"Mortuary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mortuary cart; but it was civilisation. The spirit of Kaffraria had been quenched; it was a last wild stand. Sir George Grey meditated on the means, so unexpected, so beyond man's control, which had enhanced the securities for peace in South Africa. He could do that, believing Providence to ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... came 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 of wounds received ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... wonderful composition may there be well studied; a large photograph of the whole altar piece may also be seen in the library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which shows how the work was originally designed. It was painted for Jodocus Vyts, Burgomaster of Ghent, and his wife Elizabeth, for their mortuary chapel in ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... sir," the concierge 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
... days ago by a woman who applied at the —— Street 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 inquest ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... the stonemason's yard with difficulty, as he wanted to wait for the mourning coaches. Then, opposite the mortuary, he remembered his little present for the Duchess, and ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... a commencement, and this "scheme," I am perfectly aware, is one "that no individual, however varied in attainments and abilities, could without assistance hope to achieve." My father, upwards of half a century since, commenced collecting mortuary memorials; many of the monuments from which he copied the inscriptions have since been destroyed by time, and many, very many, more by the ruthless innovations of beautifying churchwardens. These "very vast" collections—the labour of a life—however, only form a portion of the materials ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... disappointment of the camp, 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 "hic jacets" ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... (XXI-XXX Dynasty) that there appears, in the wall pictures of the Pharaohs' tombs, representations of the horse. The oldest, now known, picture of the horse is found on the walls of the tombs of Seti I. (1458-1507 B.C.) under whose reign the Israelite wandered from Egypt. The horses of the mortuary pictures are very well drawn, and have an unmistakable oriental type. There has therefore undoubtedly existed in Egypt high culture, for over 4,000 years, without representation of the horse, which was the next animal domesticated ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... son went in solemn procession to the grave of his father, opened it, and called upon Osiris to rise: "Stand up! Thou shalt not end, thou shalt not perish!" But death was deaf. Here the Pyramid Texts recite the mortuary ritual, with its hymns and chants; but in vain. At length Osiris awakes, weary and feeble, and by the aid of the strong grip of the lion-god he gains control of his body, and is lifted from death to ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... vestibule lay the brooms and brushes used in renovating the place, the windows were open, but no soul was inside. I walked up the central aisle, and read the mortuary tablets on either pulpit-side. We sometimes like to read that which we best know, and the words on these were written in the air wherever I went, still I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... Maxfield Parrish might dream; but its beauty was that which comes of antiquity—the accumulation of dead years. Its funereal cypresses, its crumbling walls and arches, its clinging ivy and moldering marbles, and a clock that long ago forgot the hours, gave it a mortuary look. In a way it suggested Arnold Bocklin's "Todteninsel," and it might well have served as the allegorical setting for a gateway to the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... his means; so he determined to get rid of them. He threw them into the canal; but had to fish them out again, as the bargemen complained. They said it made them feel quite faint. And, after that, he took them one dark night and left them in the parish mortuary. But the coroner discovered them, and made a ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... necessity, just 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 from the environment, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... read the will, and is interested in the mortuary bequest, but, curiously enough, supposes Martin to be older than Thomas. Perhaps this error arose from the testator's desire to settle Natford upon Martin. This does not seem to have been so settled. Martin had his ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... him, sir, he has finished his last illness. He lies upstairs in his beautiful mortuary chamber draped by the Sisters of ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... another of the Johnson circle, and also he had brawn to carve and there was hardly room for the helpful Betsy to pass behind his chair, so that altogether his mind would have been amply distracted from any mortuary broodings, even if a wordy warfare about the education of the modern young woman had not sprung up between Uncle Pentstemon and Mrs. Larkins and threatened for a time, in spite of a word or so in season from Johnson, to wreck all the harmony of ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... 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 their "sham ABRAHAM," ...
— Punchinello Vol. 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870 • Various
... 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. To-day he ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... of a species of well, down which, with some quakings for the safety of limbs and body, our adventurer was persuaded to follow his guides, and they reached, at the end of a long flight of steps, an immense mortuary chamber. There, on a bed of cocoa-nut fibre, he found his patient, from whose mummified and hideous appearance he at once concluded that she was entirely given over to Satan and had long been a lost soul. As spiritually, ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... were the papyrus rolls whereupon this history is written. The tomb itself is spacious, but otherwise remarkable only for the depth of the shaft which descends vertically from the rock-hewn cave, that once served as the mortuary chapel for the friends and relatives of the departed, to the coffin-chamber beneath. This shaft is no less than eighty-nine feet in depth. The chamber at its foot was found to contain three coffins only, though it is large enough for many more. Two of these, which in all probability ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... this to be the noblest bit of mortuary verse ever written; but since reading the article in the Sydney paper I have changed my opinion, and now think it poor. Bonaparte, however, was a great subject, and even the most unintelligent mortuary verse-maker could not fail to achieve distinction when the Longwood visitors' book ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... 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
... drum warned him; the singing had ceased. And this bitter idealist, this preacher of the hollowness of the real, wondered where were the sable trappings of woe, the hideous envisagement of them that are condemned with mortuary symbols in garbs of painted flame to the stake, faggot, axe, and headsman. None of these were visible, and the gentle spirit of the prisoner became ruffled, alarmed. He expected violence but instead they offered churchly music. Restless, his nerves fretted, he ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Sammet's house on One Hundred and Eighteenth 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. Sammet's ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... 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 the imposing ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... great interior. In the dim light he counted it. There were forty-two distinct piles of furs, each yielding the rough outline of a prone human figure beneath it. Each figure was deathly still. And the whole suggested some primitive mortuary, with its freight, ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... in black, and 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 was raised to blame the rector; the ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... fear of death by associating it in the imaginations of men with loathsome images and appalling surroundings. There can be no greater contrast than that between the Greek tomb with its garlands of flowers, its bright, youthful and restful imagery, and the mortuary chapels that may often be found in Catholic countries, with their ghastly pictures of the saved souls writhing in purgatorial flames, while the inscription above and the moneybox below point out the one means of alleviating ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... had no mortuary at the time in the ambulance. Corpses were placed in the chapel of the cemetery while awaiting burial. The military burial-ground had been established within the precincts of the church, close by the civilian cemetery, and in a few weeks it had invaded it like ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... 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 ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... half-tide makes the sea a tender mauve and violet. The passages of safety between these ranges of reef are but narrow at high tide; at half-tide, when the currents are changing most, the violet field becomes the floor of a vast mortuary chapel ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Whitby, and of Holy Island, the introduction of nuns at Tynemouth, in 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 penances on such as presumed to approach within ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... deed-boxes blazoned with 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 ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... cast a shrewd glance at Lee and nodded. This was during the morning. Afterward the engineer had gone for a visit to the dam, the drops, and the canal line, a last view of the project as a whole; and the ride was pursued in that peculiar melancholy of spirit which appertains to mortuary events. To him, indeed, the ride marked a burial, a burial of high hopes and ambition, and of his youth, with the partially excavated canal providing their pit and the concrete work ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... the authorities say," replied the doctor sharply. "In point of fact I expect they'll take him to the mortuary." ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... more work that day, but before going home he went to the doctor's house and the latter dressed the cuts on his head and arms. Philpot's body was taken away on the ambulance to the mortuary. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... 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 ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... stood by a slab in the mortuary, and, drawing back a sheet which covered the burden on it, stood face to face with his dead wife. The black brows were drawn, the small hands clenched. What struck Sandy with peculiar horror was that one delicate wrist was broken, having ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... built, now a conspicuous landmark for many miles round. The present N. aisle is entirely new. The nave is clerestoried, with eight bays; most of the windows are of stained glass. The Ravenscroft mortuary chapel, adjoining the S. transept, contains many monuments, the most conspicuous being the altar-tomb and recumbent effigy in marble to Thomas Ravenscroft (d. 1630), which was formerly in the chancel. Other memorials are to James Ravenscroft (d. 1680) who ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... the cities it builds, and the structures therein, and the scheme of life that romps along in its ruthless career within the sordid suburbs that take the place of the once enclosing walls. And the defiant and segregated "artists," mortuary art museums, the exposed statues and hidden pictures, the opera subsidized by "high society," and the "arts and crafts" societies and the "art magazines" and "art schools" and clubs and "city beautiful" committees, only seem to make the contrast more apparent ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... fact that the present paper will doubtless reach many readers who may not, in consequence of the limited edition, have seen the preliminary volume on mortuary customs, it seems expedient to reproduce in great part the prefatory remarks which served as an introduction to that work; for the reasons then urged, for the immediate study of this subject, still exist, and as time flies on become ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... the funereal glas begins to moan from St. Saviour's Church. Two bells are rung together so as to make as nearly as possible one clash of sound. At first it is a moan, but it soon becomes a strident cry with a continuous under-wail. At the Hospitalet on the hill the bell of the mortuary chapel is also tolling. It is the bell of the dead who lie there in the stony burying-ground upon the edge of the wind-blown causse, calling upon the bells of Roc-Amadour to move the living to pity for those who have left ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... and mortuary customs generally prevalent in the islands. The natives practice a sort of embalming of the dead. The dead person is usually buried in the lower part of his own house; and the funeral is succeeded by feasting and carousing—the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... accomplices. And the decision of the judges in the proceedings with regard to the above-mentioned Marie-Louise Nicolais, wife of Derues, is delayed until after the execution of the above sentence. It is also decreed that the mortuary act of the aforesaid de Lamotte the younger, dated the sixteenth day of February last, in the register of deaths belonging to the parish church of Saint-Louis at Versailles, be amended, and his correct names be substituted, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... 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 ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... will kindly tell me how any civilized person can furnish a room out of the mortuary pieces that he calls——" She remembered. She said meekly, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... on his 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
... nomads. She conjectured as ignorantly as Boyne himself that they were very rich, and it would not have enlightened her to know that the mother was the widow of a California politician, whom she had married in the sort of middle period following upon her less mortuary survival of Miss Rasmith's father, whose name ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... head and the fulness of the hair about the ears. The bust was by Gerard Johnson or Janssen, who was a Dutch stonemason or tombmaker settled in Southwark. It was set up in the church before 1623, and is a rudely carved specimen of mortuary sculpture. There are marks about the forehead and ears which suggest that the face was fashioned from a death mask, but the workmanship is at all points clumsy. The round face and eyes present a heavy, unintellectual ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... obituary was devoted in 1842, to do honour in his pages to each of his lieutenants as they drop out of the ranks, recognising misfortune and death—both "devil's inventions," as Ruskin calls them—as toll-gates on the path of life, with sorrow as the tax; so that these more solemn articles and mortuary elegies seem to mark the way, like milestones set by loving hands. To Evans one of these was raised, and we read in it that "they who inscribe these lines to his memory will never lament a more kind, more genial, or more ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... "I will let you see her. We have put the poor little body in the mortuary chamber, and Sister ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... who you are," said Fall, calmly, "but why you should come here under the impression that the late Mr. Farrington is an inmate of this establishment I do not understand. We are a lunatic asylum, not a mortuary," he said, ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... random series which had already thrilled the town, but on which no light was likely to be shed by the antecedents of the murdered men. A third official came to announce that the inquest was to be opened without delay, at two o'clock that afternoon, and to request Phillida to accompany him to the mortuary for the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... fancy articles, and basket work; Articles for traveling and for camping; India-rubber and gutta-percha industries; Toys; Decoration and fixed furniture of buildings and dwellings; Office and household furniture; Stained glass; Mortuary monuments and undertakers' furnishings; Hardware; Paper hanging; Carpets, tapestries, and fabrics for upholstery; Upholsterers' decorations; Ceramics; Plumbing and sanitary materials; Glass and crystal; ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... 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 do ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... 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 had never ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... dressed and engaged in steady employment, his appetite for drink loosened its cruel hold upon him, and he was once more in possession of himself. All the week long he was busy in visiting hospitals, alms-houses and lunatic asylums, and in examining their records and the mortuary records of the city. Sometimes he presented himself at the doors of public institutions as a philanthropist, preparing by personal inspection for writing some book, or getting statistics, or establishing an institution ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... to show who he was," said Lestrade. "You shall see the body at the mortuary, but we have made nothing of it up to now. He is a tall man, sunburned, very powerful, not more than thirty. He is poorly dressed, and yet does not appear to be a labourer. A horn-handled clasp knife was lying in a pool of blood beside him. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 vex the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... was informed that the inspector of police desired to see him. The inspector had come, he said, to superintend the removal of the body of Reginald Dimmock to the mortuary adjoining the place of inquest, and a suitable vehicle waited at the back entrance ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... sand in the 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
... I lived on Post and Powell streets. Trinity Church was at that corner and many people who were strangers were taken to the mortuary chapel. One sad funeral occurred there on June 18, 1887, of Abner Lincoln Blake, a grandson of Major-General Lincoln of revolutionary fame. He was ex-deputy of the custom house in Port Townsend and was on his way to Washington, with papers of importance, to give evidence ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... 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
... supposed that these crypts were used as Mortuary Chapels and the eastern one has in fact a piscina and aumbry, showing that there was once an altar. But for some centuries they served as a charnel-house, and are so called in a papal grant of Indulgences. In 1640 there is an entry in the church accounts ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... the end of every brave adventure was Smithfield Market. He put down a book which contained an inscription to "Charles Dunwoody from his affectionate Mother," and looked about him. Everywhere, secondhand, rejected things were for sale: clothes, furniture, books, pictures ... The market was a mortuary of ambition and hope, the burial ground of little enterprises, confidently begun and miserably ended. Here were the signs of disruption and dispersal, of things attempted but not achieved, of misfortune and failure, of things used and abandoned for more coveted things. John ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... the stomach, besides showing symptoms of alcoholic irritation, emitted a strong odour of chloroform. An inquest was held, and a verdict returned that B. F. Perry had died of congestion of the lungs caused by the inhalation of flame or chloroform. After lying in the mortuary for eleven days the body ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... 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 ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... distinction. He seemed to preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of cousins, merely for the pleasure of being at their funerals, which he was often asked to superintend, and I suspect had sometimes to pay for. He carried me with him as often as he could to these mortuary ceremonies; but feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental, I escaped as often as ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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 ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... that left the high-hung family photographs on the walls vague and uncertain. I made a mental note of it as a place where it would be very characteristic to have a rustic funeral take place; and I was pleased to have Mrs. Makely drop into a sort of mortuary murmur, as she said: "I hope your mother is as well as usual this morning?" I perceived that this murmur was produced by the sepulchral influence ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or mortuary or memorial laureate ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 much trouble or was in a bad way, was ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... hearers, indifferent indeed to their presence, from the habit he had acquired of thinking aloud hopefully in the solitude of the four whitewashed walls of his cell, in the sepulchral silence of the great blind pile of bricks near a river, sinister and ugly like a colossal mortuary for the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... sense Japan is still, what China has always been, a country governed by the graveyard. These cities of the dead are usually kept in attractive order and made beautiful with flowers in memoriam. The study of epitaphs and mortuary architecture, though not without elements bordering on the ludicrous, is enjoyed by ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... with thick dust [206] —the faded flowers, the burnt-out lamps, the tools and hardened mortar of the workmen who had had something to do there. A heavy fragment of woodwork had fallen and chipped open one of the oldest of the mortuary urns, many hundreds in number ranged around the walls. It was not properly an urn, but a minute coffin of stone, and the fracture had revealed a piteous spectacle of the mouldering, unburned remains within; the bones of a child, as he understood, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... at dead of night, with shrouded sight, was I conducted to this drear abyss, through ways apparently unknown to man? And next immured in a long vaulted cell, where, as I gazed upon devices framed to heighten my alarm, two ghastly figures, wrapt in mortuary veils, rushed forth, and laying bare my breast, with a new-slaughtered captive's blood, there marked a crucifix, and then descending to a deeper cell, where, in full council, round an altar formed ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... 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 ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... of gray wall and purple roof, sunk in the black-green like graves in grass. A white house here and there faced him with the stare of monumental marble. In the middle a church with a stunted spire squatted like a mortuary chapel. They had run up a gaudy red-brick villa or two outside, but on the whole Little Sutton was all right, too. He had always thought it very like a cemetery—a place where people lay buried ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... no doubt about it," Bellamy declared. "I have been to the Mortuary. It is certainly he. All our work has been in vain—just as I thought, too, that we had made ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was thus they spoke of their past patients—familiarly but not without respect, like old family servants. Here is indeed a servant, whom we forget that we possess; who does not wait at the bright table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial touch savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he attributed insensibility ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... there from a corner saloon (lit with 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 ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... country. The bishop, being concerned that many were being interred in unconsecrated ground, purchased three acres of land in West Smithfield outside the city boundaries, known as "no man's land," and consecrated it for purposes of burial, and erected also a mortuary chapel. The whole he called Pardon Churchyard and Chapel. It was situated adjoining the north wall of the garden of the monastery, and extended from St. John Street to Goswell Street. In 1349 additional ground was required, and Sir Walter de Manny bought thirteen acres and a rood from St. ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... 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 by a Government which professes to be a ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the wall against which he leaned. In the circle of semi-opaque darkness, dimly lit by the bull's-eye lantern, he looked like the shadowy figure of some dead knight, standing for ever in his shadowy mortuary niche in the gloom of some Gothic chapel. Drops of cold sweat trickled over the broad, sallow forehead. An incredible fearlessness looked out from every tense feature. His eyes of fire were fixed ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... American 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 at the one reporter who'd showed up for the press conference, ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)
... a mortuary discussion of love. Being young, nearly all of them are anxious for, completely puzzled by and rather afraid of it, all at the same time. They wish to draw up one logical code to cover its every ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... in the Montparnasse Cemetery at Paris. The background shows mortuary chapels, stone crosses on which are inscribed "O Crux! Ave Spes Unica!" and the ruins of a wind-mill covered ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... asserted Bryce. "You'll have to go 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 here in ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... of the fifteen shoguns or native rulers who preceded the Mikado in the government of Japan. The first and third shoguns are buried at Nikko, while the fourth, fifth, eighth, ninth, eleventh and thirteenth lie in Uyeno Park, Tokio. These mortuary chapels in Shiba Park are all similar in general design, the only differences being in the lavishness of the decoration. Out of regard for the foreign visitor it is not necessary to remove one's shoes in entering these temples, as cloth covers are provided. Each temple is divided into three parts—the ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... were made to bury her in the cathedral of Mayence (where a stone bearing her name could still be seen a few years ago), but the emperor refused to part with the beloved body. Neglectful of all matters of state, he remained in the mortuary chamber day after day. His trusty adviser, Turpin, suspecting the presence of some mysterious talisman, slipped into the room while the emperor, exhausted with fasting and weeping, was wrapped in sleep. After carefully searching for the magic jewel, Turpin discovered ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... on the railing of his tribune, Ramuntcho looked at the women entering, all like black phantoms, their heads and dress concealed under the mourning cashmere which it is usual to wear at church. Silent and collected, they glided on the funereal pavement of mortuary slabs, where one could read still, in spite of the effacing of ages, inscriptions in Euskarian tongue, names of extinguished families and dates ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... this date for mortuary purposes, he has less opportunity of being indefinite, since there were but three notabilities, Scheemakers, Rysbrack, and Roubillac,—all foreigners. Of these Scheemakers, whom Chesterfield regarded as a mere ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... Clinch had selected his own mortuary site and had driven a section of iron pipe into the ground on a ferny knoll overlooking Star Pond. In explanation he grimly remarked to Eve that after death he preferred to be planted where he could see that Old Harrod's ghost ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... the same offerings of birds and fish 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 it was customary to place in the grave ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... instant, was turned into a mortuary bed, and the four officers, straight, rigid and sobered up, with the harsh faces of warriors on duty stood near the windows, searching and ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 of the kings of that empire; a description of the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... me an awkward interview," he reflected, "if Mrs. Glendower could have taken herself opportunely out of the world. If we may trust the usual form of mortuary resolutions, Divine Providence is habitually pleased with the removal of mortals from this sublunary sphere; and in this case I should share ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... dark chin, and small, black moustache, combined with I know not what of martial in his air, struck into me a certain indefinable alarm. No sooner had he caught my eye, than he gathered up his reins, just raised his whip, and started the mortuary vehicle at a walk down the road. I followed it with my eyes till a bend in the avenue hid it from my sight. So wrapt up was my spirit in the exercise of the single sense of vision that it was not ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... he, steadily, "nothing to be done at present, but to get these bodies back to the Towers. After that they can take 'em to the village mortuary if they like. But I've one or two things I'd like to ask you Merriton, and one or two things I want to examine. Gad! it's a beastly task, boys. That sheet's big enough, thank fortune! Cross the pitchforks, Petrie, and make a sort of stretcher out of them, that way. That's right. Now then, forward.... ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... XVIII. seemed to the people a mortuary triumph of Royalty over the Revolution and the Empire. The profanations of 1793 were expiated. Napoleon was left with the willow of Saint Helena; the descendant of Saint Louis and of Louis XIV. had the basilica of his ancestors as ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... 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 Lord'. That had been the aspiration of my Mother, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... years there has gradually come into existence the custom of placing the photograph of a dead parent, brother, husband, or child, beside the mortuary tablet kept in the Buddhist household shrine. For this reason, also, the departing soldier wishes to leave at home a good likeness ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... been verified, also, that if the tomb of a dead man is empty the shade yearns for the world and wanders about in it needlessly. But if we place in a mortuary chapel the clothing, furniture, arms, vessels, utensils, things pleasant during life to the dead man, if the walls are covered with paintings depicting feasts, hunts, divine services, wars, and, in general, ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... than that? No collection of salient facts (without reduction to tabular form) could be more succinctly stated than is done in the first stanza by the surviving relatives, and no more concise and comprehensive program of farewells, post-mortuary general orders, etc., could be framed in any form than is done in verse by deceased in the last stanza. These things insensibly make us wiser and tenderer, and better. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Time dropping his hour-glass and scythe to throw a dart at the fleshless figure of Death. This last image seems to me about the equivalent in mortuary poetry of Roubiliac's monument to Mrs. Nightingale in mortuary sculpture,—poor conceits both of them, without the suggestion of a tear in the verses or in the marble; but the rhetorical exaggeration does not prevent us ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... thing of itself; not a nice place to lie dead in, having glazed white tiles for its walls and concrete for its flooring; something about its appearance in that grey morning air suggested to Spargo the idea of a mortuary. And that the man whose foot projected over the step was dead he had no doubt: the limpness of his ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... the past, and that makes the mentally uncontrolled people of the present, feel a fateful power calling upon them to listen to the insistence of the exacting waters, and to surrender their lives and their souls forever to a thing that called and which would brook no denial. In the Morgue, or in a mortuary by the river-side, their poor bodies have lain when the rivers have worked their will with them, and "Suicide," "Death by drowning," or "By Misadventure" have been the verdicts given. We live in a too practical, too utterly common-sensical ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... 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
... Vane turned his steps once again towards the beach at Paris Plage. The wreckage in the hospital had been cleared away, and there were rows laid side by side in the mortuary. Over everyone there breathed a sense of restless excitement and fierce anger, and Vane wanted to get away by himself. He felt ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... this 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 chalices ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... progressed well. The pious Henry VI., who loved the Abbey and often walked here with the Abbot and Prior, no doubt helped as long as he had the power, but the civil wars soon put a stop to his aid. We know that he presented the wrought-iron gates which divide his father's {27} mortuary chapel from the shrine, and the stone screen to the west of the shrine probably belongs to his time. His supplanter, Edward IV., when settled on the throne, granted oaks and lead for the roof, while his wife, and the little son ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... leg, foot, and toe-nails were well preserved; the left was a mere bone, wanting tarsus and metatarsus. The stomach was full of dried fragments of herbs (Ohenopodium, &c.), and the epidermis was easily reduced to powder. In this case, as in the other three, the mortuary skins were coarsely sewn with the hair inside: it is a mistake to say that the work was 'like that of ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... wonder. It was 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 life and death; we began with Confucius, and we ended with Benjamino ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells |
