"Hangman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out into the dark street; but jury, judge, and hangman, could have done no more, and could do nothing ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... of bright, yet incomplete images which oppressed Tsiganok by their impetuosity, a new image came—how good it would be to become a hangman in a red shirt. He pictured to himself vividly a square crowded with people, a high scaffold, and he, Tsiganok, in a red shirt walking about upon the scaffold with an ax. The sun shone overhead, gaily flashing from the ax, and everything was so gay and bright that even the ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... had so done, I was again a little flustered; for in came the coachman with the look of a hangman, I thought, and madamed me up strangely; telling me, he would beg me to get ready to pursue my journey by five in the morning, or else he should be late in. I was quite grieved at this; for I began not to dislike my company, considering how things stood; and was in hopes ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... of anything, except the hangman's rope! I don't mind telling you that I have reasons to ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... long before they were all in the cart together, with the ropes about their necks, and the hangman down again upon the ground; and as soon as that was done, a great silence fell everywhere. I had seen Mr. Gavan say something to the hangman, and he answered again; but I could ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... take no stock in such truck as judges an' lawyers an' orders of court. They ain't intended to be took serious. They're all right for children an' Easterners an' non compos mentis people, I s'pose, but I've always been my own judge, jury, an' hangman, an' I aim to continue workin' my legislatif, executif, an' judicial duties to the end of the string. You look out! My pardner is young an' seems to like the idee of lettin' somebody else run his business, so I'm goin' to give him rein ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... Parliament with this audacious address?—Reject it as a libel? Treat it as an affront to government? Spurn it as a derogation from the rights of legislature? Did they toss it over the table? Did they burn it by the hands of the common hangman?—They took the petition of grievance, all rugged as it was, without softening or temperament, unpurged of the original bitterness and indignation of complaint; they made it the very preamble to their act of redress, and consecrated its principle to all ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... saw what had happened and what it might mean for him. He had left the hall door open after his visit to the front, and some wandering bird of the night had entered the house. No need for him to go now. No need to hide either from the hangman's rope or the felon's cell. The fool above had saved him. He turned and ran up stairs again just as the prisoner in his furious efforts to escape wrenched the handle from ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... that. The boldest fellows in that exploit were the liberated felons: they fought with desperation, for they had left the hangman behind.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... were not drawn (as is generally supposed) in illustration of the text. The portraits are taken from almost every grade in life: from the dressmaker to the draper's assistant, and from the housekeeper to the hangman; the last, by the way, being perhaps the most characteristic sketch of the series. The best of these forty-three "pictures" is the one which faces the title-page, a gathering of the company which individually take part in this "gallery of illustration." ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... was increased by the sale of Dunkirk to the French. Court intrigues led to the loss of his offices and he retreated to Calais. An apology which he sent to the Lords was ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. For six years, till his death in Rouen, he lived in exile, but he was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey. His private character in a dissolute age was unimpeachable. Anne Hyde, daughter of the earl, became Queen of England, as wife of James II., and was mother of two queens, Anne and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... lives, being therefore forfeited to society, belong to us; and it does not follow because they were not all killed in the attempt, that therefore they are not now to be brought out for punishment. And as there is no common hangman here, we, of course, must do this duty as well as every other. I have now clearly proved that I am justified in what I am about to do. But the argument does not stop there— self-preservation is the first law of nature, and if we do ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... stomach come, Whose noise whets valour sharp, like beer By thunder turn'd to vinegar, 110 (For if a trumpet sound, or drum beat, Who has not a month's mind to combat?) A squeaking engine he apply'd Unto his neck, on north-east side, Just where the hangman does dispose, 115 To special friends, the knot of noose: For 'tis great grace, when statesmen straight Dispatch a friend, let others wait. His warped ear hung o'er the strings, Which was but souse to chitterlings: 120 For ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Frenchman! I hold by the hand, at last, one of that noble race, the pioneers of the glorious principles of liberty and brotherhood. Hush! No, it is all right. I thought there had been somebody at the door. In this wretched, enslaved country we dare not even call our souls our own. The spy and the hangman, sir—the spy and the hangman! And yet there is a candle burning, too. The good leaven is working, sir—working underneath. Even in this town there are a few brave spirits who meet every Wednesday. You must stay over a day or so and join us. We do not use ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... days—when Church and State Were wedded by your spiritual fathers! And on submissive shoulders sat Yours Wilsons and your Cotton Mathers. No vile "itinerant" then could mar The beauty of your tranquil Zion, But at his peril of the scar Of hangman's whip and branding-iron. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to get up with the lark—Oh, no doubt —you'll get up with the hangman one of these days. But you ought to be ashamed to be jawing here like this, in a red blanket, on a forty-foot scaffold on top of the Alps. And no end of people down here to boot; this isn't any place for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wasn't at all surprised at Guy's shrinking and shunning him; what astonished him rather was the man's occasional and incredible fits of effrontery. How that fellow could ever laugh and talk at all among the ladies on deck—with the hangman at his back—simply appalled and horrified the proud soul of a Kelmscott. Granville had hard work to keep from expressing his horror openly at times. But still, with an effort, he kept his peace. With the picture of his father and Lady ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... possessed of a mean disposition, and still sulky over the encounter with Ajeet, was in an evil mood as they trudged through the jungle to their camp. When Ajeet spoke of the priest's success in his appeal, he snarled: "The hangman always advises the one who is to have his neck stretched that he is ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... in the vulgar, conveyed at once an expectation of a life to be presently prolonged to the swarthy de Sille, but after a time to be cut suddenly short by the hangman. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... 's a hangman's whip To haud the wretch in order; But where ye feel your honor grip, Let ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... proceedings the sufferers appealed to the parliament, which immediately took cognizance of the affair, and annulled the sentence of the capitoul as irregular, but they continued the prosecution, and, upon the hangman deposing it was impossible Antony should hang himself as was pretended, the majority of the parliament were of the opinion, that the prisoners were guilty, and therefore ordered them to be tried by the criminal court of Thoulouse. One voted him innocent, but after long debates ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... that the accusation against Lord Russell was true, and by calling the King, in a written paper, the Breath of their Nostrils and the Anointed of the Lord. This paper the Parliament afterwards caused to be burned by the common hangman; which I am sorry for, as I wish it had been framed and glazed and hung up in some public place, as a monument of baseness ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... ago, I began the struggle, and endured three years imprisonment for it; but we won that great right of mankind—free expression of thought. Now there is no press at all in Hungary; there is only the hangman and martial law. We established equal protection for every religion; now there is equal oppression for all. The Protestant Church had its own self-government for its churches and schools, won by victorious arms and secured ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... these remedies do not grow under glass. They are hardy plants, springing naturally in eager and animated natures. Artificial remedies might be efficacious in an artificial world. In a real world, the best we can do is to meet the plagues of life as Dick Turpin met the hangman's noose, "with manly resignation, though with considerable disgust." Moreover, disagreeable things are often very stimulating. A visit to some beautiful little rural almshouses in England convinced me that what kept the old inmates ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... execution a shocking brutality was shown. "When Mr Cook was cut down and brought to be quartered, one they called Colonel Turner calling to the Sheriff's men to bring Mr Peters near, that he might see it; and by and by the Hangman came to him all besmeared in blood, and rubbing his bloody hands together, he tauntingly asked, Come, how do you like this, Mr. Peters? How do you like this work?"[137] This Colonel Turner can hardly have been ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... that men of good will in Ireland prayed to be delivered from such a Parliament. Molyneux, the first of the Irish Parliamentary patriots, whose book, "The Case of Ireland's being Governed by Laws made in England Stated," was burnt by the common hangman, pleaded indeed for a reformed and independent Parliament, but only because fair representation in the English Parliament was at the time "a happiness they could hardly hope for." And a few years later the Irish House, in congratulating Queen Anne on the Union of England ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... that the supposed "headhunter" is not actuated at all by personal passion. He acts under what he considers as a moral obligation towards his tribe, just as the European judge who, in obedience to the same, evidently wrong, principle of "blood for blood," hands over the condemned murderer to the hangman. Both the Dayak and the judge would even feel remorse if sympathy moved them to spare the murderer. That is why the Dayaks, apart from the murders they commit when actuated by their conception of justice, are depicted, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... of the Vatican. In this dauntless spirit they came to New England to convert its inhabitants, or at any rate to establish the principle that in whatever community it might please them to stay, there they would stay in spite of judge or hangman. At first they came to Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher, sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in 1656, Endicott happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor, Richard Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... the dreadful name of the hangman of Witold's children, turned as pale as linen; after a moment he sat on a bench, shut his eyes, and began to wipe away the cold perspiration, which collected ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... will be kind enough to let us know its signification. I always understood that a derrick took its name from Derrick, the notorious executioner at Tyburn, in the early part of the seventeenth century, whose name was long a general term for hangman. In merchant ships, the derrick, for hoisting up goods, is always placed at the hatchway, close by the gallows. The derrick, however, is not a nautical appliance alone; it has been long used to raise stones at buildings; but the crane, and that excellent invention the handy-paddy, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... the head of the bronze horse whereon the stately figure of Marcus Aurelius sat in triumph before the door of the Pope's house, as it sits today on the Capitol before the Palace of the Senator. And Otto caused the body of murdered Roffredo to be dragged from its grave and quartered by the hangman and scattered abroad, a warning to the Regions and their leaders. They left Pope John in peace after that, and he lived five years and held a council in the Lateran, and died in his bed. Possibly after his rough experience, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... was tried on a charge of committing willful murder—was found guilty on the clearest evidence—and died on the scaffold by the hangman's hands. ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... filth and carrion that thou art, so to speak of a betrothed bride to her promised husband! If it were true, wretched villain! I would save the hangman his task, and break your traitor's throat with this hand—but thou liest! thou liest!" he shouted, pushing him to the other end of the narrow sleeping chamber. "In poor revenge thou liest! But if you wish to live, beware how you so ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... refuge in the house of his uncle, Mr. Gavin Cochrane of Craigmuir, who lived at no great distance from the place of encounter. Here he was seized and removed to Edinburgh, where, after being paraded through the streets bound and bare-headed, and conducted by the common hangman, he was lodged in the tollbooth on July 3rd, 1685, there to await his trial as a traitor. The day of trial came, and he was condemned to death, in spite of the most strenuous exertions of his aged father, Earl ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... I. But you are the scum of the earth, and what you would, or wouldn't do, could only interest the hangman." ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... or, again, on Sundays and holidays have been stopped by the crowd gathered round the pillory where some too easy-going husband sat crowned with a paper-cap in a hail-storm of mud and egg-shells and fruit-peelings, round the scaffold where some petty offender was being flogged by the hangman, until the fortunate appearance of a clement cardinal or the rage of the sympathising mob put a stop to the proceedings. Barbarous as we remember the Rome of the Popes, we must imagine it just a hundred times more ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... scoundrel! If my ears do not play me false, there are now three waiting for me to kick them to the hangman." ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... on that dreadful night; and both of the only two professions of which I can claim to know anything—the law and the stage—are closed to me, since I cannot find employment in either without revealing myself as a fellow who is urgently wanted by the hangman. As things are it is very possible that I may die of hunger, especially considering the present price of victuals in this ravenous city. Again I have recourse to Epictetus for comfort. 'It is better,' he says, 'to die of hunger having ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... how to build a house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I sat here in the main, working with my back to the building. At times the approach of a contractor upon the Study-walk gave me a panic like a hangman's step; often again as he discussed the weather, all phases and possibilities, reviewing the past season, before telling what he came for, I boiled over like a small pot, but noiselessly for the most part. With penetrative eye, distant but careful observations, I would refer him to the dream ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... their moments of pleasure. Now, if I were a grave-digger, or even a hangman, there are some people I could work for with a ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... that I have seen souffred att Coutu, after that they have passed the sallett, att their entering in to the village, and the rencounters that they meet ordinarily in the wayes, as above said. They tie the prisoners to a poast by their hands, their backs tourned towards the hangman, who hath a bourning fire of dry wood and rind of trees, which doth not quench easily. They putt into this fire hattchets, swords, and such like instruments of Iron. They take these and quench them on human flesh. They pluck out their nailes for the most part in this sort. ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... they will. Where is this monument? I was riding on an English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.—What is that?—I said.—That,— answered the coachman,—is THE HANGMAN'S PILLAR. Then he told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head, and started for home. In climbing a fence, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... every thought and every energy. And can we wonder at the kris-bearing, untaught, brooding Malay preferring such a death, looked upon as almost honourable to the cold-blooded details of suicide, if he wishes to escape from overwhelming troubles, or the merciless of the hangman and the disgrace of a public execution, when he has taken the law into his own hands and too hastily revenged himself upon his enemy? In either case he chooses rather ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... God, whom the prince desires his people to adore; the will of the priests, who govern the prince, always becomes the will of God. A wit justly observed, that the true religion is always that, on whose side are the prince and the hangman. Emperors and hangmen long supported the gods of Rome against the God of Christians; the latter, having gained to his interest the emperors, their soldiers, and their hangmen, succeeded in destroying the worship of ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... orphan boy. That boy, unmindful of her prayers, and forgetful of the sufferings she had endured for him—incessant anxiety of mind, and voluntary starvation of body—had plunged into a career of dissipation and crime. And this was the result; his own death by the hangman's hands, and his ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... protects our new religion. Collected in its innumerable files is the evidence in regard to suspected heretics who have dared impugn "business as usual", or who have dwelt too lovingly on peace and good will among nations. Books and pamphlets, although no longer burned by the common hangman, are forbidden the mails by somewhat undiscerning officials. We have a pious vocabulary of high resentment and noble condemnation, even as they had in the Middle Ages, and part of it is genuine, if unintelligent, as ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... west entrance (in January, 1605-6), four of the desperate Gunpowder Plot conspirators (Sir Everard Digby, Winter, Grant, and Bates) were there hung, drawn, and quartered. Their attempt to restore the old religion by one blow ended in the hangman's strangling rope and the executioner's cruel knife. In the May following a man of less-proven guilt (Garnet, the Jesuit) suffered the same fate in St. Paul's Churchyard; and zealots of his faith affirmed that on straws ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Speed he uttered a cry, then plunged through the crowd like a bull, but the lariat loop slipped to his neck and tightened like a hangman's noose. ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... Charles wrote with characteristic coolness, "if we can safely put him out of the way." But the new members were yet better churchmen than loyalists. At the opening of their session they ordered every member to receive the communion, and the League and Covenant to be solemnly burnt by the common hangman in Westminster Hall. The bill which excluded the bishops from their seats in the House of Lords was repealed. The conference at the Savoy between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians broke up in anger, and the few alterations made in the Liturgy were made ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... about this Monk and his doctrines; wished, however, to have done with the noise of him: in a space of some three years, having tried various softer methods, he thought good to end it by fire. He dooms the Monk's writings to be burnt by the hangman, and his body to be sent bound to Rome,—probably for a similar purpose. It was the way they had ended with Huss, with Jerome, the century before. A short argument, fire. Poor Huss: he came to that Constance Council, with all imaginable promises ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... jails, and instigating and urging him, by malicious insinuations and untruths, to increase, rather than relax his severities, heightening the cruelty of his orders by his manner of executing them, offering at one time a reward to one man to be hangman for another, threatening his life on refusal, and taking from his prisoners the little property their opportunities enabled them ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the end of it all?" demanded Mistress Nutter, sternly. "Erelong, they will be unable to furnish victims to their insatiate master, who will then abandon them. Their bodies will go to the hangman, and their souls ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... upon it," was the answer. And the obsequious anxiety of the hangman to seem polite and obliging, his apparent zeal to give satisfaction, though very natural seemed to me not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... loathsome trunks thrown into a deep hole under the gallows. The heads of those three notorious regicides, Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw, and Ireton are set upon poles on the top of Westminster Hall by the common hangman. Bradshaw placed in the middle (over that part where the monstrous high court of justice sat), Cromwell and his son-in-law Ireton on ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... have done there will be no need of courts, or judges, or lawyers for you. Like a wild beast you will be hunted down; you will be trampled under foot; you will be torn to pieces! Fire, the sword, the hangman's noose, clubs, and crowbars will not be enough to satisfy the vengeance of an outraged people upon a cold-blooded wretch who came to this country solely for the purpose of perpetrating a crime more awful than anything that was ever known before! Did you ever hear of lynching? I see by ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... court, who, while they thirsted for the pleasure of vengeance, were devising how to throw the odium of it upon the English. They wanted to employ an English man-of-war to carry the priests to Palermo for degradation, and then bring them back for execution; and they applied to Troubridge for a hangman, which he indignantly refused. He, meantime, was almost heartbroken by the situation in which he found himself. He had promised relief to the islanders, relying upon the queen's promise to him. He had distributed the whole of his private stock,—there was plenty of grain at ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... recover your fortune, and be a rich man, and then, when you are driving in your own coach, riding your own horse, will you still look at poor Rosa, the daughter of a jailer, scarcely better than a hangman?" ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... constitution were contriving its ruin, I wrote a pamphlet entitled "Lethe," which was published in Holland, and afterwards translated into English, and twice printed in London; and being reprinted in Dublin, proved so offensive to the ministry in Ireland, that it was burnt by the hands of the hangman. But so it is, that after having showed on all occasions my zeal for the royal family, and endeavoured to make myself serviceable to the public by several books published; after forty years' stay in England, and in an advanced age, I find myself and family destitute of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... The slain, both good and evil, are in their graves, out of the reach of hangman and assassin. Only the correspondent never dies. He is the true Pantheist—going out of nature for a week, but bursting forth afresh in a day, and so insinuating himself into the history of our era that it is beginning to be hard to find out where ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... Quilp, Krook, Smike, Smallweed, Miss Mowcher, and the dwarfs and wax-work of Nell's caravan; and runs entirely wild in Barnaby Rudge, where, with a corps de drame composed of one idiot, two madmen, a gentleman fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a blackguard, a hangman, a shrivelled virago, and a doll in ribands—carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs the hangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs the gentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... He had there, it was said, a sort of field, a hole, a lair. There were no neighbors, not even passers-by. Since he had dwelt in that valley, the path which led thither had disappeared under a growth of grass. The locality was spoken of as though it had been the dwelling of a hangman. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... and stowed the creature that had died miserably, without a chance for its life, away in one of his big pockets, a self-satisfied grin on his face as he glanced down the hedge and saw another bird swinging. So he followed his hangman's hedge, treating each bird to his pointed stick, carefully resetting the snares after him and clearing away the fallen leaves from the fatal pathways. When he came to the rabbit he harled him dexterously, slipped him over his long gun barrel, took his bearings in ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... welcomed him as his intimate friend. On the third or fourth day of the feast he took him to hunt in a wood where he had prepared an ambuscade, and while all the rest were engaged in the chase, the common hangman of Shrewsbury, one Godwin "port hund," or the town's hound, bribed by Edric to commit the crime, sprang from behind a bush, and foully assassinated the innocent ealdorman. Not to be behind his favourite in cruelty, Ethelred ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... beast; there are souls so sensitive that they will not kill a living thing. The man who can relate without regret so profound it is close akin to remorse the killing of another—no matter what the provocation, no matter what the circumstances—is next kin to the common hangman. ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... must have been for a long time out of her wits; some said she had been born so, others maintained that the roof had fallen right upon her head and injured her brain; others again affirmed that the marriage of her only daughter with the hangman was the cause of her mental aberration. There were some who even remembered the time when this woman was rich and respected, and then suddenly she had become a beggar, and subsequently a crazy beggar. Be that as it may, in those days this old woman exercised a peculiar ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... the civil war, which were given to the British Museum by his late majesty King George III. in 1762, there are three upon this subject. One is entitled, 'The Confession of Richard Brandon the Hangman (upon his death-bed), concerning his beheading his late Majesty. Printed in the year of the hangman's downfall, 1649.' The second is entitled, 'The last Will and Testament of Richard Brandon,' printed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... naught else could she compare it, and she was so young and strong, and full of love and life, and there should have been such bliss and peace before her but for one madness of her all-unknowing days. And this beside her—this man with the fair face and looks and beauteous devil's eyes, was her hangman, and carried his rope with him, and soon would fit it ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to turn. Incompetent Ferdinand had abdicated in favour of his nephew Francis Joseph. The well-drilled Austrian army had remained faithful to their war-lord. The hangman was given plenty of work and the Habsburgs, after the nature of that strangely cat-like family, once more landed upon their feet and rapidly strengthened their position as the masters of eastern and western Europe. They played the game of politics very adroitly ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... said the girl, but she thought within herself: "I shall only have to wait a week to give up your masked head into the hands of the hangman!" ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... soberly. "Nor can I solve entirely his purpose. He is my brother, and I am the next in line. We are not even on speaking terms; yet he is childless, and may feel some measure of dislike to have the family end in a hangman's knot. I can think of no other reason for his interference. I ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... Bolton, Eng., I met Billington, the official hangman, who was convinced that I could not escape from the restraint he used to secure those he was ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... warfare fighting against the heathen in Africa, and now they practise on poor harmless English folk the devil's tricks which they have picked up amongst the savages. The Lord help Monmouth's men should they be beaten! These vermin are more to be feared than hangman's ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... speculation when I could see better. Half the world's misery (Eden else) is owing to want of money, and all that want is owing to Bankrupts. I declare I would, if the State wanted Practitioners, turn Hangman myself, and should have great pleasure in hanging the first after my salutary law should be establish'd. I have seen no annuals and wish to see none. I like your fun upon them, and was quite pleased with ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... dwelling to which the average Anglo-Saxon will most promptly direct his steps, and the only one I have space to mention, is the so-called Maison de Tristan l'Hermite—a gentleman whom the readers of "Quentin Durward" will not have forgotten—the hangman-in-ordinary to that great and prompt chastener Louis XI. Unfortunately the house of Tristan is not the house of Tristan at all; this illusion has been cruelly dispelled. There are no illusions left at all, in the good city of Tours, with regard to Louis XI. His terrible castle ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... attendance of the gaoler as some sort of protection; and the gaoler, for his part, implored his reverence the chaplain to be of the party, as the hill was not in good spiritual repute. So, when the time came, the four started together, and the hangman and the farmer's son went before them to the foot of ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... would Desire to have her, and by any means, At any rate too, yet this common hangman That hath whipt off a thousand maids heads already— That he should glean the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... If the Jaylors be so pregnant what is the hangman, troe? By the time my misery hath brought me to climbe to his acquaintance I shall find a frend to the last gaspe. What's here? a Lady? are the weomen so cruell here ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... the eyes of the spectators. On its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... about a year ago this very day, when a gentleman came in, well dressed, an eyeglass stuck in his eye, impudent like a hangman's assistant, in fact a thoroughly fashionable young man. He said he had seen the notice that there was a room for rent up stairs, and wanted to see it. Of course I told him it was a wretched garret, unfit for people like him; but he insisted, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... that cut short many a career such as they pursued. They were soberly attentive to their studies, which were of a severely practical turn. Their teacher, Mr. David Willard, who was a resident of the university settlement in its old Delancey Street home has his own sound view of how to head off the hangman. Daily and nightly he gathers about him, in the house on Chrystie Street where he makes his home, half the boys and girls of the neighborhood, whom he meets as their friend, on equal terms. Mr. Willard, though a young man, ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... reserved for games, in which Wolfgang, Ingo's smaller brother (aged seven), also took part. Our favourite pastimes were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we found enormous amusement. Galgenspiel was Ingo's translation of "Hangman," a simple pastime which had sometimes entertained my own small brother on rainy days; apparently it was new in Germany. One player thinks of a word, and sets down on paper a dash for each letter in this word. It is the task of the other to guess the word, and he names the letters of the alphabet ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... a hangman's whip To hand the wretch in order; But where ye feel your honor grip, Let that aye be your border. 694 BURNS: ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... Hermiston" is historically veracious, we might fancy that one of their descendants would feel his activities somewhat cramped on Beacon Street, Boston. The Elliotts were a wild lot, and some of them did not escape the hangman. Their family tree appears to have been the gallows. But Stevenson tells us they were noted for their prayers, and at least one of them wrote poetry, and declaimed it, drunk, to Walter Scott, who ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, has been the aim and the achievement of many recent authors of distinction. How they have succeeded, let the populous state of the public jails attest. The office of 'dubsman' [hangman] has ceased to be a sinecure, and the public and Mr Joseph Hume have the satisfaction of knowing that these useful functionaries have now got something to do for their salaries. The number of their pupils has increased, is increasing, ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... Treason, indeed! What did the poor devil know about his new allegiance? But so it was; and as the jail was overstocked with others awaiting trial, it was deemed expedient to hasten the execution, and the culprits were sentenced to be hung on the following Friday—hangman's day. ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... he murmured under his breath. "Then I must be greedy all by myself. This is a case of the hangman's supper, isn't it? You are going to humour all my whims to-night. First of all, I want you to sit on this easy-chair, and, as you said I might lie down, I shall lie ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... fingers curled like snakes around the handle of his revolver. Nothing kept him from shooting that man, yes, and that woman also, but the certainty that the deed would make him a fugitive for life, subject everywhere to the summons of the hangman. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Time was when all the honest Whore-masters in the Neighbourhood would have rose against the Cuckolds to my Rescue. If Fornication is to be scandalous, half the fine things that have been writ by most of the Wits of the last Age may be burnt by the common Hangman. Harkee, [Mr.] SPEC, do not be queer; after having done some things pretty well, don't begin to write at that rate that no Gentleman can read thee. Be true to Love, and burn your Seneca. You do not expect me to write my Name from hence, but I am Your ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... comrades, but was afraid those two would hear. The comrades were also silent. Evidently everybody knew. In the corridors and in the cells everything was as still as death all that evening. They did not tap the wall nor sing. At ten the watchman came again and announced that a hangman had arrived from Moscow. He said it and went away. I began calling him back. Suddenly I hear Rozovsky shouting to me across the corridor: 'What's the matter? Why do you call him?' I answered something about asking him to get me some tobacco, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... He spoke about his future, which would be compromised, of the disgrace which would fall on all the family, went into a rage, arid pitied neither my tears nor my prayers, and treated me with the cruelty of a hangman. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... dear sir, in my humble way: 'tis a panegyric I mean to write, and not a satire. Were I to sing as you would have me, the town would tear the poet in pieces, and burn his book by the hands of the common hangman. Do you not use tobacco? Of all the weeds grown on earth, sure the nicotian is the most soothing and salutary. We must paint our great duke," Mr. Addison went on, "not as a man, which no doubt he is, with weaknesses like the rest of us, but as a hero. 'Tis in a triumph, not a ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... my youth, there were detestable books which ought to have been burned by the hands of the common hangman, for they contained questions and answers to be learned by heart, of this sort, "What is a horse? The horse is termed Equus caballus; belongs to the class Mammalia; order, Pachydermata; family, Solidungula." ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... say, over again. Then, before the cart was drawn away from him to leave him to hang, he asked pardon of all them he had offended, and even of the Queen, if he had indeed offended her. Then one of the sheriffs called on the hangman to make an end; so Mr. Nelson prayed again in silence, and then begged all Catholics that were there once more to pray that, by the bitter passion of Christ, his soul might be received into everlasting joy. And they did so; for ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... Holy Spirit is clearly and fully refuted, 1647. This was his first heretical work, and it was followed by a number of others that were written during the intervals in which the Puritan parliament allowed him out of prison. It was burned by the hangman as blasphemous. Biddle finally died in prison, unrepentant ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... of a soldier!" shouted the prisoner, enraged beyond all control. "They are orders for a jailer, a hangman, a scullion—no soldier who wears the sword of a civilized nation can take such orders. The war is over; the South is conquered; I have no country save America. For the honour of the flag, for which I once poured out my blood on the ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... mob murders in India or Turkey or Persia than in some Christian States of the great Republic. Neither will you find more train robbers, more forgers, more thieves in heathen lands than in Christian countries. Here the jails are full, the penitentiaries are crowded, and the hangman is busy. All over Christendom, as many assert, crime is on the increase, going hand in hand with poverty. The truth is, that some of the wisest and best men are filled with apprehension for the future, but I believe in the race and ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... is. The smaller the number of persons engaged in working that political mechanism, which is never productive, but merely regulative, the better it would seem to be for the people. We do not desire ever to see a woman occupy the office of a hangman, nor of a prosecuting attorney, nor yet of an electioneering politician; because, these being transient accompaniments of an imperfect society, the desideratum is to have concentrated on them the interest and energy of the ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... well, he owes me forty shillings, (my wife lent him out of her purse; by sixpence a time,) besides his lodging; I would I had it: I shall have it, he saith, next Action. Helter skelter, hang sorrow, care will kill a cat, up-tails all, and a pox on the hangman. ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... ultra-conservative wing of the court party, the Czar abandoned the reforms which he had declared to be the expression of his "inflexible will,"[29] and permitted his governors and governors-general to "put down sedition" in the old arbitrary way, with imprisonment, exile, the Cossack's whip and the hangman's noose. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... those who whispered graft and bribery in connection with his name. There are a few very good and very dull people who try to stop all adverse criticism. All raillery strikes them as cruel. They would like to see every parody murdered by the common hangman. Even the best of comedy is constitutionally repellent to them. They want only highly colored characters from which every mellow shade of fault has been obliterated. One cannot say that they have a real love ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... daughters of Hungary! Tread now the measure so long delayed. Murdered our sons by the shot or the hangman! In this land of pleasure, oh! be not dismayed;— Now is the time, brown daughters of Hungary, To dance to the measure ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet |
