"Decapitated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found in company with the clinging oyster, resembles, when the fragile valves are expanded, a decapitated butterfly, brick-red in colour, with an overshirt of fine and elaborate network, orange tinted. The interior is scarcely less attractive, the nacre having a pink and bluish lustre, while the "lip" is dark red. This is found (in my experience) only in association ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... of a surfuria, or native cooking pot. Memba Sasa scrubbed this with sand. First we made tea in it, and drank turn about, from its wide edge. This warmed us up somewhat. Then we dumped in our few potatoes and a single guinea fowl that F. had decapitated earlier in the day. We ate; and passed the pot over to ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... decapitated while in this hibernating condition, the action of the heart is not affected for some time, a second life seeming to outlive the one taken. An experiment has been made in which the brain of the sleeper was removed, then the entire spinal cord, but ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... head and dish, and send them to London for exhibition; but a former confidential agent obtained it from the executioner for a higher price than the merchant had offered; and together with the heads of his three sons and grandson, who, according to custom, were all seized and decapitated, had them deposited near one of the city gates, with a tombstone ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... damnable magazine of disease physical and moral. It is undeniable that there were many there whose faces were passport to the Court of Lucifer—murderers, and dire malefactors; but better to have decapitated them than to have committed them to the slow torture of this citadel of woe. There were inmates who had been immured for years—inmates for debt whose hair had whitened in the fetid imprisonment, whose laugh ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... long each, have their ends bevelled off at an angle of 60 degrees, and are laid with their ends touching. Two semi-circles of 24 and 22 inch radius are drawn on the boards to indicate the positions of the rails, and short decapitated brass nails are driven in on each side of a rail, about an inch apart, as it is laid along one of these lines. (See Fig. 44. A.) The inside nails must not project sufficiently to catch the wheel flanges. The spring of the brass will prevent the rail falling out of place, but ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... have seen it eight feet long. Before now, I have seen a couple dining near the corner of a room, with their roll of bread thrown like a cane against the wall, and as often as they wanted a fresh slice, the roll was very coolly brought over and decapitated. The Frenchman eats little meat, but enormously of the staff of life. The chocolate and coffee which are to be had in the French cafes, are very delicious, and though after a fair and long trial I never could ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... same symbol with its attendant falcon was repeatedly and conspicuously emblazoned. From Edmund of Langley it descended to his son Edward duke of York, slain in the field of Agincourt, and next to the son of his unfortunate brother the decapitated earl of Cambridge; to that Richard who fell at Wakefield in the attempt to assert his title to the crown, which the victorious arms of his son Edward IV. afterwards vindicated to ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... a disgraced and decapitated Queen, wore the crown of England. If heredity had been as much talked of then as now, England might have feared the child of a faithless wife, and a remorseless, bloodthirsty King. But while Mary, ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... standing, his fingers clutched into the hair of decapitated Goliath. As Saul sees David standing there holding in his hand the ghastly, reeking, staring trophy, evidence of the complete victory over God's enemies, the king wonders what parentage was honored by such heroism, and ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... walls, with their bright clear colours, the desert appears, and shows quite brown by contrast; one sees the great yellow swell of sand and stones above the pictures of these decapitated people. It rises like a colossal wave and stretches out to bathe the foot of the Libyan mountains beyond. Towards the north and west of the solitudes, shapeless ruins of tawny-coloured blocks follow one another in the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... in his own ship by stabs with a dagger by the chief constable of the fleet, who was sent to do this by Ferdinand Magellan in a boat with certain men. The said three ships having thus been recovered, five days later Ferdinand Magellan ordered Gaspar de Quexixada to be decapitated and quartered; he was captain of one of the ships and was one ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... officers, when, through an open door, I caught sight of fowls in a backyard. I promptly jumped off my horse, and entered into negotiations with the owners of the chicken run, which speedily resulted in the decapitated corpses of three plump fowls being slung from my saddle. Amid the envy of the column, I proudly rode down to the transport of my unit with my spoil, the result being that in a short time not a fowl remained alive ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... shovel. Trembling all over with irrepressible shudders, she saw before her the very implement with its ghastly load scraped up from the ground. Mrs Verloc closed her eyes desperately, throwing upon that vision the night of her eyelids, where after a rainlike fall of mangled limbs the decapitated head of Stevie lingered suspended alone, and fading out slowly like the last star of a pyrotechnic display. Mrs ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... in, crude and ill-digested, as all sudden and sweeping reforms must be; cruel to the individual, as all crude reforms will ever be; and among the list of helpless men and women, incapacitated for other work by long service in the dull routine of federal office, who were decapitated, the weak, foolish, emaciated head of Expectant Dobbs went to the block. It afterward appeared that the gifted Gashwiler was responsible for the appointment of twenty clerks, and that the letter of poor Dobbs, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... practice they assert to have prevailed. After an execution at Peking certain large pith balls are steeped in the blood, and under the name of blood-bread are sold as a medicine for consumption. It is only to the blood of decapitated criminals that any such healing power is attributed. It has been asserted in the annals of the Propagation de la Foi that the Chinese executioners of M. Chapdelaine, a missionary who was martyred in Kwang-si in 1856 (28th February), were seen ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the honors of this historic gem to Sir John, and who had not seen it for the last seven or eight years, was much disappointed when, on arriving in front of the building, he found the niches of the saints empty and the carved figures of the portal decapitated. ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... in heaven and a chief in Brittany? There is a God above us, I know, and I believe there is a just Duke in the Breton land. Mighty ruler, make war upon the Frank, defend our country, and give us vengeance—vengeance for Karo my son, Karo, slain, decapitated by the Frankish barbarians, his beauteous head made into a balance-weight ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... please; it will cause him to shoot prodigiously, so as in a few years to be fit for pike-staves; whereas if you take him wild out of the forest, you must of necessity strike off the head, which much impairs it. Hedgerow ashes may the oftner be decapitated, and shew their heads again sooner than other trees so us'd. Young ashes are sometimes in winter frost-burnt, black as coals, and then to use the knife is seasonable, though they do commonly recover ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... insolent face, with large steel-blue eyes and beautifully cut, mocking lips. A rapier with a jeweled hilt hung at his side, and one white hand, half buried in snowy ruffles, held a beribboned cane with which, as he talked, he ruthlessly decapitated the pink and white morning-glories with which the porch ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... 1785 an Englishman visiting France boasts of the political liberty enjoyed in his country. As an offset to this the French reproach the English for having decapitated Charles I., and "glory in having always maintained an inviolable attachment to their own king; a fidelity, a respect which no excess or severity on his part has ever shaken." ("A Comparative View of the French and of the English ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... arose a vision of another corpse, that of the fair, pretty child ripped open by a bomb and stretched yonder, at the entrance of the Duvillard mansion. Blood streamed from her delicate flesh, just as it had streamed from that decapitated neck. It was blood paying for blood; it was like payment for mankind's debt of wretchedness, for which payment is everlastingly being made, without man ever being able ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... healthiness may exist in these commonwealths. And feudalism is outside the gates. There are the brutal, leering men-at-arms, in slashed, puffed doublets and heavy armour, face and dress as unhuman as possible, standing grimacing at the blood spurting from John the Baptist's decapitated trunk, as in Kranach's horrible print, while gaping spectators fill the castle yard; there are the castles high on rocks amidst woods, with miserable villages below, where the Prodigal Son wallows among the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... hunting and enjoying the sport. He is with his aunt, whom he admires." She calmed her fears and returned to the charming gayety of Florence. She had seen casually, at the Offices, a picture that Dechartre liked. It was a decapitated head of the Medusa, a work wherein Leonardo, the sculptor said, had expressed the minute profundity and tragic refinement of his genius. She wished to see it again, regretting that she had not seen it better at first. She extinguished her ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... kings were decapitated. "Ah," says Talmage, "I want five more kings beheaded to-day, King Alcohol, King Fraud, King Lust, King Superstition, and King Infidelity." Soft, you priestly calumniator! What right have you to associate Infidelity with fraud and lust? That Freethought, which you call "infidelity," is more ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... of the Lao-tsze sect inhabiting prisons under the jurisdiction of the Principal Bonze were decapitated, and the P.B. laid his own head upon his pillow with some approach to peace of mind, trusting that the knowledge of the Elixir of Immortality ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... and among them was the thought that if "Fruitfulness" were not presented to the public in an English dress, M. Zola's new series would remain incomplete, decapitated so far as British and American readers were concerned. After all, the criticisms dealing with the French original were solely directed against matters of form, the mould in which some part of the work ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... to the front veranda for a mild cigar after the mulberry just as she brought her scythe round with an admirable sweep and decapitated a whole army of ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... into the river, only their faces and hair-covered heads appearing above the surface; they treaded water, or swayed around on the bottom. As "Al-f-u-r-d" looked back on them they seemed like so many decapitated heads floating in space, a sight that dwelt in his memory ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... choose one whom they should privately guillotine when the opportunity offered. With the idea of paying a high compliment to Troubridge, who had so splendidly protected the Royalists, fought the French, and subdued the revolutionists, they made him the recipient of a decapitated head which had proudly sat on the shoulders of a revolutionist. This trophy was actually sent to him with his basket of breakfast grapes. In making the present the gallant fisherman conveyed his compliments to the Admiral, and reminded him ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... by the guide, which told their own story. In the centre of this dreary vault was a well whose water was level with the river, into which it opened some twenty feet from the surface, and into which the decapitated bodies of the criminals were cast and left to float away with the ebb and flow of the Jumna's tide. The bed of the river showed that at certain seasons it must be at least half a mile in width, but it was a meagre stream ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Sirven, a Protestant, declared guilty of the murder of his Roman Catholic daughter, was beggared and banished; Voltaire succeeded, after eight years, in effecting the reversal of the sentence. La Barre was tortured and decapitated for alleged impiety. Voltaire was not strong enough to overpower the French magistracy supported now by the French monarch. He turned to Frederick with a request that he would give shelter to a colony of philosophes, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Without doubt Sagawa had been eaten as well by the "bad fella boys too much" that stopped along the bush. He could see him, as he had last seen him, stripped of the shot-gun and all the naturalist's gear of his master, lying on the narrow trail where he had been decapitated barely the moment before. Yes, within a minute the thing had happened. Within a minute, looking back, Bassett had seen him trudging patiently along under his burdens. Then Bassett's own trouble had come upon him. He looked at the cruelly healed stumps of the first and second ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... sealed on the site of the Church of the English Martyrs. On the 5th of January, 1715, we are told that sixteen rebels "were hanged upon Gallows Hill, for high treason and conspiracy." In the following year "42 condemned prisoners of all religions were hanged and decapitated at Preston;" and amongst them were five belonging Preston and the neighbourhood. They were "Richard Shuttleworth, of Preston, Esq.; Roger Moncaster, of Garstang, attorney; Thomas Cowpe, of Walton-le-Dale; William Butler, of Myerscough, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a week or two, careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a politically dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human being, all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pursued against the Minamoto was now remorselessly enforced by the Minamoto against the Taira. The prisoners who were taken in the battle were executed to the last man. Munemori was taken prisoner and decapitated. Whenever a Taira man, woman, or child was found, death was the inevitable penalty inflicted. Yoritomo stationed his father-in-law Hojo Tokimasa at Kyoto to search out and eradicate his enemies as well as to supervise ...
— Japan • David Murray
... flowers in their season was past gathering, and any child in the neighborhood was at liberty to pluck them by handfuls, while the wicked ones played at "chicken fighting" and littered the ground with decapitated bodies. There is no heartsease nowadays, only the magnificent pansy of which it was the modest forerunner. But one little cluster of dark, spicy blooms like those I used to gather in that old garden would be more to me than the most splendid pansy ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... hurry to the odious conclusion. In parties of twos and of threes, our brave countrymen were called out by the horrid Kandyan tiger cats. Disarmed by the frenzy of their moonstruck commander, what resistance could they make? One after one the parties, called out to suffer, were decapitated by the executioner. The officers, who had refused to give up their pistols, finding what was going on, blew out their brains with their own hands, now too bitterly feeling how much wiser had been the poor privates than themselves. At length there was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... seizing him, as he fled, by an immeasurable queue, 'Ah, whoreson caterpillar,' roared he, 'here's what shall make worms' meat of thee!' so saying he whirled his sword and dealt a blow that would have decapitated the varlet, but that the pitying steel struck short and shaved the queue forever from his crown. At this moment an arquebusier leveled his piece from a neighboring mound, with deadly aim; but the watchful Minerva, who had just stopped ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... this ruffian, in a fit of drunken frenzy caused by jealousy, almost decapitated his wife with a tulwar, and afterwards mutilated her body past recognition. The shrieks of the poor woman having summoned the neighbours, he was seized, bound, and led before the Khan, who at once sentenced him to death. The execution was fixed for sunrise the following day. At midnight, ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... The boy from Barts' did remarkable imitations of a gamecock challenging a rival bird, of a cow coming through a gate, of a general addressing his troops (most comical of all). Several glasses were broken. The corkscrew was disregarded as a useless implement, and whisky-bottles were decapitated against the tent poles. I remember vaguely the crowning episode of the evening when the little major was dancing the Irish jig with a kitchen chair; when Falstaff was singing the Prologue of Pagliacci to the stupefied colonel; when the boy, once of Barts', was roaring like a ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... views show the larger of the two comparatively modern and small craters on the broad platform left by the explosion which decapitated the Peak. Prof. Flett measured this crater, and found it 1,600 feet from north to south, and 1,450 feet from east to west. The other, much smaller, adjoins it so closely that their rims touch. Together they form an eminence of 1,000 feet (Crater Peak), ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... Syrian rival, Niger, who had formerly been his friend, and who was not wanting in military skill, he overthrew him in three great battles. Niger fled to Antioch, the seat of his late government, and was there decapitated. Meantime Albinus, the British commander-in-chief, had already been won over by the title of Caesar, or adopted heir to the new Augustus. But the hollowness of this bribe soon became apparent, and the two competitors met to decide their ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the revolutionary march (none other than "Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay") while grotesque figures strike stiffly at bells. On the pavement an old man has spread for sale a litter of broken dolls, blind, halt and lame, when not decapitated; and in the roadway the festive crowd splits to allow the passage of a child's coffin covered with white flowers. The air thrills with the "ping" of unsuccessful shots: I take a gun, and by aiming at a ball dancing on a fountain jet, hit a bull's-eye two yards to the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... crying so annoyed the Captain that he savagely informed its mother that if she did not keep it quiet, he would not be answerable for the consequences. His warnings having no effect, he flew upstairs one day, when she was temporarily absent, and, snatching up the bread knife from the table, decapitated the infant. He then stuffed both its head and body into a grandfather's clock which stood in one corner of the room, and, retiring to his own quarters, drank till ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... his crime. He is put to death by the "Ling chi," or "degrading and slow process," and his younger brothers are beheaded; his house is razed to the ground and the earth under it dug up several feet deep; his neighbours are severely punished; his principal teacher is decapitated; the district magistrate is deprived of his office; and the higher officials of the province degraded three ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... have been executed by the court of justice are not by any means buried in the graves of their ancestors; but there are two graves appointed for them by the court of justice,—one for the stoned and burnt; the other for the decapitated and strangled." Just as the Prophet had, in the preceding verse, said that the Servant of God would die a violent death like a criminal, so he says here, that they had also fixed for Him a grave in common with executed ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... career. Timothy, who at this time must have been a mere boy, appears to have witnessed some of these ebullitions of Jewish malignity, and to have marked with admiration the heroic spirit of the heralds of the Cross. Paul, when about to be decapitated by the sword of Nero, could, therefore, appeal to the evangelist, and could fearlessly declare that, twenty years before, when his life was often at stake, he had not quailed before the terrors of martyrdom. "Thou," says he, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... is the attitude toward pain, inasmuch as barely a trace of intelligence is required, in order to know that it is necessary to wipe away a hot liquid drop that has fallen on the body. Every physiological text-book mentions the fact that a decapitated frog makes such wiping movements when it is wet with acid. From this unconscious activity of the understanding to the technically highest-developed treatment of a burn, a whole series of progressively higher expressions of intelligence may be interpolated, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... seemed to be streaming up past me, and me motionless. Then I looked down and saw in the darkness the river and the dead Sepoy rushing up towards me. But in the indistinct light I also saw three Chins, seemingly aghast at the sight of me, and that the Sepoy was decapitated. At that I wanted to ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... effect." Some of the bracelets are furnished with studs set with agate or coral. Some gold-plated ornaments have been found, among them a "bracelet formed by a double-headed snake grasping between its jaws a decapitated human head and a snake about four inches long." Ling Roth, commenting upon the workmanship of these smaller objects, says that generally speaking it is good, but "it is not as a rule equal to that of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... on the ground, she too holding a star at the end of a taper. The woman did not move but the star shook; then when the moment of communion was at hand, the woman rose, then disappeared, and her head, as if decapitated, filled the square of the wicket opened in ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... behead the inflexible monk, and bring the head before the throne, in case he should disobey the order for the fourth time. As Tao Sin was told of the order of the Emperor, he stretched out his neck ready to be decapitated. The Emperor, learning from the messenger what had happened, admired all the more the imperturbable patriarch, and bestowed rich gifts upon him. This example of his was followed by later Zen masters, who would not condescend to bend their knees before temporal ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... his toil's result, first was heard a rustle of leaves, as if a passing whirlwind had alighted there; next came the crack of bursting sinews; then the groan of a great riving spasm, and the tree, decapitated at its foot, crashed to earth, with a vain attempt to clutch for support at the stiff, unpitying arms of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... gentleman, general, dignified clergyman, or what not, was going to respond to the Right Honorable the Lord-Mayor's toast; then, if I mistake not, there was another prodigious flourish of trumpets and twanging of stringed instruments; and finally the doomed individual, waiting all this while to be decapitated, got up and proceeded to make a fool of himself. A bashful young earl tried his maiden oratory on the good citizens of London, and having evidently got every word by heart, (even including, however ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Boy's head is again seen rising above the level of the window-sill, and another and another follows, till the three, as if decapitated, heads ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the rest either perished or were made slaves. Mutila and Faveria were also attacked and levelled with the ground, and quiet reigned in Istria. Livy says that at that time 5,622 persons were sold into slavery, the authors of the war were beaten and then decapitated, and Istria was garrisoned with Roman troops. In 129 B.C. the Istrians rose in revolt when Rome was occupied with the Gepid war. The Consul Caius Sempronius Tuditanus crushed this revolt, and after ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... pack of monkeys on a picnic I never saw," exclaimed Billy as for the twentieth time he chased a long, skinny native away from the propellers, where he would have assuredly been decapitated if he had remained till the ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... of it. If the person who happened to pick up the douro, put it into his pocket and passed on, Bou-Akas made a sign to his chinaux (who followed him, also in disguise, and knew the Scheik's will) rushed forward immediately, and decapitated the offender. In consequence of this summary method of administering justice, it is a saying amongst the Arabs that a child might traverse the regions which own Bou-Akas's sway, wearing a golden crown on his head, without a single hand being stretched ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... to submit to such a decree if they could contrive to evade it, any more than sexquipedalians would be bound to lay their heads on the block in obedience to a law directing everybody six feet high to be decapitated. All such partial legislation would be tyrannical, and circumstances must be very peculiar indeed to make submission to tyranny a duty. But of all conceivable legislation, none could possibly be more partial, or therefore more tyrannical, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... around her mother's neck and for one awful moment it looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent had been Mrs. Brewster's ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... opposite sides of the steamer, each illuminated with buckets of blazing coal or by burning conical heaps on the surface. From the bottom of these pits in the darkness the illumination suggested huge decapitated ant heaps in the wildest frenzy, for the coal seemed covered and there was hurry in every direction. Men and women, boys and girls, bending to their tasks, were filling shallow saucer-shaped baskets with coal and stacking them eight to ten high in a semi-circle, ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... the Bishop of Hereford who, at Neath Abbey, took the King, carried him to Kenilworth, and deprived him of the Great Seal. The Queen was staying at Hereford, and thither many of the King's adherents were taken with the Chancellor and Hugh Despenser. The last-named was hanged in the town, decapitated, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... of Delhi. He summoned all the Agharias to appear before him, and fixed a sword across the door at the height of a man's neck. As the Agharias would not bend their heads they were as a natural consequence all decapitated as they passed through the door. Only one escaped, who had bribed a Chamar to go instead of him. He and his village fled from Agra and came to Chhattisgarh, where they founded the Agharia caste. And, in memory of this, when an Agharia makes a libation to his ancestors, he first ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... that her favorite Chaklovity should be surrendered to the Czar. She had to implore the mediation of the patriarch. Chaklovity was first put to the torture and made to confess his plot against the Czar, and then decapitated. Medviedef was at first only condemned to the knout and banishment for heresy, but he acknowledged he had intended to take the place of the patriarch and to marry Sophia; he was dishonored by being imprisoned with two sorcerers, condemned ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... with the knees to chin and arms crossed. With this were two whole vases, fragments of others, and pieces of cedar wood. At the feet of the skeleton were two human heads, and as the graves would not have accommodated more than one whole body M. Feraud suggests that these belong to decapitated victims. Another grave contained, in addition to human bones, those of a horse, together with three objects of copper, viz. a ring, an earring, and a buckle. In another were found the teeth and bones of a horse and an ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... same reason by the Wageia of East Africa. With the Ja-Luo of Kavirondo the custom is somewhat different. Three days after his return from the fight the warrior shaves his head. But before he may enter his village he has to hang a live fowl, head uppermost, round his neck; then the bird is decapitated and its head left hanging round his neck. Soon after his return a feast is made for the slain man, in order that his ghost may not haunt his slayer. In the Pelew Islands, when the men return from a warlike expedition in which they have ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... conclusion was based consisted simply in cutting off the tip, and then comparing the behaviour of roots so treated with that of normal specimens. An uninjured root when placed horizontally regains the vertical by means of a sharp downward curve; not so a decapitated root which continues to grow more or less horizontally. It was argued that this depends on the loss of an organ specialised for the perception of gravity, and residing in the tip of the root; and the experiment (together ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... over the forehead; but this is not the fashion amongst adults. Abu Hanifah, if I am rightly informed, wrote a treatise on the Shushah or long lock growing from the Nasiyah (head-poll) which is also a precaution lest the decapitated Moslem's mouth be defiled by an impure hand; and thus it would resemble the chivalry lock by which the Redskin brave (and even the "cowboy" of better times) facilitated the removal of his own scalp. Possibly the Turks ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... my man without difficulty. We parted a little coldly. He decapitated his brassy on the occasion of his striking Dorsetshire instead of his ball, and he was slow in recovering from the complex emotions ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... Sangleys in the provinces of this mainland [of Luzon] who had not taken refuge in the Parian in time were decapitated. Those who thus took refuge were confined to the point of Cavite or to the Parian of the city, so that we might keep them within range of our guns, and where they would be of advantage for whatever had to be done for the fortification of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye. Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... unspeakable disgust he resigned; and Mr. Stanton took the oath of office and reigned as Governor for one month. Then he also was removed, and Gov. Denver took his place. Thus, five Kansas Governors had each in their turn been officially decapitated. Stanton had been superseded by Denver because he had called a special session of the now Free State Legislature, and it had ordered an immediate election to vote for or against the Lecompton Constitution, and at this election ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... than could be said of the others. The mere wish was sufficient—Rome fell at his feet. The patent of divinity was in the genuflections of a nation. At once he had a temple, priests and flamens. Inexhaustible Greece was sacked again. The statues of her gods, disembarked at Rome, were decapitated, and on them the head ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... ask Eames about him, he must have been a man worth knowing. He always slept in the afternoons. It annoyed him to think that his people slept too. He might suddenly want them for something, he said. He commanded that they should stay awake, and decapitated several hundred who were found napping. When he saw that the habit was ingrained in their natures and that nothing would avail save a total extermination of the populace, he gave way, gracefully. Then hi instituted these popular theatricals ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... cloven here and there as by an axe; then came a golden-hued Cheshire, and next a Gruyere, resembling a wheel fallen from some barbarian chariot; whilst farther on were some Dutch cheeses, suggesting decapitated heads suffused with dry blood, and having all that hardness of skulls which in France has gained them the name of "death's heads." Amidst the heavy exhalations of these, a Parmesan set a spicy aroma. Then there came ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... of obscure birth, consequently he scorned to disquiet himself about them; but it was not so with the third, a daughter of that Earl of Huntly who been trampled beneath the horses' feet, and a sister of Gordon, who had been decapitated. Fortunately for Bothwell, his past behaviour made his wife long for a divorce with an eagerness as great as his own. There was not much difficulty, then, in persuading her to bring a charge of adultery against ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... both Livingstone and Crichton, who were stealing the king alternately: they then combined, invited Douglas to Edinburgh Castle, with his brother David, and served up the ominous bull's head at that "black dinner" recorded in a ballad fragment. {61} They decapitated the two Douglas boys; the earldom fell to their granduncle, James the Fat, and presently, on his death (1443), to young William Douglas, after which "bands," or illegal covenants, between the various leaders of factions, led to private wars of shifting fortune. Kennedy, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... Kenelm watched him swinging himself with careless grace into his saddle and riding briskly down the street,—in form and face and bearing a very model of young, high-born, high-bred manhood. "The Venetians," muttered Kenelm, "decapitated Marino Faliero for conspiring against his own order,—the nobles. The Venetians loved their institutions, and had faith in them. Is there such love and such faith among ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Brantome, in his account of Mary Queen of Scots, quotes this story. After mentioning that the headsman remained alone with the Queen's decapitated corpse, he adds: "He then took off her shoes and handled her as he pleased. It is suspected that he treated her in the same way as that miserable muleteer, in the Hundred Stories of the Queen of Navarre, treated the poor woman he killed. ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... promptly, especially as Navarette declared that he (Navarette) did not recognize the Emperor of Japan but only the Emperor of Heaven. The two fanatics were seized, conveyed secretly to the island of Takashima, and there decapitated; their coffins being weighted with big stones and sunk in the sea, so as to prevent a repetition of the scenes witnessed at the tomb of the fathers mentioned above. Thereupon, the newly elected superior ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Christian images shed drops of blood, sticks set upright in the ground blossom into flower, springs of pure water appear in dry places, warm loaves of bread multiply themselves at the feet of the needy, a tree bows down before some holy person, and so on. Then, again, decapitated heads speak, broken chalices mend themselves, the rain turns aside from a church to submerge a neighbouring palace, the robes of hermits never wear out, but renew themselves at each season like the skin of a beast. In Armenia at one time the persecutors threw into the sea the ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... raising his glass. Then, after a pause, "And why not?" continued he, "the regent is but a man after all. Only we shall neither be hanged nor decapitated; we shall be broken on the wheel. To any one else I should say that a regent would be dearer, but to you, chevalier, I have only one price. Give me six thousand livres, and I will find ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... we all do, that he would be like a decapitated chicken himself without her," said Mrs. Clifford, with her ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... the sight of these ladders, and Gorgo could perceive by the trembling of the curtain near which she and Apuleius were standing, how deeply the physician was agitated. It was as though the axe had been displayed with which a king was about to be decapitated. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Yellows, so suddenly made leaderless and faced by enemies so many and determined, could not fuse into concerted action. They hesitated, looked foolishly at one another, and lost whatever chance they had of success. Messer Simone's body, almost decapitated from the stroke of Griffo, was fished up from underneath the hooves of his rearing charger, laid upon a dismounted door, covered with a cloak, and hurriedly conveyed away to his house. Madonna Vittoria, snatched just in time from the clutch of those cruel fingers, drew her breath in ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Several grand-sons of Merodach-Baladin suffered mutilation, A Chaldaean prince and one of the chieftains of the Clambulu had their tongues torn out by the roots. Another of the Gambulu chiefs was decapitated. Two of the Temin-Umman's principal officers were chained and flayed. Palaya, a grandson of Merodach-Baladan, was mutilated. Asshur-bani-pal evidently hoped to strike terror into his enemies by these cruel, and now unusual, punishments, which, being inflicted for the most part upon ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... e., native Chinese) emperor, who (upon finding himself in a dreadfully small minority) retired into his garden with his daughter, and there hanged both himself and the lady. On no account would he have decapitated either; since in that case the corpses, being headless, would in Chinese estimation have ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... hang them:'—But with a constant notification that, after hanging, the criminals would be decapitated: otherwise the threat loses its sting. It seems to be a superstition universal amongst Southern Asiatics, unless possibly amongst the Malay race, that to suffer any dismemberment of the body operates disastrously upon the fate in ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... had worked hard all her life, and her hands were red and big-jointed. There was no pleasure in watching their clever manipulation of the little, steel hook. If it had been the Little Doctor's hands, now—Chip turned again to the decapitated, pale blue vine with its pink flowers and no leaves. The Countess counted off "chain 'leven" and began in a constrained tone, such as some well-meaning people employ ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... still in the Doge's Palace the black veil painted over Faliero's picture, and the staircase whereon he was first crowned Doge and subsequently decapitated. This was the thing that most struck my imagination in Venice—more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of Shylock: and more, too, than Schiller's 'Armenian,' a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy. It is also called the 'Ghost Seer,' ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... some surer sign of that," said Jurgen. "I would have preferred that the pavilion and the decapitated Troll King had vanished with a peal of thunder and an earthquake and such other phenomena as are customary. Instead, nothing is changed except that the woman who was talking to me a moment since now lies at ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... de Montmorency was one of the two daughters of that brave and unfortunate Count de Montmorency Bouteville, who, the victim of a false point of honour and of an outrageous passion for duelling, was decapitated on the Place de Greve, on the 21st of June, 1627. She was sister of Francois de Montmorency, Count de Bouteville, better known as the illustrious Marshal de Luxembourg. Born in 1626, she had been married in 1645 to the last ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... seized were taken up to the king and there 1 decapitated. The first of these, Clearchus, was a thorough soldier, and a true lover of fighting. This is the testimony of all who knew him intimately. As long as the war between the Lacedaemonians and Athenians lasted, he could find occupation at home; but after the peace, he persuaded his own city that ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... christening robe, heavy with embroidery, hung as if for a crime from its temporary gallows. Juliet stepped in, viewing them but an instant, then withdrew, locking the door behind her. Had she seen the seven hanging heads of Bluebeard's decapitated wives, she would not have been more pained. She returned to her room to weep over her poor baby, which she regarded as a martyr. Yes, ill-treated had he been, contemptuously treated; she could have no more pride ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... perceptible first in the anterior one. The shining matter was fluid and very adhesive: little spots, where the skin had been torn, continued bright with a slight scintillation, whilst the uninjured parts were obscured. When the insect was decapitated the rings remained uninterruptedly bright, but not so brilliant as before: local irritation with a needle always increased the vividness of the light. The rings in one instance retained their luminous property nearly ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the finely sculptured porch, rich in foliage like the Folgoet, placed between the two towers, is the equestrian statue of King Gradlon, to whom is attributed the introduction of the vine into Brittany. The statue was decapitated in 1793, but restored ten years back. On St. Cecilia's day companies of musicians used to mount on the platform. While they sang a hymn in praise of King Gradlon, one of the choristers, provided with a flagon of wine, a napkin, and golden hanap, mounted ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... o' thim things, is it?" he said, looking at the writhing decapitated viper. "Shure I thought it was the jumping sort that springs up at yer ois, and stings ye before yer know where ye are. There was a cousin, of me mother's went to live in Hampshire, and she got bit by wan o' thim bastes in the ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... the goat sacrificed to the goddess Kali, are believed to be temporarily possessed by her spirit, and thus enabled to prophesy.[56] Malayan exorcists still expel demons while they suck the blood from a decapitated fowl.[57] ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... according to some, a bow named Pinaka. Siva not being invited to Daksha's sacrifice, was so indignant, that, with his wife, he suddenly presented himself, confounded the sacrifice, dispersed the gods, and chasing Yajna, 'the lord of sacrifice,' who fled in the form of a deer, overtook and decapitated him. ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... to mention here the callous and brutalized nature of those gang-robbers, of whom it is recorded that, when one of their gang was suddenly arrested, they at once decapitated him, and carried off the head, lest the ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... supposedly solemn Senior, tumbling from the Senior fence and rolling on the campus like a decapitated rooster. "Hip-hip-hooray! Ring the bell, Beef, get the fellows out, have the Band ready, Oh, where is Coach Corridan? Read it, Beef, Theophilus, Phillyloo. Oh, Hicks ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... authority, Ramiro soon froze the whole province into comparative tranquillity. But it did not suit Cesare to incur the odium which the man's cruelty brought on his administration. Accordingly he had him decapitated one night and exposed to public view, together with the block and bloody hatchet, in the square at Cesena. Of the art with which Cesare first reduced Romagna to order by the cruelty of his agent, and then avoided the odium of this cruelty by using the wretched creature as an appalling ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... the Prince of Helium!" I shouted; and before the astonished yellow man whose misfortune it was to be at the fighting end of the line at that particular moment could gather his wits together my sword had decapitated him, and I was rushing like a mad bull down ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Masai a man is not supposed to marry until he has blooded his spear, and in a very different part of the world, among the Dyaks of Borneo, there can be little doubt that the chief incentive to head-hunting is the desire to please the women, the possession of a head decapitated by himself being an excellent way of winning a maiden's favor.[62] Such instances are too well known to need multiplication here, and they survive in civilization, for, even among ourselves, although courtship is now chiefly ruled by quite other considerations, most women are in some degree ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the Empire, so brilliant from the economic stand-point, is much less so from the intellectual: here we touch its great weakness. Destroying so many governments, especially in the Orient, Rome had at the same time decapitated the intellectual elites of the ancient world; for the courts of the monarchies were the great firesides of mental activity. Rome had therefore, together with states and governments, destroyed scientific ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... much space to recount all the violent acts which were committed,—convoys arrested, grain pillaged, millers and corn merchants hung, decapitated, slaughtered, farmers called upon under the threats of death to give up even the seed reserved for sowing, proprietors ransomed and houses sacked.[1314] These outrages, unpunished, tolerated and even excused or badly ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... were displeasing to her traditions. It is more probable that augurs had foreseen or oracles had foretold that philosophy would divest her of the sword, and with it of her sceptre and her might. Ideas cannot be decapitated. Only ridicule can demolish them. Philosophy, mistress of irony, resisted while nations fell. It was philosophy that first undermined established creeds and then led to the pursuit of new ones. Yet it may be that a contributing cause ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... to have preached in Arabia, in Persia, in Abyssinia, to have baptized among the Iberi, the races of the Caucasus, and, like Saint Thomas, in India, but there is no authentic evidence to show this. According to some writers he was decapitated; others say he was flayed alive and then crucified, near the frontiers ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... cold as themselves and as human. There, towered the standing body of an African, leaning upon a knotted club, fierce, grinning, lacking only sight in the sunken eyes to be terrible. There again, surmounting a lay figure wrapped in rich stuffs, smiled the calm and gentle face of a Malayan lady—decapitated for her sins, so marvellously preserved that the soft dark eyes still looked out from beneath the heavy, half-drooping lids, and the full lips, still richly coloured, parted a little to show the ivory teeth. Other sights there were, more ghastly still, triumphs of preservation, if not of ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... door from the hall opened about a foot, a fat head in a gaunt bonnet protruded through the crevice, having rather a decapitated look, and a deep inflectionless ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of 38 stomachs of the brush mouse (Table 2) show acorns to be the most commonly used food in winter and spring. Seed coats were only rarely found, and insects were absent. Two captive females preferred acorns. Live beetles and grasshoppers of numerous kinds were decapitated and their inner parts eaten. Seeds (wheat, corn, and oats) were also eaten. Inasmuch as acorns appear to be the chief food, it is not surprising that the brush mouse is usually found on cliffs that support stands of blackjack oak (Quercus ...
— Natural History of the Brush Mouse (Peromyscus boylii) in Kansas With Description of a New Subspecies • Charles A. Long
... himself the indignation not only of England but of all Europe. Oliver de Clisson, with fourteen other nobles of Brittany and Normandy, were arrested by his order, taken to Paris, and without form of trial there decapitated. This act of treachery and injustice aroused disgust and shame among the French nobles, and murmurs and discontent spread throughout the ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... gun went off with the report of a small cannon, and the buck disappeared. I ran to the spot with more anxiety than I should have felt in an ordinary way over a koodoo or an eland. To my delight there the little creature lay—the huge bullet had decapitated it. Considering all the circumstances I do not think I have often made a better shot than this, but if any one doubts, let him try his hand at a rabbit's head fifty yards away with an elephant gun and a ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... of Carpathian peasants. We extirpated the salivary glands of dogs in order to find out if they would slobber without them. We cut off the tails of mice to discover if the operation affected their greatgrandchildren. We decapitated, emasculated, malnourished, and poisoned rodents against whom we had no personal animus for no other reason than to keep an ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... burned, the floor was burned, the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed upon his feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen; then it stopped,—a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of the neighborhood. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... following our old trail to the lake, Hubbard decapitated a duck with a rifle bullet, and we went into camp with high hopes of more food in the way of fish. Hubbard's rod was hopelessly broken, so he took mine, now much wound with linen thread, but, still usable if not very pliable, and while I made ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... abusive and insulting terms—"It is a haughty act of yours, laying your foot upon the king's neck, for be it known to you the body on which you trample is worthy of respect." On hearing this Mochuda ceased to measure the king and declared:—"The neck upon which I have set my heel shall never be decapitated and the body which I have measured with my foot shall not be slain and but for your interference there would not be wanting anything to him or his seed for ever." Addressing (specially) the interrupter, he prophesied:—"You and your posterity will be for ever contemptible ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda
... apart and the others were cutting wood, robbers came and slew those three monks, and cut off and carried away their heads with them. Saint Keranus, not hearing the sound of those who were hacking and hewing timber, returned from the place of prayer and found his three companions slain and decapitated. But the man of God, though first he grieved sorely over this deed, yet, recovering his power from Him Who deserteth not His own in their necessity, hastened after the murderers, and found them sweating to drag a little boat down to the water. But ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... February 24, 1916.] We shall discuss some of its tenets later, but it should be noted at this point that the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... was; for, as the doll's basin of real water was cast forth by the cruel charmer, poor Chan expired in such strong convulsions that his head rolled down among the audience. Miss Ki Hi peeped to see what had become of her victim, and the shutter decapitated her likewise, to the great delight of the children, who passed around the heads, pronouncing a ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... bits of rubber sticking-plaster, then putting them hopefully back into the nest, with an admonition to the anxious parents to "sit very still and don't stwatch." While last summer he unfortunately saw a chicken decapitated over at the farm barn, and, in Martha Corkle's language, "the way he wound a bit o' paper round its poor neck to stop its bleedin' went straight to my stummick, so it did, Mrs. Evan;" for be it said here that Martha has fulfilled my wildest ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... only were practicable to kill him in real life! A story—to be called The Passing of Polonius—in which a king issues a decree condemning to death every long-winded, didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of rank, and is himself instantly arrested and decapitated. The man who suspects his own tediousness ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... episode, and the headless man is said to have run that distance before falling. This legend—which, furthermore, has many eye-witnesses still living in the town who swear to the truth—is more capable of belief if one takes into consideration the flight of a decapitated fowl in ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... a distance. He sent in some men, as much to give them something to do as for any real good, one day, who in a few hours pulled up enough docks to fill a cart. They came across a number of snakes, and decapitated the reptiles with their hoes, and afterwards hung them all up—tied together by the tail—to a bough. The bunch of headless snakes hangs there still, swinging to and fro as the wind plays through the oak. Vermin, too, revel in weeds, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... that nothing could save me from the hands of these demoniacal whitewashed executioners, and in a few moments I, a slave purchased like an ox for the slaughter, would be borne down over the bowl and decapitated. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... two soldiers, one with the haft of a blood-stained knife between his teeth, had mutilated horribly a living girl. Little Papeete had been decapitated just where his skull lay now; the shrieks and wails of the tortured tore the sky above Berselius; but Adams heard nothing and saw nothing but Berselius ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... in the days when the British public were intense believers in bear's grease as the producer of hair, and no one troubled himself or herself to investigate the precise configuration of the exhibited animal and compare it when hung up, decapitated, and shorn of its feet, with the ordinary well-fatted domestic pig, albeit the illusion was kept up by its being possible to see through the gratings outside the shop-window Ramball's black bear still "all alive-o," parading and snuffling up ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... and to port, to sink before the white foam has faded from the wake of the destroying monster. They tell ghoulish tales of bodies sliced in twain as neatly as the boat itself; of men asleep in their bunks being decapitated, or waking, to find themselves struggling in the water with an arm or leg shorn off. And again, there are stories of escapes that were almost miraculous; of men thrown by the shock of collision out of the foretop of the schooner onto the deck ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... can be always at the "top of his form." But after making all allowances for human weakness and occasional lapses, when he once reached a definite conclusion he was as abrupt and remorseless as a guillotine. Many a hopeful athlete had been decapitated so swiftly and neatly, that, like the man in the fable, he did not know his head was off until he tried ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... fatal ax. Madame Roland, without the slightest change of color, or the apparent tremor of a nerve, saw the ponderous instrument, with its glittering edge, glide upon its deadly mission, and the decapitated trunk of her friend was thrown aside to give place for her. With a placid countenance and a buoyant step, she ascended the platform. The guillotine was erected upon the vacant spot between the gardens of the Tuileries ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... thou hast: made." So grasping his sword and drawing his bow, he urged him and drove him within it. Ukeshi the elder being guilty before heaven, and the matter not admitting of excuse, of his own accord trod upon the engine and was crushed to death, His body was then brought out and decapitated, and the blood which flowed from it reached above the ankle. Therefore that place was called Udan no chi-hara. After this Ukeshi the younger prepared a great feast of beef and sake, with which he entertained the imperial army. The emperor distributed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... you, my child, which is the most destructive of all the consequences entailed by the Revolution? You would never guess. In Louis XVI. the Revolution has decapitated every head of a family. The family has ceased to exist; we have only individuals. In their desire to become a nation, Frenchmen have abandoned the idea of empire; in proclaiming the equal rights of all children to their father's ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... Alexandrinus apparently refers to the times immediately following the death of Commodus when he says—"Many martyrs are daily burned, crucified, and decapitated before our eyes." ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... them to the wreck of the first expedition, and to the new levies, and then found himself at the head of a force of more than one thousand men. His banners on which was painted a representation of the late king decapitated, with this motto, "Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord," was intrusted to young Menzies of Pitfoddels, and a declaration was circulated through the Highlands, calling upon all true Scotsmen to aid in establishing their king upon the throne, and ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... Spaniards found arm and leg bones, which the cannibals carefully preserve for pointing their arrows; for they have no iron. All other bones, after the flesh is eaten, they throw aside. The Spaniards discovered the recently decapitated head of a young man still wet with blood. Exploring the interior of the island they discovered seven rivers,[5] without mentioning a much larger watercourse similar to the Guadalquivir at Cordoba and larger than our Ticino, of which the banks were deliciously umbrageous. They gave ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... communists of the Middle Ages, and were for a number of years the plague of the northern seas; until at the beginning of the fifteenth century they were subdued, and many of them captured by the Dutch, who nailed them up in barrels, leaving an aperture for the head, at top, and then decapitated them. The best account of them is found in "Raumer's Historical Note-book," vol. ii. p. 19. And if any one wishes to see the result of communist teaching, they have only to study here the horrible excesses ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... were brought into the Sofa Chamber one by one from the Erivan kiosk where they had been robed in splendid kaftans, and as they entered the room were decapitated one after the other. They had not even time to shut their eyes ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... back to the palace the king had the astrologer decapitated, and sent for the farmer ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... be made pets, like Miss Tabitha's snake or toad, Selwyn would have fondled a hangman. He loved the noble art of execution, and was a connoisseur of the execution of the art. In childhood he must have decapitated his rocking-horse, hanged his doll in a miniature gallows, and burnt his baubles at mimic stakes. The man whose calm eye was watched for the quiet sparkle that announced—and only that ever did announce it—the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Not long since five hundred skulls supposed to have been those of English prisoners were unearthed here; as they were all found massed together, the theory is that the entire number had surrendered and been summarily decapitated, methods of warfare that have apparently found ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did not fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living intelligence, the Martian within ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... much as possible in the entire costume. A glove that ends exactly at the wrist bone, or a boot at the ankle joint, with a straight line, is always ugly; so are dresses when they are cut in a circle close to the juncture of the neck with the shoulder, giving the neck a decapitated appearance. The line of contrast should always be softened with an edge of lace, or a necklace, and only round, pretty throats ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... citing by name the persons who had been condemned in the council; the culprits were dragged naked into the midst of the assembly, and at the same time all the apparatus for punishment was brought forth. They were tied to the stake, scourged with rods, and decapitated; while those who were present were so benumbed with fear, that not only no expression of dissatisfaction at the severity of the punishment, but not even a groan was heard. They were then all dragged out, the place ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... envy, and hate, [20] and prolongs the reign of inordinate, unprincipled clans. At this period, 1888, those quill-drivers whose consciences are in their pockets hold high carnival. When news- dealers shout for class legislation, and decapitated reputa- tions, headless trunks, and quivering hearts are held up [25] before the rabble in exchange for money, place, and power, the vox populi is suffocated, individual rights are trodden under foot, and the car of the modern ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... the dilemma to which Noah, by an indiscretion at court, was suddenly reduced; and, but for my prompt interference, he would probably have been simultaneously decapitated at both extremities, in obedience to an etiquette which prescribes that, under the circumstances of a court trial, neither the king's nor the queen's rights shall be entitled to precedence. In defence of my client I urged his ignorance of the usages of the country, and, indeed, of all other ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... with his hands tied behind his back, was put on a spiked saddle and tied by a long rope held by a horseman. He went at a gallop surrounded by about fifty horsemen armed with guns and swords. Man Sing, our coolie, was also taken with him. My guards informed me my master was to be decapitated at Galshio, and that I was to be beheaded where I was. On the fourth or fifth day my master returned. Meanwhile I was a close prisoner, bound up without food. When I saw my master he was in a pitiful state. He was handcuffed with enormous cuffs, clothes torn to rags, bleeding from ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... his usual depths. With an impressive gesture, he handed me a printed clipping about the miracle. In the usual garbled manner of the sensational type of newspaper (not missing, alas! even in India), the reporter's version was slightly exaggerated: it indicated that the SADHU had been almost decapitated! ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Creek Fort that was held by the Confederates. As the Federal troops marched ahead, they were followed by the volunteer slaves. Most of these unfortunate slaves were slain by "bush whackers" (Confederate snipers who fired upon them from ambush.) After being killed they were decapitated and their heads placed upon posts that lined the fields so that they could be seen by other slaves to warn them of what would befall them if they attempted to escape. The battle at Blis Creek Fort was one in which both armies displayed great heroism; most of the Federal ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... their inhabitants to pay them tribute, as if they were the lords of the land, who were inhabiting it. And if the people refused to give it willingly, they killed right and left, collecting the tribute in the heads of those who were decapitated; as was written by one of our oldtime religious in the following words: "Even in my time, it happens," he says, "that they descended to the settlements and sought tribute from the Tagalogs, and at times took some heads for this purpose. Thus did it happen in Siniloan, which refused tribute ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... Indians took the track of their victim and his attendants, to go to Lower Sandusky, and there execute the sentence which they had pronounced upon him. But what was their surprise and disappointment, when they arrived at the place of encampment, where they found their trusty friends scalped and decapitated, and that their prisoner had made his escape?—Chagrined beyond measure, they immediately separated, and went in every direction in pursuit of their prey; but after having spent a number of days unsuccessfully, they ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... placing a billet of wood underneath it; all this time the poor woman, suffering even more from shame than from fear, was kept in suspense; at length, when she was properly adjusted, the executioner touched the spring, the knife fell, and the decapitated head, falling on the platform of the scaffold, bounded two or three times in the air, to the general horror; the executioner then seized it, showed it to the multitude, and wrapping it in black taffetas, placed it with the body on a bier at the foot ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere |
