurrence—a boy's success at school, an advocate's triumphal passage of the perils of examination at Padua, a priest's first mass, a nun's novitiate, a birth, an amputation— is the subject of tuneful ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... Island, the introduction of nuns at Tynemouth, in the reign of Henry VIII, is an anachronism. The nunnery of Holy Island is altogether fictitious. Indeed, St. Cuthbert was unlikely to permit such an establishment; for, notwithstanding his accepting the mortuary gifts above mentioned, and his carrying on a visiting acquaintance with the abbess of Coldingham, he certainly hated the whole female sex; and, in revenge of a slippery trick played to him by an Irish princess, he, after death, inflicted ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... a mortuary discussion of love. Being young, nearly all of them are anxious for, completely puzzled by and rather afraid of it, all at the same time. They wish to draw up one logical code to cover its every variation; they look at it, as it is at present with the surprised displeasure ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet

... this man, whose sallow countenance, close-shaven dark chin, and small, black moustache, combined with I know not what of martial in his air, struck into me a certain indefinable alarm. No sooner had he caught my eye, than he gathered up his reins, just raised his whip, and started the mortuary vehicle at a walk down the road. I followed it with my eyes till a bend in the avenue hid it from my sight. So wrapt up was my spirit in the exercise of the single sense of vision that it was not till the hearse became lost to view that I noticed the entire absence of sound which accompanied ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... this hall, barely lighted by a candle at one end, the mortuary table being behind the post like a horizontal bar, a sort of vast, vague cross resulted from Javert ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... A mortuary chapel has had to be built for this neighbourhood. The rooms of the houses are so crowded that directly a person dies the ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter

... which carries the city's unclaimed corpses away for burial had long ago left, when we arrived. The anxious callers who pass all day through the portals of the mortuary chamber seeking lost friends and relatives had disappeared. Except for the night keeper and one or two assistants, the Morgue was empty save of ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve

... restored out of fragments recovered and pieced together. The piecing has been beautifully done; it is covered with gilt and with brilliant paint; the whole result is most artistic. But the spell of the old mortuary figures is broken, and it will never work again. Meanwhile the monuments are ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... with a groan "at last that seemed to be the general opinion when the poor fellow was taken to the mortuary." ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford

... (H. C. Yarrow, Introduction to the Study of Mortuary Customs among the North American Indians, p. 5 ff.); Egypt (Wilkinson, The Ancient Egyptians, chap. x); see article "Funerailles" in La Grande Encyclopedie. Grant Allen, in The Evolution of the Idea of God, chap. iii, connects the idea of bodily resurrection with the custom of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... Sunday afternoon arrived, Mrs. Sammet's house on One Hundred and Eighteenth 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 ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass

... he is not made for bookkeeping,[3174] for paper and administrative work. Never, like Robespierre and Billaud can he attend to both official and police duties at the same time, carefully reading minute daily reports, annotating mortuary lists, extemporizing ornate abstractions, coolly enunciating falsehoods and acting out the patient, satisfied inquisitor; and especially, he can never become the systematic executioner.—On the one hand, his eyes are not obscured ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... His closest friend, the late Eugene Carriere, warned young sculptors not to study Rodin too curiously. Carriere was wise, but his own art of portraiture was influenced by Rodin; swimming in shadow, his enigmatic heads have a suspicion of the quality of sculpture—Rodin's—not the mortuary art of so much ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... Cremation" (a society which, we are informed by Engineering, whence we take the annexed engravings, has branches in various parts of the world), was held in Dresden. Before this meeting, a large number of designs for cremation and mortuary buildings were brought in competition, and finally the prize was awarded to Mr. G. Lilienthal, a Berlin architect, for the imposing structure ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various

... however, it is full of heavy, mortuary perfumes, for a couple of florist's men have just finished decorating the chancel with flowers and potted palms. Just behind the chancel rail, facing the center aisle, there is a prie-dieu, and to either side of it are ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken

... the Colosseum at Rome, on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by steeds? How one would like to see the curious table-napkins wrought for Heliogabalus, on which were displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; or the mortuary-cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden bees; or the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of Pontus, and were embroidered with 'lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests, rocks, hunters—all, in fact, that painters can ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... In the mortuary belonging to the church lay the little, thin, pale body of baby Thomas Mitchell. Life, though short, had been very hard for him, and he had gone out of it at the first call from his Father in heaven—at the first ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison

... mother would get into her head it might be her dear girl that was lying there alone and unclaimed; and she would pay her fare—if she could afford it—or if not, trudge the distance on foot, creep, trembling, into the mortuary or the public-house where the body lay, blue from drowning, or with the ugly red gash across the throat, take one look, and then cry with a sigh of relief, "No, it ain't my child," and return again to her watching ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... bishop what a splendid gift, in priceless jewels, the dying man intended to offer to the Church. He desired to be buried in the church of St. John at Alexandria by his father's side, and to be prayed for in front of the mortuary chapel of his ancestors in the Necropolis; he had set aside a sum of money, in his will, to pay for the prayers to be offered for his soul. The priests were well pleased to hear this, and they absolved him unconditionally and completely; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the doctor, the clerk carrying the typewriter and the attache case, and Superintendent Galloway departed in the runabout motor-car shortly afterwards. Before evening a mortuary van, with two men, appeared from Heathfield and removed the body of the ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... our misfortune not to see the magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... succeeded in leaving behind him a specially good memory of himself; but the old servitor had not been able to resist, nevertheless, and on hearing of his young master's arrival, he had immediately hastened to the churchyard, had found Misha seated on the ground among the mortuary stones, had begged leave to kiss his hand in memory of old times, and had even melted into tears as he gazed at the rags wherewith the once petted limbs of his nursling were swathed. Misha looked long and in silence ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... and veiled, were present; and half a dozen other young men who had been somewhat intimate with this lost genius. Four torches flickered on the coffin, which was covered with crape. The rector, assisted by one discreet choirboy, said the mortuary mass. Then the body of the suicide was noiselessly carried to a corner of the cemetery, where a black wooden cross, without inscription, was all that indicated its place hereafter to the mother. Athanase lived and died in shadow. No voice was raised ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... with the death rates in all lands that keep mortuary statistics, the actuaries of insurance companies can now estimate with surprising accuracy the probable length of life before any ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun

... them up—" He pointed to the prisoners asleep in their beds. "They will give me away, and I shall be transferred to the cell in the upper floor. I know my way from there. What I want you for is to unscrew the prop in the door of the mortuary." "I can do that. But where ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy

... that if the tomb of a dead man is empty the shade yearns for the world and wanders about in it needlessly. But if we place in a mortuary chapel the clothing, furniture, arms, vessels, utensils, things pleasant during life to the dead man, if the walls are covered with paintings depicting feasts, hunts, divine services, wars, and, in general, events in which the departed took ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... toe-nails were well preserved; the left was a mere bone, wanting tarsus and metatarsus. The stomach was full of dried fragments of herbs (Ohenopodium, &c.), and the epidermis was easily reduced to powder. In this case, as in the other three, the mortuary skins were coarsely sewn with the hair inside: it is a mistake to say that the work was 'like that of ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... they were very rich, and it would not have enlightened her to know that the mother was the widow of a California politician, whom she had married in the sort of middle period following upon her less mortuary survival of Miss Rasmith's father, whose name ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... regain the normal balance of life," declared the victim of the drug; "also, I am no longer a man—I am a fanatical worshipper of cocaine, and only death can part us. Some day soon I shall fall out of her train, the police will find me in the gutter and take the debased body to the mortuary, whence, unclaimed and unknown, it will be carried ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... the unknown girl had been removed to the mortuary for a post-mortem examination, but nothing else had been moved, and two officers of the C.I.D. were busy ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux

... childish, crude, and superstitious; yet some indicate considerable imagination and poetic fancy. They have various deities, and their priests are usually women; their religious traditions are preserved in songs. Their mortuary and mourning customs are described. A chapter is devoted to the institution of slavery among these peoples—its nature and causes, and the value and status of the slave. Their marriage customs are ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various

... The pious Henry VI., who loved the Abbey and often walked here with the Abbot and Prior, no doubt helped as long as he had the power, but the civil wars soon put a stop to his aid. We know that he presented the wrought-iron gates which divide his father's {27} mortuary chapel from the shrine, and the stone screen to the west of the shrine probably belongs to his time. His supplanter, Edward IV., when settled on the throne, granted oaks and lead for the roof, while his wife, and the little son who ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... Amongst these we find St. Duncheadh, Abbot of Clonmacnois, who is said to have been the last Irish saint who raised the dead. St. Aedh (Hugh) died in the year 1004, "after a good life, at Ard-Macha, with great honour and veneration." And in the year 1018, we have the mortuary record of St. Gormgal, of Ardvilean, "the remains of whose humble oratory and cloghan cell are still to be seen on that rocky island, amid the surges of the Atlantic, off the coast ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... Blair's mortuary verse has a certain impressiveness, in its gloomy monotony, not unlike that of Quarles' "Divine Emblems." Like the "Emblems," too, "The Grave," has been kept from oblivion by the art of the illustrator, the well-known ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... six men, who had worked elsewhere at this branch, were turned over to the new department, with Stevens as foreman and Richard as designer. Very shortly Richard had as much as he could do to furnish the patterns required. These consisted mostly of scrolls, wreaths, and mortuary dove-wings for head-stones. Fortunately for Richard he had no genius, but plenty of a kind of talent just abreast with Mr. Slocum's purpose. As the carvers became interested in their work, they began to show Richard the respect ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... Their deities, religious observances, and superstitions are recounted—including the worship of spirits, ancestors, idols, and phenomena of nature—and their ideas of the creation, and of the origin of man. Their mortuary customs include the employment of hired mourners, the embalming of the corpse, the killing of slaves to accompany the soul of the deceased, and a taboo imposing silence. Colin gives an account of their limited form of government (its unit the barangay); ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin

... Vane turned his steps once again towards the beach at Paris Plage. The wreckage in the hospital had been cleared away, and there were rows laid side by side in the mortuary. Over everyone there breathed a sense of restless excitement and fierce anger, and Vane wanted to get away by himself. He felt that ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... least expected, and going away again when, by all tokens, it ought to remain? How is it with ourselves? Do we wait to weigh all the good and evil of our state, to take an accurate account of it pro and con, before we allow ourselves to be glad or sorry? Not many of us, I think. Mortuary tables may demonstrate that half the children born in this country fail to reach the age of twenty years. But what then? Our "expectation of life" is not based upon statistics. The tables may be correct, for aught we know; but they deal with men in general ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey

... god-shelf. There is a curious confusion of Nipponese thought on this subject; at least among the mass of laity. At the Bon-Matsuri the dead revisit the scene of their earthly sojourn for the space of three days; and yet the worship of the ihai, or mortuary tablets, the food offerings with ringing of the bell to call the attention of the resident Spirit is a daily rite at the household Buddhist shrine (Butsudan). When, therefore, the ghost does not conform to these well-regulated ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... name was Ghangir. As they looked at the van being attached to the tail of the train in front of the luggage van, they exchanged a few words. As soon as the arrangements were complete the Persians took their places in the second-class car, which preceded the mortuary van, so as to have the precious ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne

... certain social and economic conditions, and of its products. The second book, consisting also of ten chapters, treats of the religion and superstitions of the Chinese (wherein some peculiar parallels with the Christian religion are drawn), their mortuary and marriage customs, and treatment of the poor and infirm. The third book has twenty-four chapters, wherein are treated, in some detail, many different matters relating to China. These include an historical account ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair

... village on the Tone. Its church (ded. to the Holy Cross) has a massive-looking tower, with an open-work parapet, bearing the initials I.P. It contains sedilia and a piscina, and some carved bench ends. On the S. of the building is a mortuary chapel (14th cent.) of one of the De Vernais (once lords of the manor), which at the restoration of the church in 1857 was given ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... efficacy of funeral rites perhaps explains a fact, otherwise amazing, that no Polynesian seems at all to share our European horror of human bones and mummies. Of the first they made their cherished ornaments; they preserved them in houses or in mortuary caves; and the watchers of royal sepulchres dwelt with their children among the bones of generations. The mummy, even in the making, was as little feared. In the Marquesas, on the extreme coast, it was made by the household with continual unction and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the fact that the present paper will doubtless reach many readers who may not, in consequence of the limited edition, have seen the preliminary volume on mortuary customs, it seems expedient to reproduce in great part the prefatory remarks which served as an introduction to that work; for the reasons then urged, for the immediate study of this subject, still exist, and as time flies on become more and ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow

... C. YARROW was still engaged in preparing the material for the final volume upon the mortuary customs of the North American Indians, in the prosecution of which the large amount of information received and obtained from various sources has been carefully classified and arranged under proper divisions, so that the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... sobbed. 'I always thought that what you derisively termed "mortuary bards" were horrid people, but this old man has a beautiful nature. And he's very wet—and hungry too, I'm sure; and Mary looks at him as if he were a dog. Do try and help him. I think we might get one or two dozen cream and gold cards, and two ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke

... authorities, as well as by officers of the Army and Navy. Municipal Guards lined the entrance of the Palace, and a Guard of Honour, consisting of City firemen in full dress, stood flanking the coffin during the service, which was attended by friends and many residents. The subsequent passage to the mortuary island of San Michele was organized by the City, and when the service had been performed the coffin was carried by firemen to the massive and highly decorated funeral barge, on which it was guarded during the transit by four 'Uscieri' in gala dress, two sergeants ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... F.S.A., local secretary of Berks, writes of the old church at East Shefford, of which Rev. John Prince was rector from 1620 to 1644: "The church where he preached still stands, being used only for a mortuary chapel, a new one for use having been erected near by. The old chapel is a most interesting building of the time of Henry VIII., and considered worthy to be described in full in archaeological works found in the British Museum. It contains a remarkable monument of Sir Thomas Fettiplace ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various

... issue ever resolved in Mariposa before the legal tribunal, which has not added its corpses to the mortuary selections lying in queer assortment ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... will be taken to the mortuary. If you'll leave everything to me, I'll see that you are spared as much as possible. Of course, there'll have to be an inquest—but you'll hear all about that tomorrow. Leave things to us and to Mr. ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher

... there has gradually come into existence the custom of placing the photograph of a dead parent, brother, husband, or child, beside the mortuary tablet kept in the Buddhist household shrine. For this reason, also, the departing soldier wishes to leave at home a good ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn

... the mortuary deposition. You understand, Dantes' relations, if he had any, might have some interest in knowing if he were dead ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... when we were in the sixth form, how, one day, Pouillaud lighted the candles in that idiot Lalubie's cupboard? And how frightened Lalubie was when, before going to his desk, he opened the cupboard to take his books, and found it transformed into a mortuary chapel? Five hundred lines to ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola

... mortuary," said the police officer. "And then you must come into the office and sign," he added to the convoy soldier, who had not left the convict for ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... forces of society tend to hurl them out of existence. We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary, when the dead waggon drove up and five bodies were packed into it. The conversation turned to the "white potion" and "black jack," and I found they were all agreed that the poor person, man or ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... only body I could recognize in the Queenstown mortuary, and perhaps it will interest his many friends in London and New York to know that the famous manager's face in death gives uncommonly convincing evidence that he died without a struggle. It wears ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... sordid room; but he was autocrat. He had already shown his quality in some indirect collisions with the Marquis of Lechford. The Marquis felt that he could not stomach the exposure of his daughter's corpse in a common mortuary with other corpses of he knew not whom. Long experience of the marquisate had taught him to believe that everything could be arranged. He found, however, that this matter could not be arranged. There was no appeal from the ukase of the Coroner. Then he wished to be excused ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... all Italian settlements, is reached after a short ramble, and you enter it with mingled awe and amusement," he continues. "Some of its mosaics, representing martyrs being devoured by flames and evidently enjoying themselves a great deal during this mortuary process, challenge the disrespectful smile. But others are vested with a rude yet sacred poetry, and certain semi-Oriental marble sculptures, adjacent to the altar, would make an infidel feel like crossing himself for the crime of having yielded to a humorous twinge. ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... fifteen shoguns or native rulers who preceded the Mikado in the government of Japan. The first and third shoguns are buried at Nikko, while the fourth, fifth, eighth, ninth, eleventh and thirteenth lie in Uyeno Park, Tokio. These mortuary chapels in Shiba Park are all similar in general design, the only differences being in the lavishness of the decoration. Out of regard for the foreign visitor it is not necessary to remove one's shoes in entering these temples, as cloth covers are provided. ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch

... chief, this must suffice; as for the twelve quack heads, and twelve cane heads, or, consultant, united with the cross bones at the corners, they have a most mortuary appearance, and do indeed convey ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... guiltless of the ardent caress of a paint-brush since time out of mind. On the ground floor the windows were made up of many small square panes, several of which had been rudely mended. Through them the interior glimmered darkly. In the foreground stood a broken bottle, shaped like a mortuary urn and half full of pink liquid. Beside it reposed a broken packing-box in which bleary camphor-balls nestled between torn sheets of faded blue paper. Of these a silent companion in misery stood on the far side of the window: ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance

... from the general desire to die the death of the slain, yet I find little trace of ancestor worship. The dead are feared, their burial place is shunned, their character is deemed perfidious, and relations with them are terminated by a farewell mortuary feast, after which it is expected that they will depart, to ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... were interred in the old military burying-ground, near the present site of the church of St. John the Evangelist, on the corner of Stewart and Portland streets. The old burying-ground is itself a thing of the past; but the child's death is commemorated by a tablet over her father's grave, in the mortuary chapel on the family estate in Devonshire. The inscription runs thus:—"Katharine, born in Upper Canada, 16th Jan, 1793; died and was buried at York Town, in that Province, ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... assented, with great heartiness. But Mrs. Bivins's volubility would hardly wait for this perfunctory indorsement. She talked as she arranged the dishes, and occasionally she would hold a piece of crockery suspended in the air as she emphasised her words. She dropped into a mortuary strain—"Poor pa! I don't never have nuthin' extry an' I don't never see a dish er fried chicken but what pa pops in my mind. A better man hain't never draw'd the breath of life—that they hain't. An' he was thes as gayly as a kitten. When we gals'd have comp'ny to dinner, pore pa he'd ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris

... was that which comes of antiquity—the accumulation of dead years. Its funereal cypresses, its crumbling walls and arches, its clinging ivy and moldering marbles, and a clock that long ago forgot the hours, gave it a mortuary look. In a way it suggested Arnold Bocklin's "Todteninsel," and it might well have served as the allegorical setting for a gateway to the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... patients to look after instead of one nurse like Carlotta Harrison!" she complained. "I've got to go to the trunk-room for her at this hour, and it next door to the mortuary!" ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the delay of years which sometimes elapses between the death of a person and his permanent burial, that the "City of the Dead" exists in Canton. This is not a cemetery, but a collection of nearly a thousand mortuary chapels. The "City of the Dead" is the pleasantest spot in that nightmare city. A place of great open sunlit spaces, and streets of clean white-washed mortuaries, sweet with masses of growing flowers. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... was calmer. To my trembling inquiries he said something consolatory as to the blessed relief of tears. When not praying fervently in the mortuary chamber, he could be seen pacing the gallery in a severe aloofness of meditation. In the evening he took me by the arm, and, without a word, led me up a narrow and winding staircase. He pushed a small ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... columned front, its cracking veneer of stucco, and its surrounding of little vari-colored one story cafes and shops (which are themselves like bits of operatic scenery), does not so much suggest to the imagination a home of modern opera, as a mournful mortuary chapel haunted by the ghosts of old half-forgotten composers: Herold, Spontini, Mehul, Varney; old conductors, long since gone to dust: Prevost, John, Calabresi; old arias of Meyerbeer, Auber, and Donizetti; and above all, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... the hand from him, the others left us. We sat down in the "horsehair" chairs of a well-to-do farmer's parlor—furnished in black walnut, with the usual organ against one wall, and the usual marble-topped bureau against the other. I remember the "store" carpet, the mortuary hair-wreaths on the walls, the walnut-framed lithographs of the Church authorities and of the angel Moroni with "the gold plates;" and none of these seem ludicrous to me to remember. They express, to me, in the recollection, some of the homely and devout simplicity of the people whose ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... cleared in an instant, was turned into a mortuary bed, and the four officers, straight, rigid and sobered up, with the harsh faces of warriors on duty stood near the windows, searching and ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... According to the singular practice of uncivilized people, of providing for the wants of those who have nothing more to do with earthly things, some weapons were deposited with the deceased in this novel kind of mortuary habitation; and a little beyond was ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... The study of the mortuary rites and customs of the primitive peoples of all ages of the world's history (548) reveals many instances of the belief that when men, "the common growth of mother-earth," at last rest their heads upon her lap, they do not wholly die, for the immortality of Earth is theirs. Whether they live again,—as ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... slyly, "when you've had your fill of bugs, make him show you the Book of Obituaries. He thereby stands revealed in his true colors. Why, he made me buy the old Clarion and hire Jim Dabney to run it, so his supply of mortuary gems shouldn't be cut off untimely. To-day he ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... muscles, and that the stomach, besides showing symptoms of alcoholic irritation, emitted a strong odour of chloroform. An inquest was held, and a verdict returned that B. F. Perry had died of congestion of the lungs caused by the inhalation of flame or chloroform. After lying in the mortuary for eleven days ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... preparatory conduct have appeared to show the greatest indifference for death, have not rather betrayed the most curious art to disguise its terrors. Some have invented a mode of escaping from life in the midst of convivial enjoyment. A mortuary preparation of this kind has been recorded of an amiable man, Moncriff, the author of "Histoire des Chats" and "L'Art de Plaire," by his literary friend La Place, who was an actor in, as well as the historian of, the singular narrative. One ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... was scarcely resumed before a mortuary silence fell on the room, and I became aware that somehow my presence impeded ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)

... empty fireplace were candlesticks with dangling crystals that glittered red and yellow and purple in the lamplight, in front of a cracked mirror that seemed a window into another dingier room. The paper was peeling off the damp walls, giving a mortuary smell of mildewed plaster that not even the reek of beer and ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... at Felpham, and his epitaph by Mrs. Opie may be read by the industrious on the wall of the church. Among the many epitaphs on his neighbours by Hayley himself, who had a special knack of mortuary verse, is this on a ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... cares to see at Zermatt is the village church, with the adjoining churchyard. The church, dedicated to Saint Maurice, a favorite saint in the Valais and Rhone district, is plain but interesting and in parts is quite old. Near it is a little mortuary chapel. In most parts of Switzerland, it is the custom, after the bodies of the dead have been buried a certain length of time, to remove the remains to the "charnel house," allowing the graves to be used again and thus not encroaching upon the space reserved and consecrated in the churchyard, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various

... him was Miriam and another of the Johnson circle, and also he had brawn to carve and there was hardly room for the helpful Betsy to pass behind his chair, so that altogether his mind would have been amply distracted from any mortuary broodings, even if a wordy warfare about the education of the modern young woman had not sprung up between Uncle Pentstemon and Mrs. Larkins and threatened for a time, in spite of a word or so in season from Johnson, to wreck all the harmony of ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... Lester's flat," he said. "The poor woman's body is at the mortuary. If you come with us we can reconstruct the crime. It occurred about this very hour if the ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... accordance with German etiquette, the Count's funeral obsequies could not take place for a month, in the presence of all his relatives and friends, who came from a great distance, the corpse, embalmed and placed in a leaden coffin, lay in state under a canopy in the mortuary chapel. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... of my private friends. I wrote him at once to come and join me at Lusance; and while waiting for his arrival I took my hat and cane and made visits to the different churches of the diocese, in several of which I knew there were certain mortuary inscriptions to be found which had never been ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... what they call "consecrated ground." In a large sense Japan is still, what China has always been, a country governed by the graveyard. These cities of the dead are usually kept in attractive order and made beautiful with flowers in memoriam. The study of epitaphs and mortuary architecture, though not without elements bordering on the ludicrous, is ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... China and Korea, but the same respect, though in a somewhat less rigid form, is paid the dead in Japan. Then at last the individual receives that recognition which was denied him in the flesh. In Japan a mortuary tablet is set up to him in the house and duly worshipped; on the continent the ancestors are given a dwelling of their own, and even more devotedly reverenced. But in both places the cult is anything but funereal. For the ancestral tombs are temples and pleasure ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... more work that day, but before going home he went to the doctor's house and the latter dressed the cuts on his head and arms. Philpot's body was taken away on the ambulance to the mortuary. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell



Words linked to "Mortuary" :   funeral, crematory, crematorium, funeral home, funeral-residence, building, death, funeral parlour, funeral chapel, funeral church, morgue



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