"Gravedigger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was to be seen before the house or in the streets. It was a moonlight night in May, but clouds were up. The procession moved through the sleeping city to the churchyard of St. James. Having arrived there they placed their burden on the ground at the door of the so-called Kassengewolbe, where the gravedigger and his assistants took it up. In this vault, which belonged to the province of Weimar, it was usual to inter persons of the higher classes, who possessed no burying-ground of their own, upon payment of a louis d'or. As Schiller had died without securing a resting-place for himself ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... was a learned man. 'He had turned over the leaves of Justinian's Institutes, and knew that they were written in Latin. He was well acquainted with the title-page of Blackstone's Commentaries, and argal (as the gravedigger in Hamlet says) he was not a person to be laughed at.' He attended the Parliament House in the character of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the celebrated speakers. He was the terror of essayists at the ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thinking how peaceful it was to rest here in the sacred earth of the churchyard. But surely it was just as peaceful over there in the house in which the bones were placed; and if neither church nor provost, chaplain nor sexton, gravedigger nor organist, bell-ringer nor acolyte, no, not one of them had got his due, it was quite impossible that it should be otherwise. And when he came to consider further, he thought that he could discover in these bare bones and these bleached skulls, an expression he knew only too well in life; ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... cholera, in order to enlarge this, a piece of wall was pulled down, and three acres of land by its side purchased; but all the new portion is almost tenantless; the tombs, as heretofore, continue to crowd together towards the gate. The keeper, who is at once gravedigger and church beadle (thus making a double profit out of the parish corpses), has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows smaller, and when there is an epidemic, he ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... I was now working only for the police. Regrettable as it was, I should have to surrender these two specimens to the coroner and the gravedigger. A deplorable waste of material, but unavoidable—even if one of them should prove to ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... think o' a midden i' the very middle o' your toon?" Sandy gaed on. "I paws for an answer," he said in a gravedigger's kind o' a voice. He crossed his legs ower ane anither, an' put ane o' his hands in ablo the tails o' his coat; an', gettin' akinda aff his balance, he gaed spung up again' Bandy Wobster. There was a crunch an' a splash, an' there was the chairman's bowd legs stickin' up oot o' ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... searched the church-books and discovered that a man of his name had been married one hundred and fifty years before. The bridegroom asked for food; but when he had eaten it he sank into a heap of ashes at the pastor's feet. The Transylvanian legend of "The Gravedigger in Heaven" also turns upon an invitation thoughtlessly given to a dead man and accepted. The entertainment is followed by a counter-invitation; and the gravedigger is forced to pay a return visit. He is taken to Heaven, where, among other things, he sees at intervals ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... heard except the shovelling of earth into the grave. "Hold your spade, John," the minister said to the gravedigger, and then even that sound stopped. "Go on," Mr. Dishart signed to ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... Russell, brimful of notes and venom, sate in his place, as impatient to rise as the captive and exuberant balloon which only strong ropes and the knotted arms of men hold tight to mother earth. Jimmy, however, has a passion for his ignoble calling; he sings at his work like the gravedigger in "Hamlet." And before the inflated Russell was able to explode, Jimmy had an hour or so to himself in the discussion of Mr. Mundella's efforts to deal with labour. It was on this occasion that Jimmy spread something like dismay in the bench on which he sate. Mr. Schloss, who had ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor |
