"Coffin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... surprise, that the poor little Prince—had fallen ill on the road and died within a few hours; so declared the physician in attendance, and the nurse who had been sent to take care of him. They brought the coffin back in great state, and buried him with ...
— The Little Lame Prince - Rewritten for Young Readers by Margaret Waters • Dinah Maria Mulock
... to have air-holes left in the coffin." But Nancy felt the little girl creep close to her at the grim suggestion, and, with the tact of love, ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Miss Bessie Bryan, the young Philadelphian, was identified to-day as it lay in a coffin by a grave from which it had been exhumed in Grand View Cemetery. "Returning home from a wedding in Pittsburgh with her friend, Miss Paulsen, caught by the flood on the day express, found dead and buried twice," will be the brief record ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... he will have taken your last crust, just as he took my life and squandered my love. You know, my darling, if I loved your father: I die loving him less, for I take precautions against him which I never could have practised while living. Yes, in the depths of my coffin I shall have kept a resource for the day when some terrible misfortune overtakes you. If when that day comes you are reduced to poverty, or if your honor is in question, my child, send for Monsieur de Solis, should he be living,—if not, for his ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... verge of the plain that borders Biala, and within a few paces of the convent gate of St. Francis, the bier stopped. The monks saluted its appearance with a requiem, which they continued to chant till the coffin was lowered into the ground. The earth received its sacred deposit. The anthems ceased; the soldiers, kneeling down, discharged their muskets over it; then, with streaming cheeks, rose and gave place to others. Nine volleys were fired, and the ranks ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... interested and absorbed in their melancholy task to feel either the one or the other, for such an occasion as this had never taken place in all that quiet country-side before. Inside of that hearse, in a snow-white coffin covered with flowers and gayly decorated with cut paper, silver crosses and waxen saints, reposed the mortal remains of Madame Hypolite Levassour, who had died at midnight thirty-six hours previously; and by her side in another coffin, more hastily contrived, lay the body of her well-beloved ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... of white crape and black was hung upon the door of the house, and there it swayed and rustled in the wind and whispered its tidings. At noon the preparation of the dead was finished, and in the coffin lay the fair young form, beautiful, and in the sweet face a great peace. Two mourners sat by it, grieving and worshipping —Hannah and the black woman Tilly. Hester came, and she was trembling, for a great trouble was upon her spirit. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... whole knowledge of the divine truths, which was the object of initiation, was communicated. Here we find, among the various ceremonies which assimilated these rites to Freemasonry, the aphanism, which was the disappearance or death; the pastos, the couch, coffin, or grave; the euresis, or the discovery of the body; and the autopsy, or full sight of everything, that is, the complete communication of the secrets. The candidate was here called an epopt, or eye-witness, ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... ailment passed unpleasant nights then; each night meant a nail in his coffin. Even the constant rain the burghers bore cheerfully, and many a joke was passed along during an interval in the downpour. But in the morning, as we dragged our weary limbs out of our mud-baths, shivering from cold, we did not venture ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... said: "You know well The salt was spilt,—to me it fell; And then to add loss unto loss, The knife and fork were laid across. On Friday evening, 'tis too true, Bounce in my lap a coffin flew. Some dire misfortune it portends: I tremble for ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... joy has the departed, and, perhaps, suffering soul, in the fine music of the choir, even should the choir be composed of the best singers in the country? What consolation does the poor suffering soul find in the superb coffin, in the splendid funeral? What pleasure does the soul derive from the costly marble monument, from all the honors that are so freely lavished on the body? All this may satisfy, or at least seem to satisfy, the living, but it is of no avail ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... flower of the Scottish nobility had fallen in battle, and their king himself, after the most diligent inquiry, could nowhere be found. In searching the field, the English met with a dead body which resembled him, and was arrayed in a similar habit; and they put it in a leaden coffin, and sent it to London. During some time it was kept unburied; because James died under sentence of ex-communication, on account of his confederacy with France, and his opposition to the holy see:[**] but upon Henry's application, who pretended that this prince had, in the instant before ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... thud in his ears of earth falling on a coffin, had made his way down to Ballawhaine. He had never been there before, and he felt confused, but he did not tremble. Half-way up the carriage-drive he passed a sandy-haired youth of his own age, a slim dandy ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... Yu added, "where your mistress, who is so extremely careful, will run through all the money, we've raised! If she can't spend it, why she'll take it along with her in her coffin, and make use ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... hence. He crashes through the tall, dewy grass, his white face set in a look of iron resolution. He is ghastly beyond all telling; dead and in his coffin he will hardly look more death like. He reaches the cottage, and the first sight upon which his eyes rest is his bride, peacefully asleep in the chair by the still open window. She looks lovely in her slumber, and peaceful as a little ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... Knights of the Black Eagle, took place on the 20th. The new Emperor Frederick, who had hurried from San Remo on receiving news of the Emperor's condition, was too ill to join it, but stood behind a closed window of his palace and saluted as the coffin ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... Sunday that Lilias felt as if she could ever be comforted. Her heart was indeed ready to break as she walked at the head of the school children behind the white-covered coffin, and she felt as if she did not deserve to dwell upon the child's present happiness; but afterwards she was relieved by joining in prayer for the pardon of our sins and negligences, and she felt as if she was forgiven, at least ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... papers strongly advocating the use of white troops upon the coast instead of West Indian regiments, when written to by Sir Garnet Wolseley for his advice as to articles of outfit, replied that the only article which he could strongly commend would be that each officer should take out his coffin. ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... there came across the child's mind awful thoughts of death and of the grave. She struggled with them, but they clung with fearful tenacity to her fancy. All she had heard or read of mortality, of the coffin and the mould, came back with a vivid horror. She thought,—what if in a few weeks, a few days, the hand she held should be cold, lifeless; the form, whose faint breathings she listened to, should breathe no more, but be carried from her sight, and shut up in a grave—under a stone? ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... be feared," remarked the doctor, "that if he had a spite against me I should have no peace till he was dead and buried; he would get out of his coffin ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... the pillow so touched it and glorified it that only its goodness and weakness were seen, and the beholders came to wonder how they could ever have felt any dread of aught so calm and peaceful. A day or two passed, and the body was transferred to a massive coffin long regarded as the finest piece of work of its kind ever turned out of the village carpenter's workshop. Then a slow and melancholy cortege headed by four bearers wound its solemn way across the marshes to the family vault in the grey old church, and all that was left of Ursula was placed by the ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... did all we could. 'Twas little; would that Drake had heeded our advice! But I am rejoiced to see you on the road to recovery, dear boy; 'twould have been another nail in my coffin to know that you had lost your life in doing a service for me. I thank God for that, from the bottom ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... Turks, and to traverse during four consecutive years the provinces of Iran. He quits Ispahan in 1621, loses his wife in the month of December of the same year, causes her to be embalmed, and has her coffin carried about in his train for four years longer, which he devotes to exploring Ormuz, the western coasts of India, the Persian Gulf, Aleppo, and Syria, landing at ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... sincerely I trust The Nation no longer will kick up a dust, The Jubilee really has done for me just As "Commodious" scared Mr. Boffin: Any more jubilation would finish me quite, As it is I've a horrible dream every night That a Jubilee demon is screwing me tight Down into a Jubilee coffin! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... contributions. His poetry and philosophy are from ancient Greece and Rome; his geometry from Alexandria; his arithmetic from Arabia, and his religion from Palestine. In his cradle, in his infancy, he rubbed his gums with coral from oriental oceans; and when he dies, he is buried in a coffin made from wood that grew on a foreign soil, and his monument will be sculptured in marble from the quarries of Carrara. A pretty sort of man this, to talk of being ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... whisked in the air above, a shoal of parti-coloured fishes in the scarce denser medium below; between, like Mahomet's coffin, the boat drew away briskly on the surface, and its shadow followed it over the glittering floor of the lagoon. Attwater looked steadily back over his shoulders as he sat; he did not once remove his eyes from the Farallone and the group on ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... that charmed rock, so Torridge boatmen tell, sleeps now the old Norse Viking in his leaden coffin, with all his fairy treasure and his crown of gold; and, as the boy looks at the spot, he fancies, and almost hopes, that the day may come when he shall have to do his duty against the invader as boldly as the men of Devon did then. And ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... upon a rising ground pecking with her beak and tearing up the earth with her talons, when on the sudden it came into his mind, as it were by some divine inspiration, to dig there, and search for the bones of Theseus. There were found in that place a coffin of a man of more than ordinary size, and a brazen spear-head, and a sword lying by it, all which he took aboard his galley and brought with him to Athens. Upon which the Athenians, greatly delighted, went out to meet and receive ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... explanation alone is altogether inadequate and unworthy. There was in Dickens this other kind of energy, horrible, uncanny, barbaric, capable in another age of coarseness, greedy for the emblems of established ugliness, the coffin, the gibbet, the bones, the bloody knife. Dickens liked these things and he was all the more of a man for liking them; especially he was all the more of a boy. We can all recall with pleasure the fact that Miss Petowker (afterwards Mrs. Lillyvick) was in the habit ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... that has died under a month old is (to be) carried to the grave in the arms (not in a coffin), and buried by one woman and two men, but not by one man ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... all-pervading espionage of the slave power I may mention. The newly appointed postmaster of Philadelphia employed, among his numerous clerks and letter-carriers, Joshua Coffin, who, some three years ago, aided in restoring to liberty a free colored citizen of New York, who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. The appointment of the postmaster not being confirmed, he wrote to his friends in Congress to inquire the reason, and was told that the delay ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... Subject to apoplexy, Sommers judged; but his thoughts passed over her as well as Miss M'Gann, who stood with downcast eyes ostentatiously close to Mrs. Preston, and the grave old dentist standing at the foot of the coffin, and the clergyman whose young voice had not lost its thrill of awe in the presence of death. He had no eyes for aught but the woman, who was bound to him by firmer ties than those whose dissolution the clergyman was recording. She stood serene, with head raised ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... mingled. Baby Henry Sewall's funeral procession, for instance, included eight ministers, the governor and magistrates of the county, and two nurses who bore the little body to the grave, into which, half full of water from the raging storm, the rude coffin was lowered. Death was kept before the eyes of every member of the colony; even two-year-old babies learned ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... girl as there was in New Haven if I do do housework, and that's my wedding ring and you put it there, and mother's got the certificate locked up good and safe in her box with my dead baby sister's hair and the silver plate off my father's coffin! ...
— The Girl with the Green Eyes - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... the cripple, as he stood by the wasted form shrouded in grave-clothes, and looked upon it for the last time ere the coffin-lid closed over it. "What would I have been except ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... mourning. As the multitude outside the churchyard caught sight of the pair, a thrill ran through its ranks. Melrose's daughter, and rightful heiress—disinherited, and supplanted—by the black-haired man standing bareheaded behind the coffin. The crowd endured the mockery of the burial service in a sullen silence. Not a head uncovered. Not a voice joined ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... would not allow that. I learned my lesson, or a part of it, while I hung there like Mahomet's coffin; I learned that Gravitation did not trouble itself about superior young men; but I did not learn all that there was to learn; that took the sequel. Well, I hung there, as I say, revolving slowly; centrifugal force, you understand; ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... body of my father, now prepared for the grave; but I have a more vivid recollection of standing with my mother beside an open grave, and hearing our pastor, in a solemn voice, utter the words, "Earth to earth—ashes to ashes—dust to dust." Oh! the falling of that first earth upon my father's coffin, shall I ever forget the sound? Child as I was, it seemed to me that my heart would break; but tears, the first I had shed since my father's death, came to my relief. Those blessed tears. I may well call them blessed, since the physician ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... now brooded like a gentle spirit over the violin, and the music eddied into a mournful tone; another year intervened; a little coffin sat by an empty cradle; the prints of baby fingers were on the window panes; the toys were scattered on the floor; the lullaby was hushed; the sobs and cries, the mirth and mischief, and the tireless little feet were no longer in the way to vex and worry. Sunny curls drooped above eyelids ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... down the still white face of the country, which lay at his feet like a shrouded corpse, the tears had begun to trinkle, though the eyes were tranquil and fast shut; the sight was as astounding to him as if a man six months dead should be seen to stir within his coffin of glass. Here and there in the expanse of forest he could see flashes of green and brown, of tree-tops from which the snow had fallen. The river-banks, which yesterday had seemed chiselled out of solid marble, were to-day ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... mother's death, since the moment when the three young girls had bent over the coffin and strewed flowers over the form they loved, the sisters had not gone near ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... physically incapable of proceeding many steps with their burden, but for the support it received from the two younger men who sustained the feet of the saint, using some dexterity in adapting their strength so that the coffin might ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... little girl. Her mother, sent for me. I stayed until the little angel died. From the time Matt looked on the face of the little one she loved it with all the intensity of a true mother and grieved so when it died. In a few hours I went to the grave-yard With the little coffin. This Will or his father never spoke to me again. He married the other girl. In a few years father and son were both killed. The sister of Will, who also treated me coldly, wrote me a letter and told me to tell Matt it would have been a blessing if he had married ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... and the company again seated themselves, waiting till the coffin should be placed in the hearse, which ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... and, the thing not to mince, He has done naught but copy it ill ever since; His Indians, with proper respect be it said, Are just Natty Bumpo daubed over with red, And his very Long Toms are the same useful Nat, Rigged up in duck pants and a sou'-wester hat, (Though once in a Coffin, a good chance was found To have slipt the old fellow away underground.) All his other men-figures are clothes upon sticks The derniere chemise of a man in a fix, (As a captain besieged, when his ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... pause, "It is not pleasant to be fastened up in a great iron box, doctor. It reminds one of a huge coffin." ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... the Sa Leonite cannot be called a success. Servants in shoals present themselves on board the steamers, begging 'ma'sr' to take them down coast. In vain. The fellow is handier than his southern brother: he can mend a wheel, make a coffin, or cut your hair. Yet none, save the veriest greenhorn, will engage him in any capacity. As regards civility and respectfulness he is far inferior to the emancipado of Cuba or the Brazil; with a superior development of 'sass,' ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... turnkey's daughter begged him to write his name in her album, where a many gentlemen had written it on like occasions! "Bother your album!" says Bulbo. The Undertaker came and measured him for the handsomest coffin which money could buy: even this didn't console Bulbo. The Cook brought him dishes which he once used to like; but he wouldn't touch them: he sat down and began writing an adieu to Angelica, as the clock kept always ticking, and the hands drawing nearer to next morning. ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pretty nearly finished—it lay from east to west—a lot of earth fell out at the northern side, where an old coffin had lain, and good store of brown dust and grimy bones, and the yellow skull itself came tumbling about the sexton's feet. These fossils, after his wont, he lifted decently with the point of his shovel, and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... most fameous outlaw horses. The prizes fer this here contest is: First, a pair of angory chaps, doneated by the directors of the bank about which I have spoke of before. Second prize, a pair of spurs doneated by the Wolf River Tradin' Company. Third prize, a coffin that was ordered by Sam Long's wife from the Valley Outfittin' Company, when Sam had the apendiceetis of the stummick, an' fer which Sam refused to pay fer when he got ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... appointment of Her Britannic Majesty's Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary at Peking to Sir Robert Hart." To say the I.G. was surprised is not to say enough. The offer, coming as it did under such solemn circumstances, made an impression upon him too deep for words. Looking down at the coffin half hidden in flowers, he could not help feeling the vanity of earthly glories. "We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can take nothing out," said the voice of the preacher. The Envoy ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... poisoned negro girl. Though they had often heard of the circumstance of the running in such cases, and had even seen it, they imagined it to be a trick of the corpse-bearers. The mate therefore desired two of the sailors to take up the coffin, and carry it to the grave. The sailors, who were all of the same opinion, readily obeyed; but they had scarcely raised it to their shoulders, before they began to run furiously about, quite unable to direct themselves, till, at last, without intention, ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... me. The roses are, for they remind me of poor Helen, and the first work I did with David was arranging flowers like these for a dead baby's little coffin." ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... lay the tattered gown back; and it seemed to the girls as if the poor lady herself were being laid back in her coffin to ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... walking backwards and gesticulating in the manner of some important, excited official of the Salvation Army; and after this violet robe arrived the scarlet choristers, singing to the beat of his gesture. And then swung into view the coffin, covered with a heavy purple pall, and on the pall a single white cross; and the pall-bearers—great European names that had hurried out of the corners of Europe as at a peremptory mandate— with Duncan Farll to complete ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... alive. Methought I had fallen into seeming death, and my friends had consigned me to the tomb, from which a resurrection was impossible. That, in such a case, my limbs would have been confined to a coffin, and my coffin to a grave, and that I should instantly have been suffocated, did not occur to destroy my supposition. Neither did this supposition overwhelm me with terror or prompt my efforts at deliverance. My state was full of ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... their vessel to us! For, of course, the craft was never seen again, nor did any of her crew come to the surface, although we hove-to for an hour or more, and got our boat out in readiness to pick up any one who might escape from that steel coffin. ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... fear; Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, And all which patient toil had reared, and all, Commune with thee had opened out—but flowers Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave! ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... heart of my tiny soul there began to grow a germ-like conception and reverence for God. With this thought the soul seemed to take unto itself strength to make feeble efforts to tear a way through its coffin of flinty skin and in feeble flight bounded and pounded incessantly on its case of parchment, as a drummer on his drum, with a ceaseless, monotonous, ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... was enough for her that sunny afternoon, and sufficient to her shallow soul, to know that she was safe. She lay warm and restful in her bed while the neighbor women set the house to rights, and the men moved Isom's body into the parlor to wait for the coffin which Sol Greening had gone ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... common gateway, but it has to be managed everywhere but at Charing Cross, no matter what hardship to royalty it involves. Neither has any other station a modern copy of a Queen Eleanor's Cross, but this is doubtless because no other station was the last of these points where her coffin was set down on its way from Lincoln to its final restingplace in Westminster. You cannot altogether regret their lack after you have seen such an original cross as that of Northampton, for though the Victorian piety which ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Evening Post," sought to prevent the writers for that paper from using "over and above (for 'more than'); artiste (for 'artist'); aspirant; authoress; beat (for 'defeat'); bagging (for 'capturing'); balance (for 'remainder'); banquet (for 'dinner' or 'supper'); bogus; casket (for 'coffin'); claimed (for 'asserted'); collided; commence (for 'begin'); compete; cortége (for 'procession'); cotemporary (for 'contemporary'); couple (for 'two'); darky (for 'negro'); day before yesterday (for 'the day before yesterday'); début; decrease (as a verb); democracy (applied to a political ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... for the word, mademoiselle,' said I. 'All the more since there are people who call out to me that it is like a coffin.' ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... since the emanations from the interior of the corpse had decomposed the solution, it was put into a cask made for the purpose, and filled with the same liquid; and it was in this cask that it was carried from Schoenbrunn to Strasburg. In this last place it was taken out of the strange coffin, dried in a net, and wrapped in the Egyptian style; that is, surrounded with bandages, with the face uncovered. M. Larrey and M. de Gassicourt confided this honorable task to M. Fortin, a young chemist ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... in order of importance among the Chinese shopkeepers, come the coffin makers, and they are very important men indeed, in a country where the worship of ancestors is carried to a degree unknown elsewhere in the world. Their coffins are of all sizes and degrees of finish, but of one invariable shape. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of the song heralding the flight of a child-spirit to a better world. La Tulita slipped out of the back door and went to her home without meeting the procession. But before she shut herself in her room she awakened Ana, and giving her a purse of gold, bade her buy a little coffin draped with white and garlanded with ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... I'd rather take you to her in your coffin. She's never known you, never seen what most of us have seen, that all you have—or nearly all—is your lovely looks and what they call a kind heart. There's only you two in your family, and she's got ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... only be the world's amanuensis. The proverbial expression which last evening the clown dropped as he trudged homeward to supper, the light of the setting sun on his face, expands before me to a dozen pages. The coffin of the pauper, which to-day I saw carried carelessly along, is as good a subject as the funeral procession of an emperor. Craped drum and banner add nothing to death; penury and disrespect take nothing away. Incontinently my thought moves like a slow-paced ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... coffin be ordered, and pray for my soul. I have just now signed my own death-sentence. See, there it lies. I have signed the decree abolishing the order of the Jesuits! I must therefore die, Lorenzo. It is all over and past with our shady place and our recreations. My murderers are already prowling around ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... women has 'em laid by. Same's some fool-men has a coffin built an' kep' handy. As for me, I'm goin' to worry 'bout things only up till the day o' my death, an' not a minute beyond. But, I was tellin' of Verplanck Sturtevant, an' must finish the job. Squire, he had always given the cold shoulder to Jim, an' despised ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... from the icy summits. You shall enter, with pilgrim feet, the gates of proud capitals, where puissant kings once reigned, but have passed away, and have left no memorial on earth, save a handful of dust in a stone-coffin, or a half-legible name on some mouldering arch. The solemn and stirring voice of Monte Viso, speaking from the midst of the Cottian Alps, will call you from afar to the martyr-land of Europe. You shall worship ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... will never be safe until he is in his coffin with a lily in his hand. He was considerably jolted, but he managed a fourth crime in the next five minutes. He licked the traffic cop rather thoroughly—I suppose because his onslaught was wholly unexpected—kicked an expostulating minister in the pit of the stomach, and was profanely volunteering ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... about 'such horrible and shameful incidents.' But on examination it proves that eight out of the eleven cases have nothing sexual or, indeed, in many of them, anything criminal in their character. One is, that a coffin was dug up to see if there were arms in it. On this occasion the search was a failure, though it has before now been a success. Another was that the bed of a sick woman was searched—without any suggestion of indelicacy. Two others, that ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the room, on a table, lay the coffin, with wax candles burning all round it on tall silver candelabra. In the further corner sat the chanter, reading the Psalms in a low, monotonous voice. I stopped at the door and tried to look, but my eyes were so weak with crying, and my nerves so terribly on edge, that I could ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... is the same, and the mercury stood at six and one-half below zero at seven o'clock, and now at ten A.M. is not above zero. The Coffin School dismissed its scholars. Miss F. suffered much from the exposure ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... offer of a treat lured them to the tavern, where they soon became too drunk to guard the character of Washington. It was a beautiful day, and these disturbing spirits being removed, the impressive ceremony proceeded in solemn silence. {644} The coffin was in good preservation, and contained all the bones, with a small quantity of dust. The roots of the peach-tree had entirely interwoven the skull with their fine network. His hair, so much praised for its uncommon beauty, was tied, on the day of his execution, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... in her. She wanted none of that beast's pity. She responded to the strange sense of discipline before fate that makes a man walk soldierly to the electric chair; inspires a caught spy to stand placidly before his own coffin and face the firing-squad; led Joan of Arc after one panic of terror to wait serene among the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... which still retarded this important discovery were successively removed by new visions; and the ground was opened by the bishop, in the presence of an innumerable multitude. The coffins of Gamaliel, of his son, and of his friend, were found in regular order; but when the fourth coffin, which contained the remains of Stephen, was shown to the light, the earth trembled, and an odor, such as that of paradise, was smelt, which instantly cured the various diseases of seventy-three of the assistants. The companions of Stephen were left in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the Painesville hearse drove up, accompanied by the four young pall-bearers, of the Painesville Bar, who attended the remains of their young brother. The coffin was deposited in the little parlor, and the carriages drove to Parker's ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... uninjured; nothing was found but a table and one stove; all gone. Books, papers, clothes, everything; but there in the blackened ruin lay distinctly the charred frame of little Robbie. Mr. Thorn went for Dr. Holden and a coffin, and the remains were brought to Mr. Elliott. Dear little fellow, he was the most prepared of any of the little ones to go. This is such a ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... and patron saint of Florence) restoring a dead child to life; the other the Funeral Procession of the Saint passing the Baptistery, where an elm tree, which had been withered, put forth fresh leaves as the coffin of the bishop touched it. A marble column, with a bronze tree in relief on it, stands on the spot as a memorial of this miracle. In these two works Ridolfo Ghirlandajo proved the power which was in him, but they are the culmination of his art; he never surpassed, or indeed equalled them again. His ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... I thank ye, death, and bless thy power, That I have passed the guard, and 'scaped the Tower! And now my pardon is my epitaph, And a small coffin my poor carcass hath; For at thy charge both soul and body were Enlarged at last, secur'd from hope and fear. That amongst saints, this amongst kings is laid; And what my birth did claim, my death ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... for my body to lie in this floating coffin, which was scrupulously clean, white with the whiteness of new deal boards. I was well sheltered from the rain, that fell pattering on my lid, and thus I started for the town, lying in this box, flat on my stomach, rocked by one wave, roughly shaken by another, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... plans of attack, and the venture was being bungled. Sick of the equatorial fever, or of chagrin from failure, Drake died off Porto Bello in the fifty-first year of his age. His body {167} was placed in a leaden coffin, and solemnly committed to that sea where he had ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Mr. Coffin's writings are full of reliable historical information, interestingly told. This, the first of a series, takes us from the discovery of San Salvador to the surrender of Montreal to General Amherst, in 1760. There are maps ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... forgotten, however, his duty to the saints. As soon as the fire had broken out, he had sent to the cathedral, whence he had caused the body of Saint Quentin to be removed and placed in the royal tent. Here an altar, was arranged, upon one side of which was placed the coffin of that holy personage, and upon the other the head of the "glorious Saint Gregory" (whoever that glorious individual may have been in life), together with many other relics brought from the church. Within the sacred enclosure many masses were said daily, while all ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... thi shroud an thi coffin, Ligging alone in this poor wretched room; Just thi white hands crossed ower thi bosom, Waiting for t'angels to ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... by a tributary wind. When there is a mystery, and you cannot fathom it by direct evidence, you are driven back on motives. They are, in fact, the nut and kernel of what lawyers call circumstantial evidence, a fitting together of suspicions which have made the coffin of many an honest ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... had comforted those other sisters, would comfort them, as nothing else could. I remember how from a window we watched the funeral with childish awe and curiosity—the thrill with which we heard a maid announce 'the coffin,' and caught sight of the flapping pall, and tried to realize that old Mr. Brooke was underneath. Then close behind it came the two figures we knew so well, veiled, black, and bent, and clinging together in the agony of that struggle between ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... him her marriage was the impassable barrier, a barrier as enfranchisable as the brown earth on a coffin lid. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... of Noah. In other lines trade may follow the flag, but in the Noah's ark industry it follows a belief in Noah and is known to every flag that has ever waved, paying allegiance to no particular banner. Before these fatiguing divines drive even a tack into Noah's coffin, let them provide us with a personage of equal interest and influence. If they are not permitted to move further in their scheme of destruction until they do this, Noah is safe. They can only try to kill; they ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... where the dead are buried; a sharp kind of grass, lashed by the wind, grows over the whole churchyard. A solitary grave here and there has, perhaps, a monument; that is to say, the mouldering trunk of a tree, rudely carved into the shape of a coffin. The pieces of tree are brought from the woods of the west. The wild ocean provides, for the dwellers on the coast, beams, planks, and trees, which the dashing billows cast upon the shore. The wind and the sea spray soon decay these tree ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... being so familiar with witches and warlocks." He went on to tell a little story about a gude man who was returning to his cottage one night, when, in a lonely out-of-the-way place, he met with a funeral procession of cats all in mourning, bearing one of their race to the grave in a coffin covered with a black velvet pall. The worthy man, astonished and half-frightened at so strange a pageant, hastened home and told what he had seen to his wife and children. Scarce had he finished, when a great black cat that sat beside the fire raised himself up, ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... coffin if you talk like that any longer! Will you, one, forgive my frightful behaviour; two, live with me?" For his only hope was in a ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... large squad from Le Sueur, ten miles further down the river, under the command of Captain Tousley, sheriff of Le Sueur county, joined us. Early in the day a squad from Swan lake, under an old settler named Samuel Coffin, had gone to New Ulm to see what was ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... her fair form in the coffin so cold, And placed there Joy's picture as they had been told; They bore her to her grave, all were in sad gloom, And gently laid her down ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... wedged. The gate on which Stephen White was leaning had stood open in that way for years before Stephen rented the house; had stood open, in fact, ever since old Billy Jacobs, the owner of the house, had been carried out of it dead, in a coffin so wide that at first the bearers had thought it could not pass through the gate; but by huddling close, three at the head and three at the feet, they managed to tug the heavy old man through without taking down the palings. This was so long ago that now there was nobody left who ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... into the mysteries of Indian travelling, the prospect of a journey of six hundred miles, night and day, in a hot climate, inclosed in a sort of coffin-like receptacle, carried on the shoulders of men, is somewhat alarming; but to one more accustomed to that method of locomotion, the palankeen would, perhaps, prove less fatiguing and harassing, for a long journey, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... her life, for, being the first one to die, she was buried as we have always buried our people. All of Tahiti that was not ill walked with her coffin. Oh, Maru, I wept for Lovaina. Vava, whom you whites call the Dummy, is dead, too. When Lovaina was taken to the cemetery, Vava drove her old chaise with her children in it; and then, Maru, he was seen again only by a Tahitian who had gone to bathe in the lagoon because the fever was burning ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... thing I was deceived with all my cunning. If I had not been mad—for though we madmen are sharp-witted enough, we get bewildered sometimes—I should have known that the girl would rather have been placed, stiff and cold in a dull leaden coffin, than borne an envied bride to my rich, glittering house. I should have known that her heart was with the dark-eyed boy whose name I once heard her breathe in her troubled sleep; and that she had been sacrificed to me, to relieve the poverty of the old, white-headed ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... brought to justice, as well as those of dogs and other animals, were deposited, they had ordered our poor friend to be interred. He had been placed there, fastened up in a piece of canvas, without a coffin and without ceremony of any sort. We stood with mournful countenances and with hearts full of bitterness and indignation over the foul spot, discussing among ourselves whether we ought not to dig up the body and carry it to the churchyard of ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... emulated each other in announcing the mortalities of earth's bipeds—each toll'd its tale of death. We thought upon our "absent friend." A funeral approached. We were still more gloomy. Could it be his? if so, what were his thoughts? Could ghosts but speak, what would he say? The coffin was coeval with us—sheets were rubicund compared to our cheeks. A low deep voice sounded from its very bowels—the words were addressed to us—they were, "Take no notice; it's the first time; it will soon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... frown and menacing gesture and brandishing a sword in the remaining hand." When attacked, the figure vanishes, leaving behind a massive, iron key which unlocks a door leading to an apartment containing a coffin, and statues of black marble, attired in Moorish costume, holding enormous sabres in their right hands. As the knight enters, each of them rears an arm and advances a leg and at the same moment the lid of the coffin opens and the bell tolls. Sir Bertrand, guided by the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Clark, now came. He made a short prayer, and then the coffin was placed on the bier and covered with the pall. Some of the most prominent men in the town were the pall-bearers. They placed the bier on their shoulders, and the procession followed them. As we passed the meeting-house, ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... Run men are going in Richard Cleave's company. He sets a heap o' store by Allan, an' wanted him for second lieutenant, but the men elected Matthew Coffin—" ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... myself, and Scott, entered the cloysters; we played the hazel-rod round about the cloyster; upon the west-side of the cloysters the rods turned one over another, an argument that the treasure was there. The labourers digged at least six foot deep, and then we met with a coffin; but in regard it was not heavy, we did not open, which we afterwards much repented. From the cloysters we went into the Abbey church, where, upon a sudden, (there being no wind when we began) so fierce, so high, ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... poetry, including that of Robert Buchanan (q.v.)—The Fleshly School of Poetry—to which he replied with The Stealthy School of Criticism. His Poems which, in the vehemence of his grief, he had buried in the coffin of his wife, and which were afterwards exhumed, appeared in 1870; and his last literary effort, Ballads and Sonnets, containing the sonnets forming The House of Life, in 1881. In his later years he suffered acutely from neuralgia, which led to the habit of taking chloral. Rossetti was fastidious ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... that of Nectanebo I., of the thirtieth dynasty, who reigned from B.C. 381 to 363. Its material is a breccia from a quarry near Thebes, and is remarkable for its hardness. A remarkable rectangular-shaped coffin of whinstone was that of Menkare, the Mycerinus of the Greeks, and the builder of the third pyramid; this interesting relic was found by Colonel Vyse in the sepulchral chambers of the third pyramid, but was unfortunately ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... first occupants of this noble tomb, whose memory seems to have been so dear to the faithful, led the explorers to carefully sift the earth which filled the place; and their pains were rewarded by the discovery of a fragment of a marble coffin, inscribed with the letters: ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... reporter, but, being in a hurry, left it to the florist, who knew him well, to choose the design. He hit upon a floral fire-badge as the proper thing, and thus it was that when the company of mourners was assembled, and the funeral service in progress, there arrived and was set upon the coffin, in the view of all, that triumph of the florist's art, a shield of white roses, with this legend written across it in red immortelles: "Admit within fire lines only." It was shocking, but irresistible. It brought down ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... Comedy, as Comedies then were (1815) with a serious—very serious—element in it—taken from your Mother's Friend's, Mrs. Opie's (what a sentence!) story of 'Father and Daughter'—the seduced Daughter, who finds her distracted Father writing her name on a Coffin he has drawn on the Wall of his Cell—All ends happily in the Play, however, whatever may be the upshot of the Novel. But an odd thing is, that this poor Girl's name is 'Fitz Harding'—and the Character ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... hadn't come in and said they'd be answerable if everything wasn't all square. He and they were ordering all about the funeral, and I've got two women to stay with the missus till she's put all comfortable into her coffin. Alack! Alack! That I should have to talk about her coffin!" Nancy's feelings overcame her. On recovering, she, without loss of time, began to busy herself with household duties—lighted the fire, put ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... down on benches in the kitchen. The parson sent me out for him, and I'm blest if the old skunk didn't come in through the crowd with his sleeves rolled up,—went to the sink and washed, and then set down in the room where the coffin was, as cool ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... impressed with the tone in which Colonel Capadose said that it was the turn of a hair that they hadn't buried him alive. That had happened to a friend of his in India—a fellow who was supposed to have died of jungle fever—they clapped him into a coffin. He was going on to recite the further fate of this unfortunate gentleman when Mr. Ashmore made a move and every one got up to adjourn to the drawing-room. Lyon noticed that by this time no one was heeding what his new friend said to him. They came round on either side of the table ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... in the afternoon. They first sit round the tables and eat and drink in silence, and when the first batch have satisfied their appetites they move away and make room for others. After this meal all walk round the coffin, and repeat, one after another, 'Twas een goed mensch,' ('He or she was a good man or woman,' as the case may be). Then the lid of the coffin is fastened down with twelve wooden pegs, which the most honoured guest is allowed to hammer in, and the coffin is forthwith placed on an ordinary farm-cart. ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... applause, expressions of amazement and cries of "Shame!" from the galleries, Brown told of the abuses laid bare by the prison commission. He told of prisoners fed with rotten meal and bread infested with maggots; of children beaten with cat and rawhide for childish faults; of a coffin-shaped box in which men and even women were made to stand or rather crouch, their limbs cramped, and their lungs scantily supplied with air from a few holes. Brown's speech virtually closed the case, although Macdonald strove ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... his conscience, he would have followed the coffin in the clothes he was wearing, for many a time he had heard his father speak with dislike of the black trappings which made a burial hideous; but enforced regard for public opinion, that which makes cowards of good men and hampers the world's progress, ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... the attendants, actuated either by a sense of duty requiring them to aid in extinguishing the flames, or by curiosity to witness the conflagration, abandoned the funeral cortege. The procession was broken up, and the whole multitude, clergy and laity, went off to the fire, leaving the coffin, with its bearers, alone. The bearers, however, went on, and conveyed their charge to the ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... love yo'.' (Jes' dem th'ee wuds!) De wuds fall right slow—like dirt falls out a spade on a coffin when yo's buryin' anybody an' seys, 'Uth to uth.' Marse Chan he jes' let her hand drap, an' he stiddy hisse'f 'g'inst de gate-pos', an' he didn' speak toreckly. When he did speak, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... LEWIS, another son of the Saint, who died in 1662, aged 26, and whose cenotaph is here, was first carried to St. Denis, and thence to the abbey of Royaumont, where it was interred. "The greatest lords of the kingdom," says he, "alternately bore the coffin on their shoulders, and Henry III; king of England, carried it himself for a considerable time, as feudatory of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... follows: The deceased was buried beside his house; and, if he were a chief, he was placed beneath a little house or porch which they constructed for this purpose. Before interring him, they mourned him for four days; and afterward laid him on a boat which served as a coffin or bier, placing him beneath the porch, where guard was kept over him by a slave. In place of rowers, various animals were placed within the boat, each one being assigned a place at the oar by twos—male and female of each species being together—as for example two goats, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... two graves near the old yew tree; and the grass has overgrown them. A third is close by; and the dark earth at each side has just been thrown up. The bearers come; with a heavy pace they move along; the coffin heaveth up and down, as they step over ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... superintended the cuisine, and filled his part to admiration; in fact, he was famous in this line, and between the services, he left his cooking and joined in the dance and song. He was strong, fresh, and gay as a lark. On leaving a wedding-party, he would go and dig a grave, or nail down a coffin—a task of which he ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... passing through the hall she encountered the undertakers, who carried on their shoulders a long metallic case enclosed in two oaken ones. And she had scarcely reached her own room before a smell of resin told her that the men were closing the coffin which contained all that was mortal of M. ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... by these men of the second sight to eat at funerals [and] banquets. Hence many of the Scottish-Irish will not taste meat at these meetings, lest they have communion with, or be poisoned by, them. So are they seen to carry the bier or coffin with the corpse among the middle-earth men to the grave. Some men of that exalted sight (whether by art or nature) have told me they have seen at these meetings a double man, or the shape of some ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... was great wailing and moaning at the funeral, and when the one carriage, with as many of the family as could crowd in beside the poor little coffin, started for the cemetery, this same child stood in the doorway, waving her handkerchief, and shouting tragically, "Fare thee well, baby! ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 3, March, 1889 • Various
... through the clear water, while a school of fish played around her as though sorry to see her go. Paul followed after and found all on deck solemn and silent, while the captain's good-natured wife was in the cabin wrapping the corpse in a sheet. That night a rude coffin was made in which the remains were placed and the schooner headed for Sisal, where she sailed in with her flag at half-mast. The father faithfully paid the promised reward and the schooner under charter, returned to resume her work at the wreck. Out of this ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... no reply. A memory of the anonymous letter and its threat came home vividly to her as she stepped inside the churchyard. Who knew but what within a few days she might be borne through that self-same gate in her coffin? However, she had promised to say nothing about the letter, and fearful lest she should let slip some remark to arouse the suspicions of Giles, she ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... told him that was what funerals meant. All the same, as he went up the flagged path, he took care not to look through the black panes of the window where the elder bush was, lest he should see Grandpapa's coffin standing in the place where the big table used to be, and Grandpapa lying inside it ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... cases of this room are devoted to a series of fishes including, in cases 23, 24, the globe fish with a parrot's beak; and the ungainly sea horses. The two last cases (25, 26) include the file fish; the coffin fishes with their hard case of octagonal plates; and the European and American sturgeons. Having examined the varieties of osseous fishes, the visitor should continue his westerly course into the fifth and last room, a compartment of the northern ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... please ourselves that we should soon see her here—Good Heaven! that her next entrance into this house, after she abandoned us so precipitately, should be in a coffin. ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... as well as old; three hours after the death in Savannah, every channel of communication was choked with news of a constantly increasing number of casualties. A Boston minister, preaching a funeral sermon, collapsing beside the coffin; a lineman on a telegraph pole, overcome, falling—and splashing! A thousand incongruous tragedies ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... the demise was publicly announced. When the body was exhibited to the people the next day it was in a shocking state of decomposition, which of course strengthened the suspicion of poison. At the funeral a brawl occurred between the soldiers and the priests, and the coffin having been made too short the body without the mitre was driven into it by main force and covered with an oil-cloth. Alexander's successor on the chair of St Peter was Francesco Todeschini-Piccolomini, who assumed the name of Pius ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... following a hearse to the cemetery hard by. Lucy Rowe accompanied us—at my urgent request—and her presence served to soften and support old Reuben's honest Kentish heart in his desolate agony. As they lowered the coffin a haggard face stretched over a tomb behind us. Sharp was blinded with tears, ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... is the way it is, you see. When a poor creature comes to be buried—no matter who it is, a pauper, or a tenant, or any one—the people all go to the chapel; and every man he walks up and lays his offering for the priest on the coffin; and the others, they watch him. And, you see, if a man that thinks a good deal of himself walks up and puts down five shillings, why, another man that thinks less of him, and more of himself, he'll go up and make it a gold ten-shilling piece, or perhaps even a sovereign! I've ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... curious ceremony was going on just outside, and within sight of the windows. This was the ceremonious burial of the Union Jack, which was followed to the grave by a crowd of about 2000 loyalists and native chiefs. On the outside of the coffin was written the word "Resurgam," and an eloquent oration was delivered over the grave. Such demonstrations are, no doubt, foolish enough, but they are not ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... at the kampong. The sounding of a gong drew attention to this fact and people assembled at the house of mourning where they wailed for an hour. The fishing was postponed one day on account of the burial, and the work of making the coffin could be heard over on our side of the river. During the night there was ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... favored time, and we were humbled and instructed together. We went to Highflatts to tea; when I got to the place where the remains of my dear friend were laid, I stood silently by the coffin in tears, saying in spirit, If it be thy mantle I am designed to wear, may I receive it with humility, reverence and fear! This feeling awfully impressed my mind, because my dear friend had said more ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... fellow. As far as we know he has led a straight life ever since. He is still working about the hospital and there is no sign of the old dissipation. When Anna left us a few weeks ago, the man's grief was great, and it was this old 'body-guard' who sat up all night the one night after the coffin was sealed and remained in the house. The old mother at sixty-seven years of age has learned to read the Bible and is ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... of the going forth by day. The general character may be given by a paragraph attached to one of the chapters in the Book of Ani the Scribe [Edited by E. A. W. Budge, p. 26]: "If this book be known on earth and written on the coffin, it is my mouth. He shall come forth by day in any form he desires and he shall go into his place without being prevented. There shall be given to him bread and beer and meat upon the altar of Osiris. He shall enter in, in peace, ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... when tranquillity was restored to the country, Pizarro's remains were placed in a sumptuous coffin and deposited under a monument in a conspicuous part of the cathedral. And in 1607, when time had thrown its friendly mantle over the past, and the memory of his errors and his crimes was merged in the consideration of the great services he had rendered to the Crown by the extension ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... the west, lay the large pine coffin lid, while to the south of it, turned bottom up, was the coffin with fresh chips beside it hewn out that morning in further excavation. Children played around the coffin and people lounged on its upturned ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... had panted in the last days of her novitiate fell upon her again, like a weight. She felt that her soul was in a strait-jacket. Then, as she had often felt—and prayed not to feel—while the pure voices soared, the sensation of being shut up in a coffin came back to her. She was nailed into a coffin, lying straight and still under cool, faintly scented flowers; dead, yet not dead enough to rest. The terrible longing to burst the coffin lid and live—live—made her draw a deep, quick breath as of one choking, just as she had often ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... well as the beliefs connected with them, vary considerably in different parts of Japan. Those of the eastern provinces differ from those of the western and southern. The old practice of placing articles of value in the coffin—such as the metal mirror formerly buried with a woman, or the sword buried with a man of the Samurai caste—has become almost obsolete. But the custom of putting money in the coffin still prevails: in Izumo the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... Franky Day. Sir Francis had wished, seeing that he must appear there, to appear unobtrusively, but Ada had thought that she also—painful as it was—must be present, and Ada could not go afoot. The Forcus carriage, therefore, had been conspicuous in the meagre procession following the little coffin ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... door of the room flew open and in came four Rabbits as black as ink, carrying a small black coffin ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... before I had half smoked my pipe out, and I do not believe I gave a thought to my situation before I slumbered, so wearied was I. The cold awoke me. The fire was out and so was the candle in the lanthorn, and I was in coffin darkness. This the tinder-box speedily remedied. I looked at my watch—seven o'clock, as I was a sinner! so that my sleep had lasted between ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... did not intend to betray his amusement. He considered Viola in corals as too rude a jest to share with her. Had poor Viola once grasped Harold Lind's estimation of her she would have as soon gazed upon herself in her coffin. Harold's comprehension of the essentials was beyond Jane Carew's. It was fairly ghastly, partaking of the nature of X-rays, but it never disturbed Harold Lind. He went along his dance-track undisturbed, his blue eyes never losing their high lights of ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... found the coffin, placed upon a pile of boards, entirely uncovered to the light of day and to the inspection of the people, who had, each in turn, gazed with curious eyes upon ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... pieces and scattered far and wide with great enjoyment, while the tradesmen hurriedly shut up their shops; for a crowd in those times stopped at nothing, and was a monster much dreaded. They had already got the length of opening the hearse to take the coffin out, when some brighter genius proposed instead, its being escorted to its destination amidst general rejoicing. Practical suggestions being much needed, this suggestion, too, was received with acclamation, and the coach was immediately filled with eight inside ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... the table, upon a coffin, sat the Judge of that awful tribunal, arrayed from head to foot in a blood-red robe: he wore no mask—why need he? What mask could exceed in hideousness the countenance ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... gates and I waited, much moved by what I had heard, until the coffin had been lowered into the grave, before I went up to the poor fellow who was sobbing violently, to press his hand warmly. He looked at me in surprise through his ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... hospitals there is often generated a miasm, palpable as the chlorine used to destroy it, tenacious so as in some cases almost to defy extirpation, deadly in some institutions as the plague; which has killed women in a private hospital of London so fast that they were buried two in one coffin to conceal its horrors; which enabled Tonnelle to record two hundred and twenty-two autopsies at the Maternite of Paris; which has led Dr. Lee to express his deliberate conviction that the loss of life occasioned by these institutions completely defeats the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Valley, have made the traffic in arms their especial business. Their thieves are the most daring and their agents the most cunning. Some of their methods are highly ingenious. One story is worth repeating. A coffin was presented for railway transport. The relatives of the deceased accompanied it. The dead man, they said, had desired to be buried across the frontier. The smell proclaimed the corpse to be in an advanced state of decomposition. The railway ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill |
