"Scaffold" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whether the Occidental or the Oriental theory of society is to mould our future, whether we are to recede from principles which eighteen Christian centuries have been slowly establishing at the cost of so many saintly lives at the stake and so many heroic ones on the scaffold and the battle-field, in favor of some fancied assimilation to the household arrangements of Abraham, of which all that can be said with certainty is that they did not add to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the extension of the "Inner Circle" Railway was in progress, the site of the permanent scaffold on Great Tower Hill, upon which so many sanguinary executions took place, was discovered in Trinity Square, remains of its stout oak posts being found imbedded in the ground. A blank space, with a small tablet in the grass of the Square garden, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... my father, his firmness gave way, and his usually silent sorrow burst into bitter plaints: "What! my son plotting with Pougatcheff! The Empress gives him his life! Execution not the worst thing in the world! My grandfather died on the scaffold in defense of his convictions! But, that a noble should betray his oath, unite with bandits, knaves and revolted slaves! shame! ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... my rooms," I said. He made no answer, and I walked along with him, Hinge following at a distance of a yard or two, and so far, of course, suspecting nothing. Not a word was spoken by the way, and Brunow walked like a man who was going to the scaffold. When we came to iny own rooms I locked the door ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... walks only the short distance from his cell to the scaffold or the electric chair, shielded from sight by the prison walls, and it often occurs even then that the short journey is too much ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... received so many injuries at the hands of men that it would be joy to my wounded heart to see them suffer. I struggled until I reached the front ranks of the crowd, and then waited patiently until a procession, headed by soldiers with solemn music, left the prison and marched towards the scaffold." ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... that she would indeed use that revolver now, if the miserable woman before her drove her too far. She felt afraid—afraid of herself; she was in the grasp of a savage, primeval instinct. In a flash she saw Miss Spencer dead at her feet—the police—a court of justice—the scaffold. It was horrible. ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... the prisoners to Spain was committed to Alonzo Villejo, a man of honourable conduct and generous feelings. When Villejo entered with the guard to conduct him on board the caravel, Columbus thought it was to conduct him to the scaffold. "Villejo" said he, "whither are you taking me?" "To the ship, your excellency, to embark," replied the other. "To embark!" repeated the admiral, earnestly, "Villejo, do you speak the truth?" "By the life of your excellency," replied the honest ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... the maiden, fearfully; "ye talk of Wallace, of his bold deeds and bolder heart, but bethink ye of his fate. Oh, were it not better to be still than follow in his steps unto the scaffold?" ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... child; the former, in whatever slough he may sink, can raise his eyes either to the kingdom of reason or of hope; but the little child is entirely absorbed and weighed down by one black poison-drop of the present. Think of a child led to the scaffold, think of Cupid in a Dutch coffin; or watch a butterfly, after its four wings have been torn off, creeping like a worm, and you will feel what I mean. But wherefore? The first has been already given; the child, like the beast, only knows purest, though shortest sorrow; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... sir," he said, "the worst is that which exercises its vengeance under the guise of judicial proceedings, and especially if a jury make part of the means by which its base purposes are effected. The man who is flung into prison, or sent to the scaffold, at the nod of an avowed despotism, has at least the consolation to know that his sufferings bring down upon that despotism the execration of mankind; but he who is entrapped and entangled in the meshes of a crafty ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... die had been cast, and to America he sailed on April 8, 1794, in the good ship Sansom, Capt. Smith, with a hundred others—his fellow passengers. Whilst on the seas his great protagonist Lavoisier met his death on the scaffold. ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... over the court of justice which condemned Charles I. to the scaffold, and who by his extreme republican principles had rendered himself obnoxious to Cromwell, began again to be distinguished in public affairs after the Protector's death, and was elected President of the Council of State. He did not live long to enjoy this honour, but died, according to some authorities, ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... resemblance. The famous "Courier of Lyons," founded, indeed, upon a genuine cause celebre, was a drama of this kind. Here it was indispensable that the respectable Monsieur Lesurques and the criminal Dubosc, between whom so extraordinary a likeness existed that the one suffered death upon the scaffold for a murder committed by the other, should be both impersonated by the same performer. "The Corsican Brothers," it need hardly be said, narrated the fortunes of the twin-born Louis and Fabian dei Franchi, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... 25th of July they passed through the channel of the Scaffold to Great Slave Lake, and, landing at Moose Deer Island, found thereon the rival forts, of course, within striking distance of each other, and in charge, as usual, of rival Scotsmen. At Great Slave Lake I must part company with Franklin's Journal, since our own negotiations only extended to its south ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... a sitting position, and the next minute he had out his glass, and was watching with the actor apparently close at hand, drawing himself up a few inches at a time, as one would mount a scaffold-pole, and his wrinkled forehead, compressed lips, and determined eyes so plain that Jack could have fancied that he ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... on the house-tops and in windows and on every available spot from which a view of the gallows was to be had. The prisoners mounted the scaffold, being accompanied by three Vigilance Committee officers who acted as executioners and a Rev. Mr. Thomas. After the noose had been adjusted, Hetherington addressed the crowd, claiming to be innocent, and ready to meet his ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... have harmonized better. Byron represents it as rising in extreme grief: it is, however, I suspect, greatly more common in extreme danger; and all the instances which the poet himself gives in his note—Sir Thomas More on the scaffold, Anne Boleyn in the Tower, and those victims of the French Revolution "with whom it became a fashion to leave some mot as a legacy"—were all jokers rather in circumstances of desperate and hopeless peril than of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... it will be hissed off the stage." That hissing-off plays a great part, and is an amusement which fills the house; but it is not the bad actor who is hissed, no, the author and the composer only are the criminals; for them the scaffold is erected. Five minutes is the usual time, and the whistles resound, and the lovely women smile and felicitate themselves, like the Spanish ladies at their bloody bullfights. All our most eminent dramatic writers have ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... went by. Rage and a craving for vengeance took possession of his slighted soul. If Mme. de Bargeton had been in his power, he could have cut her throat at that moment; he was a Fouquier-Tinville gloating over the pleasure of sending Mme. d'Espard to the scaffold. If only he could have put de Marsay to the torture with refinements of savage cruelty! Canalis went by on horseback, bowing to the prettiest women, his dress elegant, as became the most dainty ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... seemed to him a step nearer punishment. Fright gave him a sort of blind conviction, and the slightest movement of the young woman added to his certainty. He followed her, he went where she went, as a man goes to the scaffold. ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... guilty of treason in secretly encouraging the foreign powers to come to his aid. He was therefore brought to trial, and when it came to a final vote, he was, by a small majority, condemned to death. He mounted the scaffold on January 21, 1793, with the fortitude of a martyr. Nevertheless, one cannot but feel that through his earlier weakness and indecision he brought untold misery upon his own kingdom and upon Europe at large. The French people had not dreamed of a republic until his absolute incompetence forced ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... criminals' bench with a gendarme seated between them. They were found guilty by the unanimous verdict of a weeping jury. No one among those who had the barbarous courage to witness their conveyance to the scaffold can mention them to-day without a shudder. Religion had won for them a repentance for their crime, but could not induce them to abjure their love. The scaffold was their nuptial bed, and there they slept together in ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... of riding to the great hunt of to-morrow, but I know his malicious eye too well to be deceived in his errand. He is silent that he may be sure; and if to- morrow comes, and finds Griffith within these walls, he will be condemned to a scaffold." ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Peter to move with caution, for Catharine had ability, energy, innumerable friends, and was one of the last women in the world quietly to submit to be plunged into a dungeon, and then to be led to the scaffold, and by such a man as her despicable spouse. Peter III. was by no means a match for Catharine. About twelve miles from St. Petersburg, on the southern shore of the Bay of Cronstadt, and nearly opposite the renowned fortresses of Cronstadt which command the approaches ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... the death of a felon, he knew that the rites of sepulture, according to the forms of his denomination, would be denied to his remains. The aged sufferer, it is related, read his own funeral service while on the scaffold. Solemn, sublime, and affecting as are passages of this portion of the ritual of the Church, surely it was never performed under circumstances so well suited to impress with awe and tenderness as when uttered by the calumniated, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... was as one flower arisen out of the earth, and every part of it made the beauty of the other parts more excellent; and so new it was, that it would have seemed as if the masons thereof had but struck their scaffold yesterday, save that under the very feet of the walls the sweet garden flowers grew ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... that the public hanging of a pastor would put a stop to all further ministrations among the Huguenots. But the sight of the bodies of their brethren hung on the nearest trees, and the heads of their pastors rolling on the scaffold, did not deter them from continuing to hold religious meetings in solitary places, more especially in Languedoc, Viverais, and the provinces in the ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... had been managed with great skill; for no sooner had I extinguished the fire of my camp, and laid me down to rest, in full security, as I thought, than I felt myself seized by an indistinguishable number of hands, and was immediately pinioned, as if about to be led to the scaffold for execution. To have attempted to be refractory would have proved useless and dangerous to my life; and I suffered myself to be removed from my camp to theirs, a few miles distant, without uttering even a word of complaint. You are aware, I dare say, ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... calculated with extreme ability; the name that was pronounced, instead of the name which the marquise awaited, had precisely the same effect upon her as the badly sharpened axes, that had hacked, without destroying, Messieurs de Chalais and de Thou upon the scaffold. She recovered herself, however, and said, "I was perfectly right in saying you were a witty woman, for you are making the time pass away most agreeably. This joke is a most amusing one, for I have never seen the ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... stand there serenely unmoved, to witness such a crime? While he yet looked round in horror, the doomed man, already apparently almost dead with fear, was dragged forward by his guards. Paralyzed as he was, at sight of the stage which he knew to be the scaffold, he uttered shriek after shriek of frenzied despair, and struggled like a madman to get free. But as well might Laocoon have struggled in the folds of the serpent; they pulled him on, bound him hand and foot, and held his head ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... smile of satisfaction flitted through the shadows of his face. It was out of the question that the world should ever know who had killed his brother, and he knew the man who offered to sacrifice himself by bearing the blame of the deed. Mendoza would die, on the scaffold if need be, and it would be enough for him to know that his death saved his King. No word would ever pass his lips. The man's loyalty would bear any proof; he could feel horror at the thought that Philip could have ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... away by the Americans, as well as by us; and should success attend them, whether, in a few years, they may not celebrate the glorious era of the revolution of 1775, as we do that of 1608? Success crowned the generous efforts of our forefathers for freedom, else they had died on the scaffold as traitors and rebels; and the period of our history which does us most honour would have been deemed a rebellion against lawful authority—not a resistance sanctioned by all the laws of God and man, and the expulsion of a tyrant." There is much ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... no means follows that because you are a bad man you will become a great one; but to be bad, and at the same time unsuccessful, is a hard fate. It casts a little doubt upon a man's badness if he does not, at least, make a little money. It is a poor business accompanying badness on to a common scaffold, or to see it die in a wretched garret. That was one of my complaints with Mr. Seccombe's Twelve Bad Men. Most of them came to violent ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... Another story and I have done;—the Newgate Calendar makes mention of a notorious housebreaker, who closed his career of outrage and violence by the murder of a whole family, whose house he robbed; on the scaffold he entreated permission to speak a few words to the crowd beneath, and thus addressed them:—"My friends, it is quite true I murdered this family; in cold blood I did it—one by one they fell beneath my hand, while I rifled their coffers, and took forth their effects; but one ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... concessions as the misfortunes of the times demanded, without compromising her dignity or her aristocratic tenets, and enveloped her sorrows in reserve and mystery. She had foreseen the difficulties that would beset her at Carentan. Did she not tempt the scaffold by the very fact of going thither to take a prominent place? Yet, sustained by a mother's courage, she succeeded in winning the affection of the poor, ministering without distinction to everyone in trouble; and made herself necessary to the well-to-do, by providing amusements ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... that this document, if it could have saved her, came too late, for, in the month of October next, Queen Marie Antoinette ascended the scaffold in ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... most extraordinary men whom the especial circumstances of the court and country raised into public distinction. He had been but a cornet of cavalry on the memorable night when Catharine, uncertain whether she was mounting a throne or a scaffold, put herself at the head of the guards, and deposed her husband. As she rode along, observing that she had not a military plume in her hat, she turned to ask for one; the cornet instantly plucked out ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... Wogan broke off from his story with a clear thrill of laughter; it was a laugh of enjoyment at a pleasing recollection. Then he suddenly flung himself down on his knee at the feet of his sovereign. "Give me leave, your Majesty," he cried passionately. "Let me go upon this errand. If I fail, if the scaffold's dressed for me, why where's the harm? Your Majesty loses one servant out of his many. Whereas, if I win—" and he drew a long breath. "Aye, and I shall win! There's the Princess, too, a prisoner. Sir, she has ventured much. I ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... was shown to her pure spirit's gaze, The future with its sufferings, the shame, the scaffold's blaze; The deaf'ning shouts, the surging crowd, the incense, mounting high, Foreshadowed to her shrinking soul the ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... what of the night? - Cannon and scaffold and sword, Horror of gibbet and cord, Mowed us as sheaves for the grave, Mowed us down for the right. We do not grudge or repent. Freely to freedom we gave Pledges, till life should ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Dealing with the Napoleonic epoch, its interest gathers chiefly round the person of the brave peasant Michu, whose devotion to the Legitimist house of Cinq-Cygne brings him, an innocent victim, to the scaffold. The character of Laurence de Cinq-Cygne, a girl of the Flora MacDonald type, and the characters also of the two cousins de Simeuse, who both loved her and conspired with her, and whose pardon she gained only to lose these faithful knights dying ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... true woman there lies a reserve of courage that shames the prouder boast of man. She may not face death on the battle-field with the same defying front; but when it comes in a more appalling form and scene, she shrinks not from the dread ordeal. When man's foot trembles on the scaffold, woman stands there serene, ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... America, being welcomed in some of the colonies, and persecuted in others, but nowhere so severely as in Massachusetts. When Stephenson and Robinson were hanged at Boston, Mary Dyer, widow of William Dyer, late recorder of Providence plantations, was taken to the scaffold with them, but reprieved on condition that she should leave the colony in forty-eight hours. In the following year Mary Dyer returned to Boston, and was at once arrested and hanged. These proceedings excited general horror in the ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... falsely accused of treason and thrown into prison, where he remained during twelve years. There he wrote his History of the World. After a short period of liberty, Raleigh was beheaded. As he stood on the scaffold he asked for the ax, and said, "This is a sharp medicine, but a sound cure ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... convent at [OE]denbach was broken up; the mother tormented by sickness, domestic calamities and her own passionate disposition, increased the general misery. Then the bribery of the father came to light, and an old man, with snow-white hair, he ended his days on the scaffold, in 1526. His dignified behavior, when led to the block, excited universal pity. Some months before he had begged the authorities to pardon his ruined son, the chief cause of his misfortunes.[13] For himself, ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... When I think of the friends I have lost in this war—and every one who hears me has, like myself, lost some of those whom he most loved—there is no consolation to be derived from victims on the scaffold, or from anything but the established union ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... movement, the young man has slain his love in a fit of jealousy, and is on his way to execution. Very powerful music expresses the fatal march, interrupted every now and then by the surging footsteps of the crowd. At its close, the hero ascends the scaffold; amid a hush, the tender love theme reappears, but is obliterated by a sudden crash of the full orchestra, and all is still. Berlioz, however, does not let his hero rest in the grave, but adds a fifth movement to show him in the infernal regions. Piccolo and ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... November, 1640, and began its work—brought Strafford to the scaffold, clapped Laud into the Tower, Archbishop though he was, and secured as best they could the permanency of Parliamentary institutions. None of these things specially concerned John Milton. But there also uprose the eternal Church question, 'What ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... nothing to do with it, Mr. Westwick. How do you suppose the criminal feels on the scaffold, while the hangman is putting the rope around his neck? Cold and faint, too, I should think. Excuse my grim fancy. You see, Destiny has got the rope round my neck—and ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... three hundred men. Bruce sent on his cousin Cuthbert to reconnoitre and see whether the people would be ready to rise, but Cuthbert found the Scots sunk in despair. All who had taken up arms had perished in the field or on the scaffold. The country swarmed with the English, and further resistance seemed hopeless. Cuthbert had arranged to light a beacon on a point at Turnberry visible at Lamlash Bay in Arran, where the king, with his two hundred men and eighty-three boats, ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... would remain in Gloria, and devote himself to Gloria, and come back to England no more. How women have to suffer for a political cause! Not merely the mothers and wives and sisters who have to see their loved ones go to the prison or the scaffold for some political question which they regard, from their domestic point of view, as a pure nuisance and curse because it takes the loved one from them. Oh! but there is more than that, worse than that, when a woman is willing to be devoted ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... to the last victims who suffered in England for the alleged crime of witchcraft. One Mrs. Hicks, and her little daughter nine years of age, were executed on the scaffold at Huntingdon in 1716, for the suppositious offences of raising storms and selling their souls ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... a dust-heap. All are gay in their degradation, and degraded in their joys; all are marked with the stamp of debauchery, casting their silence as a reproach; their very attitude revealing fearful thoughts. Placed between crime and beggary they have no compunctions, and circle prudently around the scaffold without mounting it, innocent in the midst of crime, and vicious in their innocence. They often cause a laugh, but they always cause reflection. One represents to you civilization stunted, repressed; he comprehends everything, the honor of the ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... together and constituted an effective government with a real policy and the means of pursuing it. The chiefs of the Commune and of the revolutionary tribunal, near one hundred in number, had followed Robespierre to the scaffold. ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... to hear anything, as all present were talking at the tops of their voices. M. Roque wanted "an iron hand" to govern France. Nonancourt even regretted that the political scaffold was abolished. They ought to have all these ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... composed when he mounted the scaffold as he had been when he welcomed Pedrarias. A proclamation was made that he was a traitor, and with his last breath he denied this and asserted his innocence. When the axe fell that severed his head, the noblest Spaniard of the time, and one who ranks with those of any time, was judicially murdered. ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... tricoteuses were represented by comely, albeit plump maidens, who seemed more inclined to dance round a Maypole than haunt a scaffold. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... the dark ordeal that lay before her came. It was like waking to the morning that was to see one on the scaffold: but, with something of the light detachment that a condemned prisoner might feel—nothing being left to hope for and the only strength demanded being the passive strength to endure—she found that she was thinking more of the sky and of the birds than of the ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... was so great, that his study was continually thronged either with visitors who were persons of distinction, or with clients who came to him for advice; and in a short time he acquired a considerable fortune. Notwithstanding all these advantages, he passed his life miserably, and ended it on the scaffold. The following story afterwards got into circulation, and has been often triumphantly cited by succeeding astrologers as an irrefragable proof of the truth of their science. It was said that, long before he died, he uttered three ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of 1625, just a month or two after the accession of the king whose tragical fate was to be the original source of Milton's European fame and very nearly the cause of his mounting a scaffold himself, the future author of Paradise Lost went into residence at Cambridge where he remained for seven years. The college that can boast his name among its members is Christ's. Unlike so many poets he had a successful university career, took the ordinary degrees, and ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... the scaffold, and the Anabaptists marched to punishment, denying and cursing the Saxon who did violence to their faith. Everything was perishing—painting, sculpture, poesy, letters. The Reformation imitated Nero, and sang its ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... very kind. Somebody—an uncle, I think—left me a packet of sandwiches and a little something in a flask, in case, as he said, I should feel peckish on the scaffold. ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... they had been run up in the night; there were buildings in course of erection that looked as if they would tumble down before they were finished; and there were other buildings in process of being planned, but of which not much was to be seen saving a forest of scaffold poles. ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... will, and from the beginning knew that Calvary was the work for which He had come, and that His love would fail of its expression, and the divine purpose would fail of its realisation, and His whole mission would fail of all its meaning, unless He died for men. The martyr looks to the scaffold and says, 'It stands in my way, and I must either be untrue to conscience or I must go there, and so I will go.' Christ said, 'The Cross is in My path, and on it and from it I shall exercise the influence, to exercise which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... (better known as Anacharsis Clootz), was born in 1755. In 1790, at the bar of the National Convention, he described himself as the "Speaker of Mankind." Being suspected by Robespierre, he was condemned to death, March 24, 1794. On the scaffold he begged to be executed last, "in order to establish certain principles." (See Carlyle's French Revolution, 1839, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... dreadful day of Nordlingen. But enough remained, when strengthened by the body-guard of the Landgrave, to make up a corps of nearly five hundred men. Under the command of Colonel von Aremberg, part of them now enclosed the scaffold, and part prepared to seize the persons who were pointed out to them as conspirators. Amongst these stood foremost ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... with a bundle of fasces, the rods being of iron, and the axe sharp, and which did not become rusty from want of use. It was enough that a man was "guilty of being suspected" to insure him a drum-head court-martial, which tribunal sent many men to the scaffold, sometimes denying them religious consolations, an aggravation of punishment peculiarly terrible to Catholics, and which seems to have been wantonly inflicted, and in a worse spirit than that of the old persecutors, for it had not even fanaticism for its excuse. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... before the last cannon? No! emphatically, no! With Napoleon he might have cried, 'It is finished,' but then with the same calm brow yet bursting heart, he would have resigned his sword to his conquerors; and if the scaffold were his fate, met it with quiet dignity; or if the dungeon, there calmly await the Almighty's time when he might again raise his right arm for his country; still as great in the prison or on the scaffold, as when he was at the head of conquering ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... him; and this was the picture so drawn. The Italian said he had struggled long, but life was a burden which he could now no longer bear; and he was resolved, when he had made money enough to return to Rome, to surrender himself to justice, and expiate his crime on the scaffold. He gave the finished picture to my father, in return for the kindness which he ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... chimney; then a piece of good hand-and-foot climbing; and last, another ledge which led by an easy gradient to the top. I figured all this out as I have heard a condemned man will count the windows of the houses on his way to the scaffold. ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... Puritan Parliament: all but one, whom the family hated because he took the Parliament side; and he became a soldier, and fought against his own brothers; and it was said among them that, so inveterate was he, he went on the scaffold, masked, and was the very man who struck off the King's head, and that his foot trod in the King's blood, and that always afterwards he made a bloody track wherever he went. And there was a legend that his brethren once ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... clear summer day, lay the bed upon a scaffold; wash it well with soap-suds upon both sides, rubbing it hard with a stiff brush; pour several gallons of hot water upon the bed slowly, and let it drip through. Rinse with clear water; remove it to a dry part of the scaffold to dry; beat, and turn ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... bended knee before Edward III. to spare the lives of the men of Calais, Catherine urging her suit before Henry VIII., Madame de Stael supplicating Bonaparte for her father's liberty, Marie Antoinette ascending the steps of the scaffold, are but few of the women of history who furnish us examples of highest womanhood. Literature supplies as great illustrations: Antigone going to bury her brother's ashes in spite of the king's threat to take her life; Zenobia in chains in the midst of a great ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... the gallows, the charges preferred against the accused and the sentence of the court-martial were read. A short but impressive prayer was then offered by the minister, at the conclusion of which the condemned man, unaccompanied, mounted the scaffold. ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... had passed, Canada had overthrown a system of government by oligarchy. She had ousted special interests forever from her legislative halls. In a blood and sweat of agony, on the scaffold, in the chain gang, penniless, naked, hungry and in exile, her patriots had fought the dragon of privilege, cast out the accursed thing and founded national life on the eternal rocks of justice to all, special privileges to none. Her patriots ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... the part about Pranzini. The day after his execution I hastily opened the paper, La Croix, and what did I see? Tears betrayed my emotion; I was obliged to run out of the room. Pranzini had mounted the scaffold without confessing or receiving absolution, and the executioners were already dragging him towards the fatal block, when all at once, apparently in answer to a sudden inspiration, he turned round, seized the crucifix which ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... rashness, had on the Queen's death dashed into the arena and boldly asserted his right as the heir of Edward the Fourth. The only way to dispose of him was by making him realise that the crown was beyond his grasp; and that if he persevered, he would find the scaffold and the axe within it. This was accordingly done so effectually that weak, impulsive Basset quailed before the storm, and fled to France to save his own life. He survived the accession of James the First for seventeen years at least [Note 3]; but no more was ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... engaged all day, and only returned home at dusk. Then ensued a little combat of words. Mrs. Bretton and her son pressed me to remain one night more. I could have cried, so irritated and eager was I to be gone. I longed to leave them as the criminal on the scaffold longs for the axe to descend: that is, I wished the pang over. How much I wished it, they could not tell. On these points, mine was a state of mind out of ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the two unfortunate nobles were arrested by the treacherous Spaniard and promptly thrown into prison. They never regained their liberty. After being held as captives for the better part of a year they met their fate courageously on the public scaffold where so many of the bravest and best heads of the Netherlands were falling by the Duke of ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... builded of stone The scaffold rose, whereon Death claimed his own. At the four corners, in stern attitude, Four statues of the Hebrew Prophets stood, Gazing with calm indifference in their eyes Upon this place of human sacrifice, Round which ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... grimy, his hands are full of lumps, and he toils night and day all his lifetime. The quarryman pulls his arms out to satisfy his stomach. The mason while forming a capital in lotus shape is hurled off by wind from the scaffold. A weaver has bent knees, a maker of weapons is ever traveling: barely does he come to his house in the evening when he must leave it. The fingers of a wall painter smell disagreeably, and his time passes in trimming ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... she was naturally tender-hearted: and, as for myself, although I abhorred such kind of spectacles, yet my curiosity tempted me to see something that I thought must be extraordinary. The malefactor was fixed in a chair upon a scaffold erected for that purpose, and his head cut off at one blow, with a sword of about forty feet long. The veins and arteries spouted up such a prodigious quantity of blood, and so high in the air, that the great jet d'eau ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... scenes, in the words of the minister and magistrate, the justice and the juryman, the accuser and the accused, and the searcher. Into this court of inquiry come all these personalities to witness the sorrowful march of the victims to the scaffold or to exile, or to acquittal and deliverance with the after life of ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... Hampton could distinguish the faint ticking of the watch in his pocket, the hiss of the breath between the giant's clinched teeth. Twice the fellow tried to utter something, his lips shaking as with the palsy, his ashen face the picture of terror. No wretch dragged shrieking to the scaffold could have formed a more pitiful sight, but there was no mercy in the eyes of the man ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... mean with Miss Wilson, Ken," Boyd said. "I meant in general." He left, with the air of a man whose world has betrayed him. His back looked, to Malone, like the back of a man on his way to the scaffold or guillotine. ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... dead all of the belongings of the deceased, the playthings of the Indian child, for the Indian boy and girl have dolls and balls and baubles as does the white child: you may see them all pendent from the poles of the scaffold or the boughs of a tree. When the great Chief Spotted Tail died they killed his two ponies, placing the two heads toward the east, fastening the tails on the scaffold toward the west. The war-bonnets and war-shirts ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... ship went down, leaving not a spar, not a plank, on a vast ocean of hope! Some women when they see themselves abandoned will try to tear their lover from the arms of a rival, they will kill her, and rush to the ends of the earth,—to the scaffold, to their tomb. That, no doubt, is fine; the motive of the crime is a great passion, which awes even human justice. Other women bow their heads and suffer in silence; they go their way dying, resigned, weeping, forgiving, praying, and recollecting, till they draw their last ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... tenanted by a religious Roundhead; and, framed-in over the low door, there was a grim, faded portrait of a pinched-faced saturnine man, with long lank hair, starched band, and a length of upper lip that betokened relentless obstinacy of character, and might have curled in sullen glee at the monarch's scaffold, or preached an interminable sermon to the stout Protector. On a table, under the deep-sunk window, were neatly arrayed a few sober-looking old books; you would find amongst them Colley's "Astrology," Owen Feltham's "Resolves," Glanville "On Witches," the "Pilgrim's Progress," ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... He occupies his cell hardened by crime. Sentence has been passed; the day of execution comes. The sheriff enters the prison, reads the death warrant, pinions his hands, and the slow and steady death march begins. The scaffold is reached, steps ascended, and the prisoner takes his place on the center of the death trap; the black cap is securely tied over his face, and the rope around his neck, and as the trapdoor is sprung, the unfortunate man leaps into ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... strongly a special purpose, the characteristic of all but his very earliest writings. Its scene is laid at the time when the incessant execution of men and women, comparatively innocent, disgraced every part of the country; demoralizing thousands, whom it also prepared for the scaffold. In those days the theft of a few rags from a bleaching-ground, or the abstraction of a roll of ribbons from a counter, was visited with the penalty of blood; and such laws brutalized both their ministers and victims. It was the time, too, when a false ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of former ages are not extinct in this," added he. "Whenever a scaffold is erected outside a prison-door, if you are earnest in pursuit of truth, and can put up with disgusting objects, you shall see a relic of ancient ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... and abandon, Miranda is indeed a powerful study. Always guilty, she is always excused, or if punished but sparingly and little, whilst the friar languishes in a foul dungeon, the page-boy is hanged, her husband stands upon the public scaffold. And then in the end, 'very penitent for her life past', she is received with open arms by Tarquin's old father, who looks upon her as a very angel, and retiring to the tranquility of a country-house she passes her days in 'as perfect a state of happiness ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this time, is the most useless and the least read. I mean his "Novum Scientiarum Organum." This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it, at least the scaffold was no longer ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... a fatal blow; but I can force him to it, force him even to be bold. I need but pronounce his real name; but the murder of a friend is a frightful crime; and then, perhaps, to be discovered, betrayed—to die on a scaffold like a common felon—I, the head of the house ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... priestcraft and statecraft, yet his learning and labours were, for the chief part, devoted to the support of certain irrational points of theological faith; and poor Sir Thomas More lost his head on the scaffold rather than aid his less fastidious sovereign in overturning the spiritual supremacy of the bishops of Rome. We may honour the conscientious scruples of such men; but, enabled, as we now are, to view their errors at a proper ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... were these rejoicings; for the greater part was occasioned by a false rumour that the duke was to be sent to the Tower. No one inquired about a news which every one wished to hear; and so sudden was the joy, that a MS. letter says, "the old scaffold on Tower-hill was pulled down and burned by certain unhappy boys, who said they would have a new one built for the duke." This mistake so rapidly prevailed as to reach even the country, which blazed with bonfires to announce the fall of Buckingham.[234] The shouts ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Dutch officers who escaped, three were publicly shot at the Helder, four were ordered to have their swords broken over their heads by the common hangman, and the master of the vice-admiral to stand upon a scaffold with a halter about his neck under the gallows, while the others were executed, and he was afterwards sent into perpetual banishment. Two more were degraded and rendered incapable of serving the ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... out, it happened that the very day had come round when her dear brothers should be set free; the six shirts were also ready, all but the last, which yet wanted the left sleeve. As she was led to the scaffold, she placed the shirts upon her arm, and just as she had mounted it, and the fire was about to be kindled, she looked around, and saw six Swans come flying through the air. Her heart leapt for joy as she perceived her deliverers approaching, and soon the Swans, flying towards her, alighted so near ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... the centre of the group of huts, a rude sort of scaffold, four or five feet high, and surrounded by a rustic railing, served for the speaker's stand. It would seat about a dozen persons, and was protected by a roof of pine-boughs, interlaced together so as to keep off the sun, without affording protection from the rain. In ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... again condemned. Her husband, who knew not of her return to Boston until it was too late, appeared before the magistrates, and pleaded with all the eloquence of affection and anguish. But he wept and prayed in vain. His young and lovely wife was led to the scaffold, where she met her fate with a pious and even cheerful resignation; but her blood has left a dark stain on the history of the Church of Boston, that no time will ever efface. This dreadful event occurred about forty years after that period of which ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... man, looking beyond the mobs of kings and lords to the great nation-forming people, upon which these float and pass away like the shadows of purple Summer clouds; and stranger still, the ending of the contrast in the identification of these typical women in their death, both going to the same scaffold, discrowned of all their hopes. Of all the lessons which life has taught to ambition, none are more touching than when it points to the figures of these women as they are hurried by the procession in which they moved ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the princess of the knight's fairy dream; and Mrs. West bowed, with a sweet, sad look first at Mr. Somerled, then finishing up with me—just the reproachful, yet resigned martyr-look a queen ought to give a crowd of rebellious subjects on her way to the scaffold where their cruelty had ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... its actual presence; but Theramenes was light-hearted when the hemlock bowl was presented to him, and drinking it off could not, as he threw out the dregs, resist exclaiming "To the health of the lovely Critias."[23] Sir Thomas More was jocose upon the scaffold. Baron Goerz, when being led to death, said to his cook—"It's all over now, my friend, you will never cook me a good supper again." The poet Kleist, who was killed in the battle of Kunersdorf, was seized with a violent fit of laughter ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... unavailing exertions to beat down the barrier. Strong ropes with running nooses are now laid down, and no sooner does the animal put his foot within one of them, than the rope is drawn tight by some of the hunters who are stationed on a small scaffold which has been raised over the gateway. In the same manner his other feet are secured. When this has been effected, some of the hunters venture to approach, and tie his hind legs together. Having thus secured him, they can with comparative ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... longed for their former yoke; they looked around them with a feeling of strangeness, and to them it seemed unnatural not everywhere to see the brandished knout, the avenging scaffold, and the transport-carriages ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... in the long list of victims whose bloody end, at stake or scaffold, the historian of England in the sixteenth century has to relate, two only showed signs of cowardice, and one of those was a soldier and a nobleman, who, {p.041} in a moment of extreme peril, four years before, had kissed swords with his comrades, and had sworn to conquer the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... the most absolutely curious of all extant thieves' literature. Somewhere in the recesses of Fury's wild heart there must have been good concealed; for he confessed his worst crime in the interests of justice, and he went to the scaffold with a serious and serene courage which almost made of him a dignified person. But, on his own confession, he must have been all his life long an unmitigated rascal—a predatory beast of the most ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... and do it yourself." Michael Angelo took down the platform, and took away so much rope from it, that having given it to a poor man that assisted him, it enabled him to dower and marry two daughters. Michael Angelo erected his scaffold without ropes, so well devised and arranged that the more weight it had to bear the firmer it became. This opened Bramante's eyes, and gave him a lesson in the building of a platform, which was very useful to him in the works of St. Peter's. For all that, Michael Angelo, although ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... piracy, and a search made for evidences of the unlawful traffic. The prisoners were released through some favor of the authorities, but Brisbau and his men were imprisoned. In the hands of the king's officers their lives were in great jeopardy, but they finally escaped the scaffold. ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... father believed it to be impossible that a man at whose table he had sat, whose relatives and friends he had amused and instructed by his talents, would be the man to give evidence which should condemn him to be hanged on the public scaffold. ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... who has looked upon a full-rigged ship must have noticed some distance up the main-mast a frame-wood or platform, like a little scaffold. A similar construction may be observed on the fore and mizen-mast, if the ship be a large one. This platform is called the "top," and its principal object is to extend the ladder-like ropes, called "shrouds," that reach from its outer edge to the head of the mast ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... hitch. He was already several days behind, and when one is figuring it as fine as Bannon was doing in those last days, even one day is a serious matter. He could do nothing more at the belt gallery until his substitute for a scaffold should arrive; it did not come that afternoon or evening, and next morning when he came on the job it still had not been heard from. There was enough to occupy every moment of his time and every shred of his thought without bothering about the gallery, ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... sustaining life, far less wealth sufficient to counterbalance the infamy which my countrymen, both those whom I desert and those whom I join, will attach to the name of the political renegade. It is not to be thought of. And yet, what choice remains between this lot and the ignominious scaffold? Nothing can save me but reconciliation with these men; and, to accomplish this, I have promised to Langley that Isabella shall marry him ere midnight, and to Mareschal, that she shall do so without compulsion. I have but one remedy betwixt me and ruin—her consent to take a suitor whom ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... and docks. The ugliness of some docks is appalling. Wild horses would not drag from me the name of a certain river in the north whose narrow estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks are like a nightmare of dreariness and misery. Their dismal shores are studded thickly with scaffold-like, enormous timber structures, whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by the infernal gritty night of a cloud of coal-dust. The most important ingredient for getting the world's work along is distributed there under the circumstances of the greatest cruelty meted out to helpless ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the bigamous Miss Chudleigh; what jokes—now, alas! very faded and dreary—were made by George Selwyn, and how that amiable favourite of society went to Paris in order to see the cruel tortures inflicted upon Damiens, and was introduced to the chief performer on the scaffold as a distinguished amateur in executions. One of the best of all these vignettes portrays the funeral of George II., and is a worthy pendant to Lord Hervey's classic account of the Queen's death. It opens with the solemn procession to the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... had happened just before my time, or were still, at a less dramatic pace, happening. I realised that building was the enemy. I began to understand why in every direction out of Bromstead one walked past scaffold-poles into litter, why fragments of broken brick and cinder mingled in every path, and the significance of the universal notice-boards, either white and new or a year old and torn and battered, promising sites, proffering houses to be sold or let, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... man who had lived a righteous, sober and godly life died while playing cards or in innocent laughter, with no opportunity for the ministrations of a priest, his chances for the next world were thought to be slim. On the other hand, a damnable scoundrel on the scaffold, with the clergyman's assurances assented to, was supposed to be jerked into heaven. This view of life and death was firmly held even by so sincere and profound a thinker as Hamlet: which explains his anguish at the fate of his father killed in his sleep, and his own refusal to slay the villain ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... the difficulty of obtaining employment and procuring an honest livelihood, would be almost insuperable. It has been accordingly found that these unfortunate persons have generally renewed their ancient habits, and ended their career either by falling sacrifices on the scaffold to the often violated laws of their country, or by imposing on the government a necessity for the second, and in many instances for the third time of re-transporting them to this colony, where, if sufficient encouragement and protection had been afforded them in the first instance, they would ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... consecutive review of the characteristic forms and facts of a creed which (if at present apparently dead, or at least harmless, in Christendom) in the seventeenth century was a living and lively faith, and caused thousands of victims to be sent to the torture-chamber, to the stake, and to the scaffold. At this day, the remembrance of its superhuman art, in its different manifestations, is immortalised in the every-day language of the peoples ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... of the aborigines called upon them for increased exertion. They were wasting away with disease—they were dying on the scaffold—they were being shot down in mistake for native dogs, and their bleeding and ghastly heads had been exhibited on poles, as ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... person, amidst the crowd of frivolous idlers who at that time formed "good society," not only in Paris, but even in provincial towns, of which Boulogne was not the least gay. Perhaps he knows already that she quickly followed her husband to the scaffold. Her sister (I believe the only one) married a Parisian gentleman named Aublay, and died at a great age about ten ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... of the eastern practice of investiture by a glove. A remarkable instance of this ceremony is recorded. The unfortunate Conradin was deprived of his crown and his life by the usurper Mainfroy. When having ascended the scaffold, the injured prince lamenting his hard fate, asserted his right to the crown, and, as a token of investiture, threw his glove among the crowd, intreating it might be conveyed to some of his relations, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... in his own bed. But he had to be buried secretly in the dead of night, for, ten years after Eugene Aram had died on the scaffold, the hatred of the world survived for his accomplice. Rowland Lester did not live long after Madeline's death. But when Walter returned from a period of honourable service with the great Frederick of Prussia, it was with no merely cousinly welcome that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... to contend with—this hapless and amiable queen—but she ever proved firm, and ever retained one kind of courage that belongs to woman—the courage to smile through her tears. Her father perished on the scaffold; her mother, the doubly-dethroned empress, died of a broken heart; her step-father, the Emperor Napoleon, pined away, liked a caged lion, on a lone rock in the sea! Her whole family—all the dethroned kings and queens—went wandering about as fugitives and pariahs, banished from ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... brave, for the sake of those he loved, the unknown dangers that lurked in the rude, wild wastes beyond the line of blue mysterious hills to the northward. And now the poor remains enclosed in the rough box that rested upon the scaffold outside were all that remained of him. And that was the end of all the plans that he and the mother had made for their son's future, of all their ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... affection and feeling. He witnessed the gentlemanly manners and equanimity of this heroic soldier, while in his house, under the most trying circumstances, and from its threshold to the fatal spot. In his room the prisoner could hear the sound of the axe employed in erecting the scaffold; and on one occasion, in the presence of a friend, when these sounds, terrible to all but himself, were more than usually distinct, he is said to have observed, with great composure, "that every sound he heard from that axe was indeed an important lesson, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... entered this inn as a sovereign; he left it a prisoner under the guard of his Lothian escort. Here he slept his last night of liberty, and as he passed under the archway of the "Saracen's Head" he started on that fatal journey that terminated on the scaffold at Whitehall. You can see on the front of the inn over the gateway a stone lozenge with the royal arms engraved on it with the date 1693, commemorating this royal melancholy visit. In later times Lord ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... the plough was staid in the unfinished furrow; wives gave up their husbands, and mothers gave up their sons, to the battles of a civil war. Death might come, in honor, on the field; it might come, in disgrace, on the scaffold. For either and for both they were prepared. The sentiment of Quincy was full in their hearts. "Blandishments," said that distinguished son of genius and patriotism, "will not fascinate us, nor will threats of a halter intimidate; for, under God, we are determined that, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... you make your dying speech from the scaffold you're going to say something original and funny. You can't ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... clad in the vile uniform of guilt and shame." But he is now gone where he will scarcely have the opportunity even of such conversation. I cannot honestly suppress my conviction that the object in the case of Poerio, as a man of mental power sufficient to be feared, is to obtain the scaffold's aim by means more cruel than the scaffold, and without the outcry ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... gratitude then, and I don't know that I can describe it now. I can only say that it has outlived the crime, the disgrace, and the awful death on the scaffold. I am grieved to speak of that death at all; but I have no other alternative. The course of my story must now lead me straight on to the later time, and to the terrible discovery which exposed my benefactor and my friend to all ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... glanced at his comrades, raised his hand, and said in a loud voice: "God grant that none of the heretics who stand here may hear, the unclean dogs, how Christians suffer! Let none of us utter a single word." After this he ascended the scaffold. ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... high, his fall would be so bitter, his disgrace so deeply felt, and the stigma so doubly severe! "No, no," thought Joey, "were I to impeach my father now—to accuse him of a deed which would bring him to the scaffold—I should not only be considered his murderer, but it would be said I had done it to inherit his possessions; I should be considered one who had sacrificed his father to obtain his property. I should be scouted, shunned, and deservedly despised; ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... first person that ever gave me a Bible in French, and bade me read it, was a Franciscan like yourself. And therein I learned the religion that I now hold, which is the only true religion. Having lived in it ever since, I wish, by the grace of God, to die in it to-day." On the scaffold, after a touching address to the spectators, he recited in a loud voice the Apostles' Creed, in the confession of which he protested that he died, and then, "having made his prayer to God after the manner of those of the (reformed) religion,"[1387] ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... merriment characteristic of the time, "victim balls" were given, to which those alone were admitted who could produce the death warrant of some family connection: these secured the pleasure of dancing in costumes which recalled those of the scaffold, and of beckoning ever and anon to their partners with nods that simulated the fall of the severed head. It was for this, then, that the amiable Louis, the majestic Marie Antoinette, the Minerva-like Madame Roland, the Girondins vowed to the utter ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... exercise the rights of States even, a power which seeks to coerce us, when we propose to protect ourselves against this lowering and impending danger. You of the North are descended from men who honored the scaffold for the very rights we now seek to exercise. So are we. You would deserve to be spurned by the maids and matrons among you, if you refused to protect yourselves against the dangers thus drawing around you. Can ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... the charge of working the tackle of the balance-weight, and James Scott, also a mason, took charge of the purchase with which the stones were laid; while the pointing the joints of the walls with cement was intrusted to William Reid and William Kennedy, who stood upon a scaffold suspended over the walls in rather a frightful manner. The least act of carelessness or inattention on the part of any of these men might have been fatal, not only to themselves, but also to the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for him the absolution of that murderer's father. Gianpaolo Baglioni, who reigned by parricide and lived in incest, was severely blamed by the Florentines for not killing Pope Julius II. when the latter was his guest at Perugia. And when Gabrino Fondato, the tyrant of Cremona, was on the scaffold, his only regret was that when he had taken his guests, the Pope and Emperor, to the top of the Cremona tower, four hundred feet high, his nerve failed him and he did not push them both over. Upon this anarchy of religion, morals, and conduct breathed suddenly the inspiring breath of Pagan antiquity ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... State is Lost. I lie in Vile Bondage here in Morristown under charge of Disrespeck—me that a twelvemonth past left a home and Respectable Connexions to serve my Country. Believe me still your own Love, albeit in the Power of Tyrants and condemned it may be to the scaffold. ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... History was abruptly ended. The seven years of retirement which he had anticipated were cut down by the outbreak of the Second Civil War to two; and within a year the King for whose benefit he had begun this History was led to the scaffold. Not for twenty years was Clarendon again to have the leisure to be an historian. When in 1668 he once more took up his pen, it was not a continuation of the first work, but an entirely new work, that came in steady flow from ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... whose great overhanging sweep offered a convenient scaffold, Ortez paused to look at his victim. My breath came slow, I ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... was that he hailed originally from the Bowery in New York City; and one, the worst of them all, who was said to be the son of a pastor in a New England town. One by one, unerringly and swiftly, Uncle Tobe launched them through his scaffold floor to get whatever deserts await those who violate the laws of God and man by the violent shedding of innocent blood. When the sixth and last gunman came out of the prison proper into the prison enclosure—it was the former dentist, and being set, as the phrase runs, upon dying ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... which will fly a kite for some tousle-headed boy in Michigan or for a slant-eyed urchin on the banks of the Yang-Tse Kiang: or, somewhere, it may be looped into ugliest knot by a grim figure standing on a scaffold—though I hope not!" ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... has deserted you, Lucian Davlin," she says, slowly. "It was not in the book of chance that you should triumph over or outwit me. The bullet you designed for me has completed the work you began five years ago. Go, to live a convict, or die on the scaffold, and when you think upon the failure of your villainous schemes, remember that this retribution has been wrought by a woman's ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... he made much of it—how should he?—for there were a hundred things to look at, and his eyes were here and there and everywhere; now up at the great black rocks above us; now peering into a deep gorge, over which a little wooden bridge carried us, just for all the world like a scaffold thrown from tree to tree of the wood. It was a rare picture, I admit, and when we came out of the thicket at last and saw the lower island spread before us like a chart, with its fields of crimson flowers, its waterfalls, its bits of pasture, and its blue seas beyond, a man might well have ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... pa died last week. He was killed falling from a scaffold. He was buried on Monday with five carriages and everything nice. We all got new black dresses, and have enough for a stone. If it don't cost too much, we'll have an angle on the top. I always thought an angle pointing ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... so easy that we will wonder why it was not done long before." Again the fire leaped high within him. To do it! Perhaps after all he did see it too complexly. He must not let the husk dull his eye to the kernel. A man building a beautiful tower must erect a scaffold. But the scaffolding should not make him forget the tower! Some way in this last hour his mind had seemed to clear. His immense amount of useless work was not hanging about his neck like a millstone. Something had cut that away. He ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... answered. "She, and my father also, went by the same road to heaven as so many others of the fair and brave: they followed their queen upon the scaffold. So, you see, I am not so much to be pitied in my prison," I continued: "there are none to wait for me; I am alone in the world. 'Tis a different case, for instance, with yon poor fellow in the cloth cap. His bed is next to mine, and in the night I hear him sobbing to himself. He has ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wicked and wanton will. To the shame of England be it said, the Earl of Surrey was beheaded when he was only thirty years of age. No particulars are preserved of his deportment in prison or on the scaffold, but from the noble spirit he evinced at his trial, and from his general character, it cannot be doubted that he behaved in the last scene of his existence with fortitude and dignity. On the barbarous injustice to which he was sacrificed comment is unnecessary; but ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... inches below the extremity of the split; it is then turned directly bottom upwards, for the sun to kill it more speedily, to enable the laborers to carry it out of the field, else the leaves would break off in transporting it to the scaffold. The plants are cut only as they become ripe, for a field never ripens altogether. There is generally a second cutting likewise, for the stalk vegetates and shoots forth again, and in good land, with favorable seasons, there is a third cutting also procured, notwithstanding acts ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... for pretty Hetty Sorrel. Hetty is seduced by the young squire, murders her baby, and is condemned to die for the crime. Dinah visits the doomed girl in prison, wins her to a confession and repentance, and accompanies her in the gallows-cart. They are at the scaffold when a reprieve arrives.—George ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... money against the "Divine Right" of any Habsburg or Bourbon or Stuart. They knew that their guilders and shillings could beat the clumsy feudal armies which were the only weapons of the King. They dared to act, where others were condemned to suffer in silence or run the risk of the scaffold. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... back of the house. Beneath the walnut tree he slung the coiled rope over one shoulder and under the other arm; and then he slowly ascended the ladder, saying to himself: "I am on the steps of my scaffold. The scaffold steps. I am going up the scaffold steps." From the top of the ladder he got upon a branch, and, putting his arms about the stem, began to climb. "Yes," he said to himself, "my gallows tree. I am going up the gallows tree. This is my gallows tree;" ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... Roman infantry, and one of cavalry, both in battle array, surrounded a vacant space, in the middle of which rose a large scaffold of timber. On the platform was a heavy block, such as is used for chopping meat on. Beside the block stood a Moor of gigantic stature and bronzed of color. His arms and legs were bare, his hair was bound with a scarlet band; he wore a coat ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... thus terribly afflicted, I beheld the figure of a man enter my chamber, twisted in his body into the form of a capital S. He raised a lamentable, doleful voice, like one who announces their last hour to men condemned to die upon the scaffold, and spoke these words: "O Benvenuto! your statue is spoiled, and there is no hope whatever of saving it." No sooner had I heard the shriek of that wretch than I gave a howl which might have been heard from the sphere of flame. Jumping from my ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... so strongly as you and I. Others have pursued the search for the murderer with great zeal for a while; we must make that search the one great object of our lives. Upon us devolve the right and the duty to avenge her death by bringing her destroyer to the scaffold. Miriam, do you hear—do you hear ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... rendered it necessary to separate them, even from their companions in guilt. It is a long, sombre room, with two windows sunk into the stone wall, and here the wretched men are pinioned on the morning of their execution, before moving towards the scaffold. The fate of one of these prisoners was uncertain; some mitigatory circumstances having come to light since his trial, which had been humanely represented in the proper quarter. The other two had nothing to expect from the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... no citizen should leave his house. About noon the condemned patriots were led from their dungeons to the Grand Square, and huddled together beneath the platform on which they were to bleed. The citizens had by this time been permitted to leave their houses and had gathered around the foot of the scaffold, from which they were addressed in soothing language by several of the Danish Cabinet, whose words however were interrupted by constant cries of the victims calling on their fellow-countrymen to avenge them. At last the agony of suspense was over. One after another the condemned mounted ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... stone of it: I'll take my oath. Mind you, it isn't like a church made up of different scraps of memory. It's just that particular church, and I know it by heart, down to a scaffold-hole, partly hidden with grass, close under the lowest string-course of the tower, facing ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... has built its nest and laid three eggs at the junction of two scaffold poles where between fifty and sixty men are working on a new building at Northampton. The kind-hearted labourers were, we understand, willing to work quietly and slowly in order not to disturb the young mother, but were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... said Bat. "An acquaintance with that guy is one of the things I'd framed up for the near future. I'm interested in why he was promenading around on the scaffold at Nora's window, and why he shifted his attention to Stanwick in such a hurry." Bat looked at his hat which lay upon the table, and then to Ashton-Kirk once more. "Any particular time you'd like me to take ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... to hide the fragment of the blade in a corner of my cell, as if it might still be of use. They tended me; none of my wounds were serious. At two-and-twenty one can recover from anything. I was to lose my head on the scaffold. I shammed illness to gain time. It seemed to me that the canal lay just outside my cell. I thought to make my escape by boring a hole through the wall and swimming for my life. I based my hopes on the ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... our sentence of death being cried in the streets. To-morrow we shall walk to the scaffold; but we will meet death with such calmness and courage as shall make our executioners blush. We are sixty years old, therefore our lives will only be shortened by a brief apace. During our lives we have shared in common, illness, grief, pleasure, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton |
