"Undertaker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... coroner, and when he arrived, about an hour later, they all went into a huddle and decided that it was an obvious accident and that no inquest would be necessary. Then somebody, I'm not sure who, called an undertaker. It was past eleven when he arrived, and for once, Nelda got home early. She was just coming in while they were carrying Lane out in a basket. You can imagine how horrible that was for her; it was days before she was over the shock. So she'll be just as glad ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... must have his joke. He is a professional lawyer, and I have frequently observed that lawyers' jokes are like an undertaker's griefs—strictly professional. You begin now to sympathize with everybody that ever went to sea. You think of the Pilgrim Fathers during the tempestuous voyage in the Mayflower. You reflect how fully their throats must have been occupied, and you can see how they originated the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... until he had possessed Northwick of his whole autobiography. He was in high content with himself, and his joy overflowed in all manner of affectionate services to Northwick, which Northwick accepted as the mourner entrusts his helplessness to the ghastly kindness of the undertaker, and finds in it a sort of human sympathy. If Northwick had been his own father, Pinney could not have looked after him with tenderer care, in putting his things together for him, and getting on board the boat, and making interest with the clerk for the best stateroom. He did not ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... seen many a fellow come in just like you. I 've been here thirty year. They call me Old Undertaker Chastine!" ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... hours of the great were not in the way of friendly sympathy, or unfriendly intrusion, here. The back door stood wide open, and people came and went, while the children's sobs mingled with the curt, outspoken directions of the undertaker and the clatter of dishes, which some obliging neighbor was washing at the kitchen sink. The body of the murdered man lay on the bed in a small room off the little sitting-room—an apartment so tiny that the door had to be left open, so that the implements of this last service to his body ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... death. "The saddest thing about the life of a Denver minister," writes Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, "is the number of lonely funerals that he is called upon to attend. Often I have been hastily summoned to say a prayer over some poor body at the undertaker's {106} shop, where there would be present just the undertaker and the minister, with perhaps the keeper of the boarding-house where the lad died or an officer of the Charity Organization Society. I look ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... Washington scientific men to examine it in advance of a public exhibition. The first feature to strike the critical observer was that the arms of the fossil were crossed over the breast in the most approved undertaker's fashion, showing that if the woman had ever existed, she had devoted her dying moments to arranging a pose for the approval of posterity. Little more than a glance was necessary to show that the fossil was simply baked clay. Yet the limbs were hard and stiff. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... were found a little time after, when an undertaker came by orders of the Chief of Police to prepare the dead for honorable burial. Following his example, a few noble fellows about his office had contributed out of their pay, and thus poor Chester was saved from a ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... we are fallen into a fanatical terror for the national salvation, we shall then be ready to throw ourselves,—in a sort of precipitate trust, some strange disposition of the mind jumbled up of presumption and despair,—into the hands of the most pretending and forward undertaker. One such undertaker at least he has in readiness for our service. But let me assure this generous person, that however he may succeed in exciting our fears for the public danger, he will find it hard indeed to engage us to place ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... salvation of poor sinners. The whole work of salvation is laid on Christ, and the Father is glorified in him, who is his Servant and his Chosen, whom he upholdeth and furnisheth for the work, Isa. xlii. 1,2. He is called the covenant itself. He is the undertaker in the covenant of redemption and in the covenant of grace; all is founded on him; all the good things of it are given out by him; all the grace by which we close with it, and accept of him according to it, is given by him. Now, in this gospel ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... preventing this abuse had not proved, effectual, they resumed their inquiry, and proceeded with, uncommon vigour on the information they received. A great number of persons who had been pressed were discharged by order of the house; and captain Winter, the chief undertaker for this method of recruiting the army, was carried by the sergeant before the lord chief justice, that he might be ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... second half of A Life's Atonement was written under difficulties which would have been absolutely insurmountable if it had not been for that spirit of camaraderie which distinguished the jolly little Bohemian set amongst whom I had fallen. One chum who lived over an undertaker's shop in Great Russell Street found me house-room, and I had a resource from which, for the space of some ten weeks, I was entitled to draw one pound a week, which came to me in rather an odd fashion. ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... depend on our report of this—of this sad event. We may tell them that the female pope of our great religion"—he bent his big neck reverently—"was wafted to her heavenly abode by the angels. But there are the officers of the law, the undertaker, the cemetery people, to be considered. Shall we acknowledge that our founder has died like any other human—in bed, of a fever? And who is to be her successor? ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Sam jerked his thumb back to show that he meant Si Lee; "sounds like a Chinese laundry. I guess that's the only thing he isn't. He can do any mortal thing but get on in life. He's been a soldier an' a undertaker an' a cook He plays a fiddle he made himself; it's a rotten bad one, but it's away ahead of his playing. He stuffs birds—that Owl in the parlour is his doin'; he tempers razors, kin doctor a horse ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... is the ambition of every one of the class we are discussing to live fashionably, so it is their chief wish to be laid in the grave in the same style. The undertaker at a fashionable funeral is generally the sexton of some fashionable church, perhaps of the church the deceased was in the habit of attending. This individual prescribes the manner in which the funeral ceremonies shall be conducted, and advises certain styles of mourning for the family. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... chimney, the merry wrangling of sleigh-bells, the sonorous clash of fire-bells, and the manuscript grew under my pen, as if by magic. I came to love the nurslings of my fancy as no one else will. I liked the cold, cynical features of Mr. Flint, with his undertaker's aspect; the child-spirit, Bell; Daisy Snarle's eyes; the heart-broken old sailor; the pale book-keeper; Tim, the office boy; Mr. Hardwill, the great publisher; Joe Wilkes, and all ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the hatchway! Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault. Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does. Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop? I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir? Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker? Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning it into something else. Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, inter-meddling, monopolizing, heathenish old scamp, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... which led into the next room was partly open. I saw the undertaker's people removing the coffin in order to place it in the hearse. This was a fresh cause for anxiety. I knew that that black, mysterious-looking box contained the cold, pale, sleeping form of my mother; but I could ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the waiter and we left the cafe. On the way to Mary's I stopped at the undertaker's and made arrangements for Jim's burial. The man in charge was the saddest looking person I have ever seen. He had a woebegone look about him that was infectious—made you want to weep for him or with him. He discussed ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... is suffered to prevail upon its own principle; the whole is so frittered down and disjointed, that scarcely a trace of the original scheme remains. Thus, between the resistance of power, and the unsystematical process of popularity, the undertaker and the undertaking are both exposed, and the poor reformer is hissed off the stags ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker called in to help them to ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... to let the dead rest. He simply won't hear of it. He wants remains. He wants to have 'em out in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls. He don't act subdued or proper about it either, or kind of buttery sad, like a first-class undertaker. He's gleeful. Let him find the skeleton of something as big as a freight car, that perished far in the dead past, and he's as tickled as a kid shooting at little sister ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... ever-shifting groups held sober discourse in front of business places. He hurried by them and struck off up the road, his mind so intent upon what lay ahead of him that he failed to notice that Jack Trentman had detached himself from the group in front of the undertaker's and was following swiftly after him. He was nearly half-way home when he turned, in response to a call from behind, and beheld ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... about the Browning woman and the interest he was supposed to have in her. I tapped him gently and so indirectly on the subject that I could see he knew nothing about her. The undertaker's card he had found in the hall and brought in and laid on the table, where I chanced to pick it up, little thinking I would take it as corroborative of anything that might be said against him. He declared he had not left the house that night. Smith's men had simply ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... Thompson, who was high and narrow in build—shaped something like a lath, with a face something like an undertaker's—sang at length. First a doleful ditty ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... coffin, to be sure! You see, I am the city undertaker, and the people are dying here so fast, that I can hardly supply the demand for coffins. You will have to wait until your turn comes, which will be ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... short blue coat, he should travel with a screen. A man in just such a rig attracted no end of comment in a fashionable hotel. The caricaturing effect of his trousers and coat were unspeakably comical. The wearer had a face as grave as an undertaker's and the air of a serious-minded college professor; but he had the nondescript look of a scarecrow composed of whatever available garments could be obtained from the cast-off wardrobe of ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... cloth-covered casket with silver mountings is considered in the best taste, and the pall-bearers are given at most a white scarf and a pair of black gloves. Even this is not always done. At one time the traffic in these returned bands and gloves was quite a fortune to the undertaker. Mourning is very expensive, and often costs a family more than they can well afford; but it is a sacrifice that even the poorest gladly make, and those who can least afford it often wear the best mourning, so tyrannical is custom. They consider it—by what process of reasoning no one ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... Presently the white undertaker, a silent little man with a brisk yet sympathetic air, came and made some measurements. He talked to Peter in undertones about the finishing of the casket, how much the Knights of Tabor would pay, what Peter wanted. Then he spoke of the hour of burial, and mentioned a somewhat early hour ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... came forward. The undertaker's man, on seeing them look for the inscription, civilly turned it round towards them, and each read, almost at one moment, by the ruddy light of ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... landlord was sympathetic and offered to feed him. But the young man was too much upset to eat, and having fasted for three days fell seriously ill. He rapidly grew worse, and the landlord, fearing he would not recover, had him moved straight to the undertaker's shop. In a short time the whole of the undertaker's staff was collected round him, offering sympathy and bringing him food. Gradually he got better and was able to walk ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... "Riffraff!" Possibly he would have shouted it; and, certainly, most people believed a story that went round the town just after Mrs. Amberson's funeral, when Georgie was eleven. Georgie was reported to have differed with the undertaker about the seating of the family; his indignant voice had become audible: "Well, who is the most important person at my own grandmother's funeral?" And later he had projected his head from ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... and departed to another market town. Timothy, dressed in a sombre suit of black, very much like an undertaker, was provided with a horse, with the following directions: to proceed leisurely until he was within half a mile of the town of ——, and then to gallop in as fast as he could, stop at the best inn in the place, and order apartments for the Great Aristodemus, who might be ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... said the cook, insisting on carrying the kettle, 'but we are in such confusion; and the nurse-maid, whose place it is, has been up most of the night with Mr. Leonard, and must have just dropped asleep somewhere, and I was just giving their breakfast to the undertaker's young men, but I'll call her ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... each side of the front step. A servant threw open the door of the breakfast room, and Delme mechanically entered it. It was filled with strangers; on some of these the spruce undertaker was fitting silk scarfs; while others were ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... own attending physicians, all of whom have performed remarkable cures. It is a full and complete list of fifty-eight physicians in good professional standing, and I will dispose of it at a moderate compensation to any apothecary or undertaker who desires to purchase. ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... pathos—their blind stoniness toward the sky. Against such a background, Bibbs was not incongruous, with his figure, in black, so long and slender, and his face so long and thin and white; nor was the undertaker's coupe out of keeping, with the shabby driver dozing on the box and the shaggy horses standing patiently in attitudes without hope and without regret. But for Mary Vertrees, here was a grotesque setting—she was a vivid, ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... with credit at a marriage, having no natural aptitude for gaiety, and being haunted with anxiety lest any "hicht" should end in a "howe," but the parish had a genius for funerals. It was long mentioned with a just sense of merit that an English undertaker, chancing on a "beerial" with us, had no limits to his admiration. He had been disheartened to despair all his life by the ghastly efforts of chirpy little Southerners to look solemn on occasion, but his dreams were satisfied ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... Harald Williams, has the most dreadful cover of any book that we have come across for some time past. It is possibly intended to symbolise the sorrow of the world, but it merely suggests the decorative tendencies of an undertaker and is as depressing as it is detestable. However, as the cowl does not make the monk, so the binding, in the case of the Savile Club school, does not make the poet, and we open the volume without prejudice. The first poem that we come to is a vigorous attack on those wicked and misguided ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... air, helped also to complete the Young America expression. Mother Hubbard's mingled consternation and pride at each successive achievement of her astonishing puppy were inimitable. Each separate illustration made its point. Patriotism, especially, came in when the undertaker, bearing the pall with red-lettered border,—Rebellion,—finds the dog, with upturned, knowing eye, and parted jaws, suggestive as much of a good grip as of laughter, half risen upon fore-paws, as far from "dead" as ever, mounting guard over ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... borne by the undertaker's men, passed through the west door, the delicious rays of a winter sun fell on the faces of the women and the roses lying on the coffin. Grouped on either side of the parvis, a few young men from the great colleges sought the faces ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... has been recorded of an English lady of good social position who fell in love with an undertaker at her father's funeral and insisted on marrying him. It is known that some men have been so abnormally excited by the funeral trappings of death that only in such surroundings have they been able to effect coitus. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... undertaker. With his own hands he "rived" the planks, made the coffin, and buried Nancy Hanks, that remarkable woman. There was no pastor, no funeral service. The grave was marked by a wooden slab, which, long years after, in 1879, was replaced by a ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... in the parlour, amid a mass of flowers. Miss Laura, for love of him and of the colonel, with her own hands prepared his little body for the last sleep. The undertaker, who hovered around, wished, with a conventional sense of fitness, to remove old Peter's body to a back room. But the colonel ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... heaven's name were you doing with those two men?" Egavine inquired, twitching his eyebrows disapprovingly up and down. The doctor was a tall, thin man in his forties, dressed habitually in undertaker black, with bony features and intense dark eyes. He added, "They appeared to be unconscious ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... Dan Dalzell, "if seven undertakers call, all within five minutes, won't it be a delicate way of conveying the hint that a Board of Education that thinks it can stop football is composed of dead ones? You see, there'll be an undertaker for each member of the Board. Don't you think the idea—-the hint—-would soak through even those seven dull ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... him to a loss in the hottest of his chase, and to cause honour to fly away so much the faster, by how much it is more eagerly pursued. Finally, he is an importunate suitor, a corrupt client, a violent undertaker, a smooth factor, but untrusty, a restless master of his own, a bladder puffed up with the wind of hope and self-love. He is in the common body as a mole in the earth, ever unquietly casting; and, in one word, is nothing but a confused ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... fellow, always dressed like a country sexton, and with a face like an undertaker. And the Baron Three Francs Sixty-eight, an old bird, was fool enough to be taken in by him! For he was taken in. He had a face like a man whose chimney is on fire, when he came to tell us, mamma and myself, that Favoral had ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... fourth was McFadden. The name of her first and third was Smyth, while that of her second, oddly enough, was Smith. Soon after her return from her last wedding-tour she was visited by Mr. Toombs, the undertaker, who called ostensibly to correct an error in his last bill. When Mrs. Banger entered the parlor, Mr. Toombs greeted ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... in the Palazzo Chiaromonte within an hour of her brother-in-law's death; she locked the drawers of his private desk herself, sent for the notary and had the customary seals placed on the doors of the inner apartments 'in the name of the heirs'; she spoke with the undertaker and made every arrangement for the customary lying in state of the body during the following night and day; saw to the erection of the temporary altar at which masses for the dead would be celebrated almost ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... Street presented an appearance of unusual festivity. The long, narrow parlor had been liberally draped with smilax and sparingly decorated with ex-table-d'hote roses, until it resembled the mortuary chapel of a Mulberry Street undertaker; and this effect was, if anything, heightened by four dozen camp-chairs that had been procured from the sexton of Mrs. ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... great misfortune of my life that I have never been able to escape from the Irish question. It was discussed round my cradle by a nurse whom my parents selected for her sound Protestant principles. The undertaker will give his views of the Irish question to his assistant while he drives the nails into the lid of my coffin. I should not have supposed that any one could have hit on an aspect of it wholly new to me. But Mrs. ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... figured daily in the narratives thereafter—Joe, who drove a carriage, a motor, or a hay wagon, as the occasion required, for his uncle who owned a livery stable, but whose ambition was to buy out old Scanlon, the local undertaker, and ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... care," cried Bostock. "It ain't any of my interests. I haven't underwrote your life. Only I'm blest if I'm not sorry for the cannibal as tries to eat your head. And what I recommend is a cheap, smart coffin and a good undertaker. See if you can find a house to give you credit for a coffin! Look at your friend there: he's got some sense; he's laughing at you so as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sort of convent and monastery mixed," replied the witch. "I am connected with it officially. I undertook to manage it, yet I forget what the proper word for me is. Not undertaker, is it?" ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... and amusing—"so very droll, don't you know." He recites things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and mimics public characters. He is a type of a class, and I take him to be one of the elementary forms of animal life, like the acalephae. His presence is capable of adding a gloom to an undertaker's establishment. The last time I fell in with him was on a coaching trip through Devon, and in spite of what I have said I must confess to receiving an instant of entertainment at his hands. He was delivering a little dissertation on "the English and American languages." As there ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... made appropriate to the occasion or situation. In fact, so thoroughly did he exhibit just such a demeanor as suited a confidential secretary at the inquest of his murdered employer, that I involuntarily thought what a fine undertaker he would have made. For, in my experience, no class of men so perfectly adapt themselves to varying ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... surely kill poor Lucy, if nothing else did. I know, and you know, and the other doctor who attended her knows, that Mrs. Westenra had disease of the heart, and we can certify that she died of it. Let us fill up the certificate at once, and I shall take it myself to the registrar and go on to the undertaker." ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... Hotel Broker, an Insect Exterminator, a Junk Dealer, a Kalsomine Manufacturer, a Laundryman, a Mausoleum Architect, a Nurse, an Oculist, a Paper-Hanger, a Quilt Designer, a Roofer, a Ship Plumber, a Tinsmith, an Undertaker, a Veterinarian, a Wig Maker, an X-ray apparatus manufacturer, a Yeast producer, or a Zinc Spelter." He closed the book. "There is only one thing to do. I must starve in the gutter. Tell me—you know New York better than I do—where is ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the subject in different literatures, and then we should send him on a tour round the great public and private libraries of Great Britain and the Continent. This, of course, applies only where the undertaker is in thorough earnest, and wishes to spare himself a good deal of expense and a good deal of mortification. Illustrated catalogues are of very indifferent value, especially those of auctioneers, which too often offer the result of sophistication so cleverly disguised that to ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... nobody ever paid any attention to him at all; but he was one of those empty-headed village talkers who are always trying to look as if they were behind the scenes, always trying to walk with important people. Everybody knows them. They whisper to the undertaker at funerals; and during campaigns they have something confidential to communicate to United States Senators. They meddle and intrude and waste as much time for ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... Trumet, and a place to put your head in nights. Long's Sol was alive and could do his cobblin' we managed to get along somehow. What I could earn sewin' helped, and we lived simple. But when he was taken down and died, the doctor's bills and the undertaker's used up what little money I had put by, and the sewin' alone wouldn't keep a healthy canary in bird seed. Dear land knows I hate to leave the old house I've lived in for fourteen years and the town I was born in, but I've got to, for all I see. Thank mercy, I can ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... pleasure, and even joy, to the moment when my physician would come for the last time in his professional capacity and go to work on me officially. Then the county would be obliged to pay him, and the undertaker could take charge of the fragments left by ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... directions about everything and meant to have a funeral "beyond his betters." This was true; for old Featherstone had not been a Harpagon whose passions had all been devoured by the ever-lean and ever-hungry passion of saving, and who would drive a bargain with his undertaker beforehand. He loved money, but he also loved to spend it in gratifying his peculiar tastes, and perhaps he loved it best of all as a means of making others feel his power more or less uncomfortably. If any one will here contend that there must have been ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... sit in his little bank and watch the world go by. And I guess he's got a nice bunch of brothers-in-law on his hands. Poor old Amzi! There was always something amusing about the cuss, even when he was a smug little roly-poly as a boy. But I passed his bank this morning and it looked like an undertaker's office. The contrast between that old tomb and your plant pleases me, Will; it soothes my family pride. You are an able man and I congratulate you on your success. Sam liked to cut didoes on thin ice a little too well; but you're a born banker—inherited it from ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... consent, Benjamin Crane took charge of Blair's affairs. The funeral took place in an undertaker's establishment and the body was placed in a receiving vault, until Blair's people could be heard from. His immediate possessions remained in the studio rooms, for the lease had still six months to run, and the police ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... have a fashionable funeral. He must, to the last, bear witness to the power of Mrs. Grundy. It is to please her, that the funeral cloaks, hatbands, scarves, mourning coaches, gilded hearses, and processions of mutes are hired. And yet, how worthless and extravagant is the mummery of the undertaker's grief; and the feigned woe of the mutes, saulies, and plume bearers, who are paid for ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... as piety tell us these are proper."—Family Commentary, p. 64. "For without it the critic, as well as the undertaker, ignorant of any rule, have nothing left but to abandon themselves to chance."—Kames, El. of Crit., i, 42. "And accordingly hatred as well as love are extinguished by long absence."—Ib., i, 113. "But at every turn the richest melody as well ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... this as he looked through his disguises, selecting one suitable for the work he had in hand. He had just decided that the most appropriate disguise would be "Number 13, Undertaker," and had picked up the close black wig, and long, drooping mustache, when he had another thought. Given a bag sufficiently loose to permit free motion of the hands and arms, and a man, even in ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham—the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own particular armchair. Fettes was an old drunken Scotchman, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... much of a reader, and if she had been, there were no books within her reach but the Bible and a cookery book, on the former of which, for private reading, Jenny looked as a mere precursor of the undertaker. ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... said to the undertaker's men, and called them in, and young Master Jasper, he followed me along the ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... my looks. I will excuse your congratulations, Mr. Turner," said I, impatiently; for the recollection of the banqueting-house, and the undertaker whom Turner was so eager to introduce, came full into my mind. "Go on, if you please; five minutes is all I am at present able to give to any business, and you sent me word you had something ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... stipulated that although they were to be employed only in suppressing the rising, the officers should have permanent rank.[16] So, as was shown in Mrs. Clarke's case, a patent for raising a regiment might be a source of profit to the undertaker, who again might get it by bribing the mistress of a royal duke. The officers had, according to the generally prevalent system, a modified property in their commissions; and the system of sale was not abolished till our own days. We may therefore say ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... that "Sis had got a beau," I was pleased at the prospect of her becoming a minister's wife. On inquiry, however, I found that the somewhat solemn look which I had noticed was indeed a professional one, but not clerical. He was a young undertaker, who had just succeeded to a thriving business. Things, I believe, are going on well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the landlady's daughter and her mother. Sextons and undertakers are the cheerfullest people in the world ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... amazement at his brother, who had turned quite white at the sight of the undertaker's wagon standing in front of the miser's home. He had halted and gone off to one side of the road to lean against a tree, where he stood now, mopping his face ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... that kind of taste," said Judy in defence, "an' whin her eyes was blue an' her hair yalla, I dunno but high colors wint well enough. Her father always dhressed her well. Anyhow she's goin' to make up for all the years she had to dhress like an undertaker. Yistherday it was a gran' opery-cloak, as soon as Artie tould her he had taken four opery sates ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... composing it"!—which want of leisure in the credulous Bishop, our readers will regret with us, especially those inventive geniuses, who, like the projector in the reign of George I., published a scheme for manufacturing pine plank from pine saw-dust, or the still more ingenious undertaker of later times, who proposed to make pine plank out of oak saw-dust, by the mere ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... symptoms of a turn of fashion toward coloured coats and bright buttons, which may be successful, because the fashionable world abhors monotony. The flame coloured coats, long curls, and pink under waistcoats of George IV., were succeeded by the solemn sables of an undertaker; the high tight stock made way for a sailor's neckcloth. For a time shawl waistcoats, of gay colours, had their hour. Then correct tight black yielded to the loosest and shaggiest garments that could be invented. Perhaps the year 1852 may see our youth arrayed ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... woman of about fifty, small and prim. Prim with an unconquerable primness that neither storm nor battle nor accident could shake. If she had been killed in the runaway she would have looked prim in death while awaiting the undertaker. She must have been wet almost to those unfractured bones which she had been feeling; her black silk dress, with its white ruching about the neck, was torn and bedraggled; her black hat, with its jet ornaments, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... when Mr. Lyken, the little undertaker from Ghost Lake, arrived with several assistants, a casket, and what he ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... came forward. Lord Kenmure was accompanied by an undertaker, to whom the care of his body was to be entrusted; he was also attended by a surgeon, who directed the executioner how to perform his office, by drawing his finger over that part of the neck where the blow was to be given. Lord Kenmure then kissed the officers and gentlemen on the scaffold, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... principal personage? Presently, quite alone, up the side steps, and unobserved, came a thin but tallish man in black, with a tail coat, and, almost unrecognised, took the vacant front seat. He might have been, so far as dress went, a clerk in a counting-house, or an undertaker. But the face was no ordinary one. The wide brow, the sharp nose of the Burke type, the compressed lips and strong chin, were suggestive of intellect and of suppressed emotion. There was no applause, for nothing was known to the crowd, even of ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... happened one must bury the other. And Nellie saw her husband dying. This terrible event presented itself to her in every detail. She saw the coffin, the candles, the deacon, and even the footmarks in the hall made by the undertaker. ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the chief. "I'm down here to meet Braceway now. He and Withers are in conference. Braceway doesn't want to go to the inquest. I'm to take him by the undertaker's to look at the body, and then he wants to run up to see you. Says he won't learn anything important at the inquest; ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... sot endur'd, Who all his time in taverns spent, While his affairs in ruin went. Once as insensible he lay, She dress'd him in a corpse's array, And with the undertaker's aid, Into a burying vault convey'd. The fumes dispersed, the man awakes; All for reality he takes. When by the glimmering of a lamp He saw his mansion drear and damp, Reflecting how his life had pass'd, A forced repentance came at ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... mad cow. Ann Harriet was not so fortunate; her size prevented her running, and a fiery peony on her bosom attracted the animal's attention, so that, with a loud roar, the beast rushed directly upon her. Had Ann Harriet been—as she was a few weeks before—an unprotected female, the undertaker of Peonytown would have had a 'big job' that day; but luckily, he who had just sworn to love and protect her saw that now was his time and chance to begin; so, drawing his sword, he stepped in front of his trembling bride, and, as the cow approached with head ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tomb—a radio loud-speaking outfit permanently set at 327 meters wave-length, which was to be the wave-length of his endowed broadcasting station. I don't know how Remington Solander first got his remarkable idea, but just about that time an undertaker in New York had rigged up a hearse with a phonograph so that the hearse would loud-speak suitable hymns on the way to the cemetery, and that may have suggested the loud-speaking tomb to Remington Solander, but it is not important where he got the idea. ...
— Solander's Radio Tomb • Ellis Parker Butler
... finally secured was in an unfashionable locality; there was a tailor shop next door and an undertaker across the street, and a clanging trolley car screeched on the curve at the end of the block; but the dignity of the pillared doorway, and the carved window casings, had appealed to Maurice; and also ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... kicks rained on him in that last valorous chapter of his life. He heard the decision placing the responsibility on the men from Denver, saw the sheriff and his deputies step forward and lay firm hands on their arms and lead them away; and then was aroused by the heavy entrance of the camp undertaker to make ready, for the quiet sleep, the body of ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... the tiny graveyard situated among the maize-fields to the north of Marosfalva, and which is the local Jewish burial ground, the suicide was quietly laid to rest. There was no religious service, for there was no minister of his religion present; an undertaker came down from Arad and saw to it all; there was no concourse of people, no singing, no flowers. Ignacz Goldstein—home the day before from Kecskemet—alone followed the plain deal coffin on its lonely journey from ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... with it a fresh supply of the genuine Oporto, which our merry companion, Blackstrap, called "his old particular." One of his stories, relative to a joke played off upon the Bolton trotters, by his friend Sable, the travelling undertaker, is too good to be lost. In Lancashire the custom of hoaxing is called 255trotting, and in many instances, particularly at Bolton, is still continued, and has frequently been played off upon strangers with a ruinous success. Sable had, it would appear, taken up his quarters at a commercial ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... one point connected with the deceased upon which the court is particularly anxious, namely, that the fiction of a full-sized coffin should be preserved, though there is so little to put in it. Upon the undertaker's stating in the Sol's bar in the course of the day that he has received orders to construct "a six-footer," the general solicitude is much relieved, and it is considered that Mr. Smallweed's ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... in Port Agnew, Donald called upon one Sam Carew. In his youth, Mr. Carew had served his time as an undertaker's assistant, but in Port Agnew his shingle proclaimed him to his world as a "mortician." Owing to the low death-rate in that salubrious section, however, Mr. Carew added to his labors those of a carpenter, and when outside jobs of carpentering ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... all right," she said at last. "I thought you were—well, never mind that. What about this Wheeler family? Are they going to settle with the undertaker? Because I tell you flat, I can't and won't. She owed me a month's rent, and her clothes won't bring over seventy-five or ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... house all day, dreading to see the undertaker's wagon drive up. But it did not come—not that day, nor the next, nor ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... in the greatest possible hurry as though they never could go quick enough; and then the coachmen would drive very fast also, though they did not know why, for a fast pace of movement is another of those contagious diseases. And then again the sportsmen would move at an undertaker's pace, when the fox had traversed and the hounds would be at a loss to know which was the hunt and which was the heel; and then the carriage also would go slowly, and the ladies would stand up and talk. And then the time for lunch came; ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... or three weeks after their original publication. One of these had reference to the "Fight with Fate," which was then being played at the Surrey Theatre; and as Mr. Banting and his famous cure (the stout undertaker lived but two doors from Leech, in The Terrace at Kensington, and struck up a pleasing friendship with the artist) were then the talk of the town, "The Arrow" suggested a revised version, "A Fight with Fat," with a disciple of Mr. Banting as ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... shop of modern times where goods are repaired or manufactured. They represent customs which now are irregular, but which formerly were permanent methods. It was a simple system, requiring no capital, no undertaker or manager, no middleman. Gradually these customs were replaced by many varied methods, such as the establishment of the laborer in his individual shop, who at first only made the raw material, which people brought him, into the finished product; later he was required ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... has been often used to signify inflammation of the peritoneum covering the intestines. On the other hand, no case of typhus or typhoid fever is mentioned as giving rise to dangerous consequences, with the exception of the single instance of an undertaker mentioned by Mr. Travers, who seems to have been poisoned by a fluid which exuded from the body. The other accidents were produced by dissection, or some other mode of contact with bodies of patients who ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... Here belong, besides formal crimes against property, games of chance,(332) usurious speculations ( 113) and measures taken to entice customers away from other competitors. Again, scientific experiments, means of communication etc., may be entirely unproductive in the individual economy of the undertaker, and yet be of more profit to mankind in general, than they have cost the former.(333) In this respect the nation's economy holds a middle place between individual economy and the world's economy.(334) Strictly speaking, only those employments ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... dress he wore: 'Ay, and if some that I could name possessed the hearts of mice, ye should have had me long ago. Mark me, my lad—and you about him do the same. There are a score among ye whom I see now and know, who are dead men from this hour. Begone! and rob an undertaker's while you can! You'll want some coffins ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... musing; "you wouldn't like a very little pony, with only one eye and a rat-tail, I suppose—it might look absurd with your long legs, I'm afraid—or else Mrs. Meek, the undertaker's widow, has got a very quiet one that poor Meek used to ride—a child could manage it:—there's the butcher's fat mare, but she won't stir a step without the basket on her back, and it would be so troublesome for you ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... that made them disinfect their houses," cried he, "and invented a little oven or something to steam mattresses and things. You are the man that nursed them and buried them when the undertaker died. You digged graves with your own hands—I say, I should like to ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... a blunt, hard-looking man, self-sufficient and formal. A woman said the undertaker brought him. Icier than the pitiless storm outside, yes, colder than ice were his words. He read a few verses from the Bible, and warned "the bereaved mother against rebellion at the divine decrees." He made a ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... might be well for some of that body to meet the incoming ship. Coroners Feinberg and Holtzhauser with Coroner's Physician Weston arranged to go down the bay on the Patrol, while Coroner Hellenstein waited at the pier. An undertaker was notified to be ready if needed. Fortunately ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... perceive that you are to have a funeral here very shortly. I am an undertaker, and shall be glad to take charge of furnishing the coffin and whatever else ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... BAZOUGE, an undertaker's assistant who lived in an attic of the same tenement-house as the Coupeaus and the Lorilleux. He was generally drunk and made ribald jests about his dismal calling. It was he who buried Gervaise Coupeau after she was found dead in an ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... clothing—and the relatives—he had no chance to save. At last he broke down, and the doctor told him it was an outdoor life, with absolute freedom from the strain of serving a man like Burgeman—or the undertaker for him. So he went to Burgeman, asked him to loan him the money to invest in a fruit-farm, and let him pay it off as fast ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... with the undertaker creeping around in his black, sneaking way, and I found when it was all over that she had secretly incorporated a face-bleach company and sold all she owned to it, complexion mask and all, and lost the whole of what she got on that year's Derby. I've understood from the boarding-house ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... 'you gentlemen have been very entertaining this morning. One would think Polly and I had come out for a stroll with a couple of undertaker's-men. There's surely time enough to think of such things yet! None of us ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... the undertaker did accordingly, with a visage of professional length and most grievous solemnity, distribute among the pall-bearers little cards, assigning their respective situations in attendance upon the coffin. As this precedence is supposed ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... borrowed from the guillotined, is a rallying point for anti-revolutionaries, whereupon, the next day, wigs are denounced at the Commune-council, and suppressed; "Barere roared with laughter on alluding to this piece of fun." The humor of an undertaker and the dexterity of a commercial drummer: he plays with Terror.—In like manner he plays with his reports, and at this latter exercise, he improvises; he is never embarrassed; it is simply necessary to turn the faucet and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... shape that future. But how can he amass money? Surely by enterprise. His being where he is proves that he has capacities, that he can take risks; is it remarkable, then, that sooner or later his unbridled acquisitiveness will turn him into a restless capitalist undertaker? Here again we have cause and effect. He undervalues the present; he overvalues the future. Hence his activities are such as they are. Is it too much to say that even today American civilization has something of the unfinished ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... here, assures me that those people who never need a doctor until they are well advanced in life are not likely to require a physician's services more than once. The next call is for the undertaker." ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... were called, differed widely from the Norman invaders of a former age. The Norman generally espoused the cause of some native chief, and took his pay in land; what he got by the sword he held by the sword. But the Undertaker was usually a man of peace—a courtier like Sir Christopher Hatton—a politician like Sir Walter Raleigh—a poet like Edmund Spencer, or a spy and forger like Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork. He came, in the wake of war, with his elastic "letters patent," ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... the assistant on a Peddletonian weekly, who made his little annual joke about the "first egg laid on our table," and who was the menial of every tradesman in the village and under bonds to him for frequent "puffs," except the undertaker, about whose employment he was recklessly facetious. In Washington he was an important man, correspondent, and clerk of two house committees, a "worker" in politics, and a confident critic of every woman and every man in ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... like to grouse and pretend every fall that the team's shot full of holes and that the world is a dark, dreary, dismal place and that winning from Claflin is only a hectic dream. For the love of lemons, fellows, chuck the undertaker stuff and cheer up. Talk about something interesting, or, if you must talk your everlasting football, cut out ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... that felt greasy to the touch and taste. The coffin was in a four-wheeled trap, for the solitary hearse that Mudgee boasted then was to meet them some three miles out of town—at the racecourse, as it happened, by one of those eternal ironies of fate. (Jones, the undertaker, had had another job that morning.) The long string of buggies and carts and horsemen; other buggies and carts and horsemen drawn respectfully back amongst the trees here and there along the route; male hats off and held rigidly vertical with right ears as the coffin passed; and drivers waiting ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... have made a shift to struggle in my part of the performance of this opera; which, as mean as it is, deserves at least a pardon, because it has attempted a discovery beyond any former undertaker of our nation; only remember, that if there be no north-east passage to be found, the fault is in nature, and not in me; or, as Ben Jonson tells us in "The Alchymist," when projection had failed, and the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... and two intimate friends, Mr. Henderson (one of the trustees and executors of the deceased) and Mr. Hayes (for many years his medical attendant), and was received by the council and officers of the Royal Academy, and their undertaker and his attendants, with every mark of respect. The body was then deposited in the smaller Exhibition-room, on the ground-floor, which was hung ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt |
