"Mortuary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... debarring from the sacraments, but left to the free will of the givers (Concilia Scotiae, ii. 148, 149). The Council met this demand for reformation by enacting that in future the poor should be freed from mortuary dues, while those not quite so poor were only to pay them in a modified form; and the small tithes and oblations were to be taken up before Lent so as to avoid the appearance of selling the sacrament (Ibid., ii. 167, 168, 174). When, on the 27th of May 1560, the reforming vicar of Lintrathin ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... John Arniston was at the mortuary. Of course, he found a pressman there with a notebook before him. With him he arranged what should be said the next morning, and how the inquest should be reported. There was no doubt about the identity, and John Arniston soon possessed the proofs of it. But, after all, there was ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... life could be lived here now. But I have to remember that at the end of the eighteenth century, and under the illumination of the 'ideas of 1789,' the tomb of this Princess in the chapel of Ste-Catherine was broken into, and her bones flung about on the floor of the mortuary vault, while at the end of this nineteenth century the legitimate owners of the chateau which has replaced the home of Louise de Lorraine et de Conti have been driven into exile for no other crime but that of their birth ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... it best to get the advice of a publisher who was one of my private friends. I wrote him at once to come and join me at Lusance; and while waiting for his arrival I took my hat and cane and made visits to the different churches of the diocese, in several of which I knew there were certain mortuary inscriptions to be found which ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... of the unknown girl had been removed to the mortuary for a post-mortem examination, but nothing else had been moved, and two officers of the C.I.D. were busy making ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... Alcock, LL.D., Master of the Rolls. Bishop of Rochester; afterwards of Worcester; translated to Ely. Founder of Jesus College, Cambridge. Bishop Alcock built the elaborate mortuary chapel in which his remains lie buried, and much of the Episcopal Palace ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... a burning question in Scotland, and about Annie's time the flames raged with peculiar ferocity. Her father, Sir Robert Laurie, was a bitter enemy of the Covenantry, and his name finds a somewhat unenviable fame in mortuary verses of this sort ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... for the priests at every halting-place on the road of life—fees at weddings, fees at funerals, fees whenever an excuse could be found to fasten them. Even when a man was dead he was not safe from plunder, for a mortuary or death present ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the mortuary," said the police officer. "And then you must come into the office and sign," he added to the convoy soldier, who had not left the convict for ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... built all the time. There is a certain melancholy interest in wandering through these silent streets, peering through the windows and recognizing over the vaults names famous in Florence. One learns quickly how bad modern mortuary architecture and sculpture can be, but I noticed one monument with some sincerity and unaffected grace: that to a charitable Marchesa, a friend of the poor, at the foot of whose pedestal are a girl and baby done ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... sir?" he said. "Dr. Stern must hold a post mortem before the inquest, and he suggested that it could be carried through more easily in the mortuary attached to the Cottage Hospital. ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... dynasty are almost all comprised in the sculptured stone slabs embellishing mortuary chambers and of these the artistic merit is most unequal.[4] Their technique is primitive. It consists in making the contours of figures by cutting away the stone in grooves with softened angles, leaving the figure in silhouette. Engraved ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... stooped? Perhaps in giving her up to Strefford he might be saving her. At any rate, the taste of the past was now so bitter to him that he was moved to thank whatever gods there were for pushing that mortuary paragraph under his eye.... ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... part. The cabbages had a bulky, prosperous appearance; the carrots looked bright and gay; and the lettuces lounged in line with an air of careless indolence. And as he looked at them all, the markets which he had left behind him that morning seemed to him like a vast mortuary, an abode of death, where only corpses could be found, a charnel-house reeking with foul smells and putrefaction. He slackened his steps, and rested in that kitchen garden, as after a long perambulation amidst deafening noises and repulsive odours. The uproar and the sickening humidity ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... the globe. To such as are in quest of health, no comparison can be instituted, as it has been demonstrated that the Northwest, especially in the region of the lakes, possesses the most invigorating climate in the world. A reference to the mortuary tables removes all doubt on this point. In the town of Marquette, on Lake Superior, containing a population of over three thousand, there were during the last year but eight deaths, and only a portion of ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... as certain sins and certain crimes are still considered to be inevitable in the world; the alternative of avoiding them has never occurred to any one. Class-rooms have black desks, and bare, gray walls, more devoid of ornament than those of a mortuary chamber; this is to the end that the starved and famishing spirit of the child may "accept" the indigestible intellectual food which the teacher bestows upon it. In other words, every distracting element has to be removed ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... all adornment (and so best) To Nature's reverential hand. The tomb, Made ready there for a fresh habitant, Was that of an old family. I knew it.— A very ancient altar-tomb, where Time With his rough fretwork mark'd the sculptor's art Feebly elaborate—heraldic shields And mortuary emblems, half effaced, Deep sunken at one end, of many names, Graven with suitable inscriptions, each Upon the shelving slab and sides; scarce now Might any but an antiquarian eye Make out a letter. Five-and-fifty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... it has been placed on the site allotted for it in Union Square. It is very creditable to the Republican Party that they exercised such control over their feelings when the day for unveiling the LINCOLN Monument arrived. Some parties might have made a demonstration on the occasion of post-mortuary honors being accorded to a leader whom they professed to worship while he lived, and whom they demi-deified after his death. No such extravagant folly can be laid at the door of the Republican Party. "Let bygones be bygones" is their motto. They allowed ...
— Punchinello Vol. 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870 • Various
... from a mortuary where a skull had voice, London may be restorative as air of Summer Alps. It is by contrast blooming life. Observe the fellowship of the houses shoulder to shoulder; and that straight ascending smoke of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and its surrounding of little vari-colored one story cafes and shops (which are themselves like bits of operatic scenery), does not so much suggest to the imagination a home of modern opera, as a mournful mortuary chapel haunted by the ghosts of old half-forgotten composers: Herold, Spontini, Mehul, Varney; old conductors, long since gone to dust: Prevost, John, Calabresi; old arias of Meyerbeer, Auber, and Donizetti; ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... It was the mortuary ground of these Indians that occupied the only level spot we could get for the block-house. Their dead were buried in canoes, which rested in the crotches of forked sticks a few feet above-ground. The graveyard was not large, containing probably from forty to fifty canoes ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... and the strange room in which he found himself was the mortuary chapel. Nothing disturbed the impressive silence of this vast resting place. In the distance a clock struck five, and far off Juve perceived the silhouette of ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... being "steady" and "a comfort," like Mary 'Liza. Even my less critical father's shout of laughter at any unusual freak or experiment abraded my moral cuticle sometimes. At home the colored children would have entered heartily into my mortuary enterprise,—yes! and kept my counsel. The reticence of the serf exceeds in dumb doggedness that of a misunderstood child. But I did not play with Uncle Carter's little negroes. Every Southern child comprehended the distinction between ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... of Cushing lying in a modest little mortuary chapel of an undertaking establishment on the main street. Kennedy at once began his investigation by discovering what seemed to have escaped others. About the throat were light discolourations that showed that the young inventor had been ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... turned in the lock and withdrawn, but immediately accounted for the fact on the theory that the surgeon wished to prevent any one from finding his visitor lest the secret should be divulged. He was not a nervous man, and had no especial horror of being left alone in a mortuary chamber for a few minutes. He looked about him, and saw that the room was high and vaulted. One window alone gave air, and this was ten feet from the floor and heavily ironed. He reflected with a smile that if it pleased the surgeon to leave him there he could not possibly get ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... here," remarked Miss Roscoe, impersonally, addressing the world at large. Then she called to the girl between the box rows. Was there a touch of amusement in the mortuary voice? ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... We sat down in the "horsehair" chairs of a well-to-do farmer's parlor—furnished in black walnut, with the usual organ against one wall, and the usual marble-topped bureau against the other. I remember the "store" carpet, the mortuary hair-wreaths on the walls, the walnut-framed lithographs of the Church authorities and of the angel Moroni with "the gold plates;" and none of these seem ludicrous to me to remember. They express, to me, in the recollection, some of the homely and devout simplicity of the ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... sculptures. The walls slope at an angle of seventy-five or eighty degrees externally, but in the interior are perpendicular. The roof is composed of large flat stones. Strictly speaking, the chambers are not actual tombs, but mortuary chapels. The embalmed body of the deceased, encased in its wooden coffin (Gen. 1. 26), was not deposited in the chamber, but in an excavation under one of the walls, which was carefully closed up after the coffin had been placed inside it. The chamber was used by the relations for sacred ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... into that pretty deeply. But the inside of the Cathedral's like a rabbit-warren, and whoever threw the man through that doorway no doubt knew how to slip away unobserved. Now, you'll have to remove the body to the mortuary, of course—but just let me fetch Dr. Ransford first. I'd like some other medical man than myself to see him before he's moved—I'll have him ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... (I cannot resist giving it the mortuary of capital letters) had been, as my readers know, that I should be exclusively and consecutively dedicated through the whole of my life, 'to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised service of the ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Kairouiyin, but fairly definite information as to its plan has been gleaned by students of Moroccan art. The number of its "countless" columns has been counted, and it is known that, to the right of the mirhab, carved cedar doors open into a mortuary chapel called "the mosque of the dead"—and also that in this chapel, on Fridays, old books and precious manuscripts are sold ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... Clonmacnois, who is said to have been the last Irish saint who raised the dead. St. Aedh (Hugh) died in the year 1004, "after a good life, at Ard-Macha, with great honour and veneration." And in the year 1018, we have the mortuary record of St. Gormgal, of Ardvilean, "the remains of whose humble oratory and cloghan cell are still to be seen on that rocky island, amid the surges of the Atlantic, off the coast ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... to accompany this man—one of my officers—to the mortuary, to see if you can identify the body I have told you of. Perhaps you gentlemen will accompany Miss Lennard? Then," he continued, rising, "if you will all return here, we will go into this matter further, and see if we can ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... important element of the supply. In Russia several attempts to gain an anatomy act have been made, but have always been opposed by those in authority, and there is good reason to believe that bodies are procured by bribing hospital and mortuary attendants. It is said that the army contributes a large percentage of the total number. In Turkey no facilities for dissecting the dead body exist, as the practice is against the Mahommedan religion; the German pathologists in Turkey, however, insist on making post ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... most impressive, consisting of the walls and tower of an old church building, the walls of a mortuary chapel at the north end of the church, and a surrounding court with adobe walls six feet high. These, like all the Spanish missions, were built by Indian converts under the direction of priests, for the Spanish invaders ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... to say that the dead steersman has been reverently removed from the place where he held his honourable watch and ward till death, a steadfastness as noble as that of the young Casabianca, and placed in the mortuary ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... Jinny, after quietly surveying the stranger, uttered a sardonic bray, and ambled away to the little cemetery on the hill, whose tangled chapparal effectually prevented all pursuit by her skilled antagonist. From that day she forsook the camp, and spent her Sabbaths in mortuary reflections among the pine head-boards and cold ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... they look like twin arks of safety, floating just five feet above the troubles of this life. These buildings are most of them painted red; and there is fine carving on panels, friezes and pediments, and also much tawdry gaudiness. Behind these two sanctuaries is the mortuary chapel where repose the memories of many of the greatest in the land. Behind this again are the priests' dormitories, with a lovely hidden garden hanging on the slopes of a sudden ravine; its presiding genius is an old pine-tree, beneath which Nichiren himself, a contemporary ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... common in churches even where the sedilia or stone seats are wanting, and not only in the chancel, but also in the south walls at the east end of the north and south aisles, and in mortuary chapels, as will be presently noticed; it appears, in short, to have been an indispensable appendage to ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... Death has placed its irrevocable stamp upon him; he has served his three years in the pits; has been transferred to the breakers when the signs of failing strength are perceived by the mine overseer. In another year he will be in the hands of the mortuary vulture; his last week's earnings will go to pay for the hard earned grave that is grudgingly ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... which, we are informed by Engineering, whence we take the annexed engravings, has branches in various parts of the world), was held in Dresden. Before this meeting, a large number of designs for cremation and mortuary buildings were brought in competition, and finally the prize was awarded to Mr. G. Lilienthal, a Berlin architect, for ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... known as the Abbot's Mortuary was kept at Furness throughout three centuries. This was almost unique among Cistercian monasteries, for only names of those abbots who, having presided for ten years, continued at the abbey and died abbots there, were entered ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... the mortuary, of course," said she, in answer to Reginald's question. "Where else do ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... the only body I could recognize in the Queenstown mortuary, and perhaps it will interest his many friends in London and New York to know that the famous manager's face in death gives uncommonly convincing evidence that he died without a struggle. It wears a serenely ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... accordance with German etiquette, the Count's funeral obsequies could not take place for a month, in the presence of all his relatives and friends, who came from a great distance, the corpse, embalmed and placed in a leaden coffin, lay in state under a canopy in the mortuary chapel. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... congregation was at the moment directed to the bride and bridegroom, who were returning from the vestry with the bridal party behind them, and thus the painful incident made no sensation among the crowded congregation. The body was removed to the parish mortuary, and from subsequent inquiries it transpired that death had been due to poison self-administered, and that the deceased was Elizabeth Anne Love (twenty-four), of no occupation, but formerly a nurse —a circumstance which had ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... universally liquor was served to all who had to do with a funeral, let me give the bill for the mortuary expenses of David Porter, of Hartford, who was drowned ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... casket industry had by now almost completely automated box-making and gravedigging, with some interesting assembly lines and packaging arrangements; there still remained the jobs of management and distribution. The President of General Mortuary, an ebullient fellow affectionately called Sarcophagus Sam, put it well. "As long as I have a single prospective customer, and a single Stockholder," he said, mangling a stogie and beetling his brows ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)
... adopted by the Church for the Sundays in Advent and in Lent, and for penitential services. It was the colour of the mortuary-shroud of the kings of France; during the Middle Ages it was the attribute of mourning, and it is at all times the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... we well How each of us must prove Love's infidel; Still out of ecstasy turn trembling back To earth's same empty track Of leaden day by day, and hour by hour, and be Of all things lovely the cold mortuary. ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... icy assurance of manner. It seemed to him that the voice of the bishop's, but just now so playful and gay, had become funereal and sad; that the wax lights changed into the tapers of a mortuary chapel, the very glasses of wine into ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... makes a woman,' says Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Rather, she takes herself seriously when she makes the average spiritual woman: as seriously as that woman takes herself when she makes a novel. And in a like mood Nature made New England and endowed her with purpose, with mortuary frivolities, with long ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... slyly, "when you've had your fill of bugs, make him show you the Book of Obituaries. He thereby stands revealed in his true colors. Why, he made me buy the old Clarion and hire Jim Dabney to run it, so his supply of mortuary gems shouldn't be cut off untimely. ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... our misfortune not to see the magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages concerning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... was calmer. To my trembling inquiries he said something consolatory as to the blessed relief of tears. When not praying fervently in the mortuary chamber, he could be seen pacing the gallery in a severe aloofness of meditation. In the evening he took me by the arm, and, without a word, led me up a narrow and winding staircase. He pushed a small door, and we ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Police Court, alleging that her husband had disappeared in the above neighborhood. The police are extremely reticent, but at the present they have no clue to the authors of the outrage. The body awaits identification at the mortuary, and an ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... anchorite, one Fray Diego, "whose life and miracles," says Olivarez, "are so notorious;" and the bones of St. Justus and St. Pastor, the tutelar saints of the university of Alcala. Amid solemn litanies the relics of Fray Diego were laid upon the prince's pillow, and the sudarium, or mortuary cloth, which had covered his face, was placed upon ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... them up—" He pointed to the prisoners asleep in their beds. "They will give me away, and I shall be transferred to the cell in the upper floor. I know my way from there. What I want you for is to unscrew the prop in the door of the mortuary." "I can do that. But where ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... of endurance, asserting herself at last — and they laid him down in his old favourite haunt, with his books around him, having made the place look like it did before the house had been turned into a veritable hospital and mortuary. ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... said Chief Inspector Kerry. He tilted his bowler hat farther forward over his brow and contemplated the ghastly exhibit which lay upon the slab of the mortuary. Two other police officers—one in uniform—were present, and they treated the celebrated Chief Inspector with the deference which he had not only earned but had always demanded from ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the reign of Henry VIII, is an anachronism. The nunnery of Holy Island is altogether fictitious. Indeed, St. Cuthbert was unlikely to permit such an establishment; for, notwithstanding his accepting the mortuary gifts above mentioned, and his carrying on a visiting acquaintance with the abbess of Coldingham, he certainly hated the whole female sex; and, in revenge of a slippery trick played to him by an Irish princess, he, after death, inflicted severe ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... quality which is the special gift of the man born for a teacher,—the power of exciting an interest in that which he taught. While he was present the apartment I speak of was the sunniest of studios in spite of its mortuary spectacles. Of the students I met there I best remember James Jackson, Junior, full of zeal and playful as a boy, a young man whose early death was a calamity to the profession of which he promised to be a chief ornament; the late Reverend ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ignored my existence. The coffin was unlashed and lowered from the leading coach; the clergyman at the gate began to recite the sacred office, and the funeral train, reduced to decorum by his voice, followed him as he turned, and trooped along the path towards the mortuary chapel. I moved with the crowd to its porch, drew aside to make way for a lady in rouge and sprigged muslin, and slipped behind the chapel wall. The far end of it hid me from the view of the coaches, and from it ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in with a stretcher. The corpse was pushed on to it and carried away to the mortuary. There it would be sewn up in an army blanket, ready for burial. And then a telegram would be sent to a wife or mother, informing her that her husband or son had "died ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... impassable; but Mr. Beeson did not so much as pull his eyes out of the coals. And even when the door was pushed open he only shrugged a little more closely into himself, as one does who is expecting something that he would rather not see. You may observe this movement in women when, in a mortuary chapel, the coffin is borne ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... With these mortuary evidences also are found domestic implements, stone clubs, arrow points and, particularly valuable, prayer sticks and religious implements that clearly show the archaeologist a connection with the pueblo-dwelling peoples who still live, under ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... in Scarnham," said Polke. "He'll have to be taken down to the town mortuary. We'd better see to it at once. What are you going to do, Starmidge?" he asked, as the detective turned ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... the indication of their offices—MacGibbon's Mortification, Dunderave Estate, Coil's Trust, and so on; he sat with a shrieking quill among these things, and MacTaggart entering to him felt like thanking God that he had never been compelled to a life like this in a stinking mortuary, with the sun outside on the windows and the clean sea and the singing wood calling in vain. Perhaps some sense of contrast seized the writer, too, as he looked up to see the Chamberlain entering with a pleasant, lively air of wind behind him, and health and vigour in his step, despite ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... apparatus is saturated, has turned into mud, as though there had been a shower of rain. Through the hole at the bottom, which is protected by a flat pebble, the gruel trickles drop by drop. It is a still at work, a mortuary still, in which the Snake is being drawn off. Wait a week or two; and the whole will have disappeared, drunk up by the sun: naught but the scales and bones will remain ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... mother would get into her head it might be her dear girl that was lying there alone and unclaimed; and she would pay her fare—if she could afford it—or if not, trudge the distance on foot, creep, trembling, into the mortuary or the public-house where the body lay, blue from drowning, or with the ugly red gash across the throat, take one look, and then cry with a sigh of relief, "No, it ain't my child," and return again ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... proceeded to a third mortuary, if it may so be called, and here Maqueda pointed out the skeleton of a man, in front of which stood a tray piled up with what evidently had been the medicine bottles of the period and among them a number ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... as to prevent our lapsing into the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest again. The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in some mediaeval church we cast down our eyes to muse over a fresco of Giotto, and are reminded of the transitoriness of life by the mortuary tablets under our feet. The vast superiority of Bunyan over Spenser lies in the fact that we help make his allegory out of our own experience. Instead of striving to embody abstract passions and temptations, he has given us his own in all their pathetic simplicity. He is the Ulysses of ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... and government; of certain social and economic conditions, and of its products. The second book, consisting also of ten chapters, treats of the religion and superstitions of the Chinese (wherein some peculiar parallels with the Christian religion are drawn), their mortuary and marriage customs, and treatment of the poor and infirm. The third book has twenty-four chapters, wherein are treated, in some detail, many different matters relating to China. These include an historical account ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... the foot of hills laid out in vineyards hedged by the prickly cactus, or lightly sprinkled with myrtles and cystus, and all those odoriferous plants which now perfumed the balmy night air. Embowered in these, we had remarked some mortuary chapels, the burying-places of Ajaccian families. One of them, high up on the hill-side, was in the form of a Grecian temple; and we now passed another, standing among cypresses, close to the shore. Nearer the city, two stone pillars stand at the entrance ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... head or call out a confederate youth from a closet, as the woman might have expected. To the left was a green baize door, outlined with brass-studded rivets like a cheerful coffin-lid, and bearing the mortuary inscription, "Private." This he pushed open, and entered the ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... with ambition for ever; I had feared his strongly religious nature would lead him to see a "judgment" upon him and her for having exaggerated her indisposition to gain a political point. And I had mapped out what I would say to induce him to go on. Instead, after a few of those stereotyped mortuary sentences, he shifted to politics and was presently showing me that her death had hardly interrupted his plannings for the presidential nomination. As for the "judgment," I had forgotten that in his religion his deity was always on his side, and his misfortunes were always of the evil one. ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... to describe in concise phrases how its defenders had sought by such destruction to isolate themselves from a storm. He spoke of the loss of men that huge downfall had entailed in an indifferent tone. He indicated an improvised mortuary among the wreckage showed ambulances swarming like cheese-mites along a ruinous groove that had once been a street of moving ways. He was more interested in pointing out the parts of the Council House, the distribution of the besiegers. In a little while the civil contest that ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... leading thoroughfares and an efficient system of street naming and numbering. The sights are the usual ones of every large Continental city, such as churches, museums, and picture galleries; e.g. the Church of San Roque, the Church of San Vincente with its remarkable Royal Mortuary Chapel, the church and convent at Belem, and the gardens of the Escola Polytechnica. But a day should certainly be set apart for a trip to Cintra (17m. by rail, trains about every hour). The town (pop. 5000, hotel—Lawrence's) ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... at Zermatt is the village church, with the adjoining churchyard. The church, dedicated to Saint Maurice, a favorite saint in the Valais and Rhone district, is plain but interesting and in parts is quite old. Near it is a little mortuary chapel. In most parts of Switzerland, it is the custom, after the bodies of the dead have been buried a certain length of time, to remove the remains to the "charnel house," allowing the graves to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... which was the most respectable thing to suffer in those times. In the reign of Queen Anne, Colonel Maurice Hussey sold Cahirnane to the Herberts, and there is a garden still called Hussey's Garden in the property. He built a mortuary chapel for himself on the top of a small hill just outside the gates of Muckross, where his own grave near that beautiful abbey can ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... frequently played but too small a role in all these trappings of despondency, and the insignificance of the deceased might only be likened to the secondary position of a man at his own wedding. It was all fuss and mortuary feathers, mourning rings and mulled wine in the one case, just as in the other it is entirely a show of bride and blushes, flounces and femininity. [Footnote A: In writing of the customs connected with old-time English funerals, Misson says: "The relations and ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... candlesticks with dangling crystals that glittered red and yellow and purple in the lamplight, in front of a cracked mirror that seemed a window into another dingier room. The paper was peeling off the damp walls, giving a mortuary smell of mildewed plaster that not even the reek of beer and tobacco ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... replied. "He was stabbed by some one who stole in through the bathroom—they say that he couldn't ever have moved again. The Commissioner of Police is upstairs. The ambulance is round at the back to take him off to the Mortuary." ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... YARROW was still engaged in preparing the material for the final volume upon the mortuary customs of the North American Indians, in the prosecution of which the large amount of information received and obtained from various sources has been carefully classified and arranged under proper divisions, so ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... The study of the mortuary rites and customs of the primitive peoples of all ages of the world's history (548) reveals many instances of the belief that when men, "the common growth of mother-earth," at last rest their heads upon her lap, they ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... no great issue ever resolved in Mariposa before the legal tribunal, which has not added its corpses to the mortuary selections lying in queer assortment ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... it is full of heavy, mortuary perfumes, for a couple of florist's men have just finished decorating the chancel with flowers and potted palms. Just behind the chancel rail, facing the center aisle, there is a prie-dieu, and to either side of it are great banks of lilies, carnations, gardenias ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... and seaweed, rice and rice-wine, which were made to the spirit of the Founder of the Empire twenty-five hundred years ago. But before the period of Chinese influence the family would seem to have worshipped its dead only before the mortuary house, or at the grave; and the spirits were yet supposed to dwell especially in their tombs, with access to some mysterious subterranean world. They were supposed to need other things besides nourishment; and ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... divinities, and from the general desire to die the death of the slain, yet I find little trace of ancestor worship. The dead are feared, their burial place is shunned, their character is deemed perfidious, and relations with them are terminated by a farewell mortuary feast, after which it is expected that they will depart, to ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... dead called back one must go to some priest— Buddhist or Shinto—who knows the rite of incantation. And the mortuary tablet, or ihai, of the dead must be brought to ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... the coin in a brand-new travelling suit intended for his own service. Such an apology for a dinner had not been seen during the last four months of wild travel—unpleasant when guests have been bidden to a feast! The night at the Docks, also, was a trifle mortuary, over-silent and tranquil: all hands, officers and men, who could not get leave to sleep ashore, simply took leave—I believe myself to have been for a time both captain and crew of the Sinnr. And, lastly, we heard that both ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... its service. He was instructed in religion by churchmen in Paris, and learned the language. Oh, my dear monsieur—I think it is Iroquois that he is called—I am aware the Americans have different manners, but here we do not go into the mortuary chapel of the Hotel Dieu and disarrange the bodies ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of St. Clara. In the background appears a partly demolished convent building, from which a gang of workmen are carrying out timber and debris. At the left is a mortuary chapel. Its windows are lighted from within, and whenever the door is opened, a brilliantly illuminated crucifix on the chancel wall, with a sarcophagus standing in front of it, becomes visible. A number of the graves have been opened. ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... that the forces of society tend to hurl them out of existence. We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary, when the dead waggon drove up and five bodies were packed into it. The conversation turned to the "white potion" and "black jack," and I found they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who in the Infirmary gave too ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... "dead boat" which carries the city's unclaimed corpses away for burial had long ago left, when we arrived. The anxious callers who pass all day through the portals of the mortuary chamber seeking lost friends and relatives had disappeared. Except for the night keeper and one or two assistants, the Morgue was empty ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... Jack-o'-lanterns or phosphorus), stagger forth shuddering, home-bound citizens, nerved by the tankards within to their fearsome journey adown that eldrich avenue lined with the bloodstained weapons of the fighting dead. What street could live inclosed by these mortuary relics, and trod by these spectral citizens in whose sunken hearts scarce one good whoop or ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... veiled, were present; and half a dozen other young men who had been somewhat intimate with this lost genius. Four torches flickered on the coffin, which was covered with crape. The rector, assisted by one discreet choirboy, said the mortuary mass. Then the body of the suicide was noiselessly carried to a corner of the cemetery, where a black wooden cross, without inscription, was all that indicated its place hereafter to the mother. Athanase lived and died in shadow. No voice ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... hanging over like a veil, she held the inanimate head to her bosom, sobbing and shrieking with the violence of her Eastern nature. The priest who had been sent for to take care of the corpse, and bear it to the mortuary of the Minster, wanted to move her by force; but the Dean insisted on one more gentle experiment, and beckoned to the kindly woman, whom he saw advancing with eyes full of tears. Perronel knelt down by her, persevered when the poor girl stretched out her hand to beat her off, crying, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Crawley Arms. Then, after a lunch in the servants' hall at Queen's Crawley, the gentry's carriages wheeled off to their different destinations: then the undertaker's men, taking the ropes, palls, velvets, ostrich feathers, and other mortuary properties, clambered up on the roof of the hearse and rode off to Southampton. Their faces relapsed into a natural expression as the horses, clearing the lodge-gates, got into a brisker trot on the open road; and squads of them might have been ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said Thorndyke, "that the remains of Sebek-hotep, or at least a portion of them, are at present lying in the Woodford mortuary ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman |
