"Sexton" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Horseley, in Derbyshire, England, a venerable matron, named Frances Burton, aged 107. She had practised midwifery upwards of 80 years. The husband of the above old lady was sexton of the parish church 70 years; and this ancient pair frequently boasted, that she had brought into the world, and he had buried, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... was clearing away the weeds from this epitaph, the little sexton drew me on one side with a mysterious air, and informed me in a low voice that once upon a time, on a dark wintry night, when the wind was unruly, howling and whistling, banging about doors and windows, and twirling weathercocks, so that the living were frightened out of ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... you won't hearken an' you won't heed, go ahaid!" stated Uncle Bill, with a wave of his hand. "You ain't too young to die, even ef you is too ole to learn. Only I trust an' prays dat you won't be blamin' nobody but yo'se'f 'bout this time day after to-mor' evenin' w'en de sexton of Mount Zion Cullud Cemetery starts pattin' you in de ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... in common, they assorted themselves in their own fashion, as they only knew how, and departed to the garrets, or the cellars, or the unsheltered street-corners, where their honeymoon and subsequent lives were to be spent. The parson smiled decorously, the clerk and the sexton grinned broadly, the female attendant tittered almost aloud, and even the married parties seemed to see something exceedingly funny in the affair; but for my part, though generally apt enough to be tickled by a joke, I laid it away in my memory as one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in every monastery interpreters, and you shall be accredited to them all who are of that great Brotherhood. Well, 'tis settled. Go, make ready as best you can; I must write. Stay; the sooner this Harflete is under ground the better. Bid that sturdy fellow, Bolle, find the sexton of the church and help dig his grave, for we will bury him at dawn. Now go, go, I tell you I must write. Come back in an hour, and I will give you money for your faring, also ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... table and two pillows sent to the engine house, and when Aggie and I arrived at midday she was seated comfortably, with her hat hung on a lamp of the fire truck. When we arrived she was asking the sexton of the Methodist Church, whom she has known for thirty years, if he had lost a ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sounded, all the things that Ghost had shown him, came upon his mind; he softened more and more; and thought that if he could have listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the kindnesses of life for his own happiness with his own hands, without resorting to the sexton's spade ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... ground. And all that lived and laughed around The sea now holds in gloom profound. At times, when low the water falls, The sailor sees the broken walls; The church tower peeps from out the sand, Like to the finger of a hand. Then hears one low the church bells ringing Then hears one low the sexton singing; A chant is carried by the gust: "Give earth to earth, and dust ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... MR. SEXTON (of Illinois): "When you consider your place for your next convention tell Chicago what you want, and in response to that Chicago will answer you. 'We will give ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... at Newcastle, being summoned to a vestry, in order to reprimand the sexton for drunkenness, he dwelt so long on the sexton's misconduct, as to draw from him this expression: "Sir, I thought you would have been the last man alive to appear against me, as I have covered so ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... Sexton was one of the brilliant intellects of the Party at this period, a consummate orator, a reputed master of all the intricacies of international finance, and in every sense of the word a first-rate House of ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... a high and glorious morning in spring, and all the trees were budding and bursting into green. Everywhere there were blossoms and flowers; the pear trees and cherry trees in the sexton's garden were sunlit snow, there were nodding daffodils and early tulips in the graveyard beds, great multitudes of daisies, and everywhere the birds seemed singing. And in the middle was the brown coffin ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... a Sunday-school, Jimmy being too young. The church they had formerly attended being in Harlem, they could not of course go so far, but dropped into one not far from Union Square. They were shown seats by the sexton, and listened attentively to the services, though it must be confessed that Jimmy's attention was occasionally diverted to his new clothes, of which he was not a little proud. Mrs. Hoffman felt glad once more ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... reading it Taylor told Amy to meet him at seven o'clock on Wednesday morning, and they would be married in the church with no one present but his brother (the only relative Taylor has in town is a bachelor brother), and the sexton, the minister, and me. She met and the ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... two bottles for you." The flesh-coloured coat was then Moiselet. I followed him into his room, and we began to drink with all our might. Two other bottles arrived; we only went on in couples. Moiselet, in his capacity of chorister, cooper, sexton, &c. &c. was no less a sot than gossip; he got tipsy with great good-will, and incessantly spoke to me in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... objection to Sexton and Healy knowing the deliberate intention of the Government on the subject of Irish education, but it would not do for the letter or communication to be made public, for the effect of publicity on Lancashire would be unfortunate.... It is the bishops entirely ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... of "seating" fifteen hundred persons, has galleries running entirely around it, and is sustained at the roof within by composite pilasters of plaster, and at the pulpit by columns of mongrel Corinthian; the tout ensemble is very excellent; a darkey sexton gave us a pew, and there were some handsome ladies present, dark Richmond beauties, haughty and thinly clothed, with only here and there a jockey-feathered hat, or a velvet mantilla, to tell of long siege and privation. We saw that those who dressed the shabbiest had ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... and a prohibition against the shooting of deer by the peasants was actually issued in 1538, both measures helping to provoke the widespread uprising that broke out in Smaland in 1541. It was named the "Dacke feud" after its principal leader, the peasant-chieftain Nils Dacke, to whom the Sexton refers in the second scene of the last ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... of scene. A host of monuments and gravestones reflected the sunlight, while a broad river ebbed and flowed between high banks. A sexton and a watchman stood by a granite vault, the heavy door of which they had opened with a large key. Hard by were some gardeners and labourers, and also a crowd of curiosity-seekers who had come to witness ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... we cried that they had put the barriers too near together. They, to spite us, swore to shoot over the skin of the bear, sure death! almost barrel to barrel; both were fine shots. 'Let Hreczecha be our second.' 'All right,' I said, 'let the sexton dig a hole at once, for such a dispute cannot end without results. But fight like gentlemen, and not like butchers. It is well enough to shorten the distance, I see that you are bold fellows; but ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... the babe unborn. Reg'lar goney. Dunno whether he's jokin' or in sober airnest. Good mind to sail into him anyhow. Guess 't 'll do, though, to leave him to Natur'. He'll stuff himself to death fast enough ... pitchin' into p'is'n ... sexton ... six-board box ... coroner's verdick ... run over by a fry ... ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... serving in almost all the offices of the kingdom, such as those of queen, marshal, great chamberlain and constable of England, the champion of England, commissioner of sewers, governor of work-house, sexton, keeper of the prison, of the gate-house of the dean and chapter of Westminster, returning officer for members of Parliament, and constable, the latter of which is in some respects judicial. The office of jailor is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... be the work of invisible hands, his nervous system received such a shock that he fell in a fit, and was found where he fell, by the sexton, on the ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... far in a foreign land, The Parson was wax to my Lord's command: He sent for the Sexton and bade him make A lonely grave by the ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... precedent that preachers' boys are not especially angelic. For instance, we have it on good authority that Bob, aged fourteen, once climbed into the belfry of a church and removed the clapper, so that the sexton thought the bell was bewitched. At another time he placed a washtub over the top of a chimney where a prayer-meeting was in progress, and the smoke broke up the meeting and gave the good people a foretaste of the place ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Romance, as we say; that buoyant anticipation on which in youth we ride the airs, and which, as we wax older and too heavy for our atmosphere, hardens to the Hobby, which, if an obstinate animal, is a safer horse, and conducts man at a slower pace to the sexton. Adrian had never travelled. He was aware that his romance was earthly and had discomforts only to be evaded by the one potent talisman possessed by his patron. His Alp would hardly be grand to him without an obsequious landlord in the foreground: he must recline on Mammon's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... married he stamped and swore so that the high-spirited Katharine trembled and shook with fear. After the ceremony was over, while they were yet in the church, he called for wine, and drank a loud health to the company, and threw a sop which was at the bottom of the glass full in the sexton's face, giving no other reason for this strange act than that the sexton's beard grew thin and hungerly, and seemed to ask the sop as he was drinking. Never sure was there such a mad marriage; but Petruchio did but put this wildness on the better to succeed in the ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... see it in the same light, and it seems he made some ill-advised speech,—said he would rather turn sexton and bury other people than be buried alive himself in a hole like that, which was not a nice thing for him to say to his father,—but that was no reason why Cousin John should swear at him, and tell him he was sick ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... resolved strongly that she would do this, and she did it; but when the moment for starting came, her courage almost failed her. The church was but a few yards from her own gate, and she walked there without any attendant. She had, however, sent word to the sexton to say that she would be there, and the old man was ready to show her into the family pew. She wore a thick veil, and was dressed, of course, in all the deep ceremonious woe of widowhood. As she walked up the centre of the church she thought of her dress, and told herself that ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... cases of hauntings by the phantasms of birds happened towards the end of the eighteenth century in a church not twenty miles from London. The sexton started the rumours, declaring that he had heard strange noises, apparently proceeding from certain vaults containing the tombs of two old and distinguished families. The noises, which generally occurred on Friday nights, most often took the form of mockings, suggesting ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... speech, is not in use in the United States, as an English gentleman discovered who settled here a few years ago. He attended a meeting of the members of the church to which he had attached himself, and hearing something said that pleased him, he cried out "hear him! hear him!" Upon which the sexton came over to him, and told him that, unless he kept himself quiet, he would be under the necessity of turning him out ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... for the sustentation of tomb-stones and monuments, appears to have prevailed for many generations; and may be very naturally accounted for, by the repugnance which most men would feel, to the idea of having their bones knocked about by the sexton's spade, and then wheeled off to the bone-house, if there happens to be a bone-house, or shot into the neighbouring river, or on a farmer's dung-heap, if there is no such convenience as a bone-house at hand. It was this feeling that induced the celebrated sculptor, Chantrey, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... the churchyard, which lay at the end of the village, near the little wood. Everything was as still as death, and not a soul was to be seen. The sexton was evidently sitting in the public house, for they found the door of his cottage locked, as well as the door of the little chapel that stood in ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... feeling as in origin. Though rebuilt a hundred years ago, on the site of an earlier church, it has remained loyal to its history, and is the true child of the eighteenth century. Is it not fitting that the communion-plate presented by Queen Caroline should be treasured here? That the sexton should still show you, even with a cold indifference, the stately prayer-books which once contained prayers for the king? That a bell, captured at Louisburg by Sir William Pepperell, should summon to the worship of God a people long forgetful of that ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... notice especially misery, degradation, and moral eclipse, resulting directly from giant evils, which are tolerated in all our large cities, though known to every thoughtful person, from judge to artisan, from clergyman to sexton, from editor to reporter, from wealthy matron to the humble sewing woman. Every earnest thinker knows that there are evils feeding the furnaces of physical, mental, and moral destruction; that there are flourishing ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... sexton would suddenly tack up the aisle and clutch the unhappy Mr. Chubb by the collar, and scud down the aisle again to the accompaniment of "Home Sweet Home," and then incarcerate Henry in the upper portion ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... happier children of a later generation (the descendants of James, Earl of Derwentwater), the circumstances, of which he had heard in his childhood. The Countess of Newburgh was afterwards buried by the side of her husband; and the sexton of St. Giles's Church, some years since, on the lid of the coffin giving way, perceived some gold lace in a state of preservation; so that it seems probable that the blanket in which the bleeding remains were removed, was superseded by the costly ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... confusion between the books of Daniel and Deuteronomy. A cook (not a Worcestershire person) was asked if the papers had come. "Yes; the Standard has arrived, but not the Condy's fluid (Connoisseur) "! The regatta at Evesham was always "the regretta." An old sexton working in a churchyard, from whom I inquired if there was a bridge over the river, replied: "Only ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... when the earth painfully breathed away the frost that choked it, with her child for mourner, and herself for sexton and priest, she buried Antoine with maimed rites: but hers were the prayers of the poor, and of the pure in heart; and she did not fret because, in the hour that her comrade was put away into the dark, the world was laughing at the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... dark road toward the graveyard; he had always hurried past that spot when coming home from the crossroads at night. Once he had seen a ghostly figure on the stone wall, which, on more careful inspection the next morning, proved to be the sexton's shovel with his hat on top of it. The little church was around the bend of the road, within the ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... sea is a sexton old, And well his work is done. With an equal grave for lord and knave, ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... he, "according to your ladyship's orders, I dug up the flower-beds of the family vault, dusted the vault and the—the coffins (added he, trembling) inside. Me and John Sexton did it together, and polished ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... States Minister and his wife, which had now taken the place of the Canterville family pictures. He was simply but neatly clad in a long shroud, spotted with churchyard mould, had tied up his jaw with a strip of yellow linen, and carried a small lantern and a sexton's spade. In fact, he was dressed for the character of 'Jonas the Graveless, or the Corpse-Snatcher of Chertsey Barn,' one of his most remarkable impersonations, and one which the Cantervilles had every reason to remember, as it was ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... vs. Ingraham (7 Modern Rep. 263) was an action brought to try the title to an office. On the death of the sexton of the parish of St. Butolph, the place was to be filled by election, the voters being the housekeepers who "paid Scot and lot" in the parish. The widow of the deceased sexton (Sarah Bly) entered the lists ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... Baptists, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, or the Congregationalists, are not what is wanted; nor is it a cold and barn-like edifice which makes one feel, if one goes to call upon God, as though He were out, and could only be seen at stated times, and by the will of the sexton and the trustees. ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... in bold relief. "It has suffered dilapidation from the culpable neglect of those who should have felt an interest in its preservation. About two feet of the top of the shaft is wanting, as may be seen by reference to the engraved sketch, (See the Cut,) which was taken in the year 1815." The sexton of the church, who was then an old man, told Mr. Rhodes in 1818, that he well recollected the missing part being thrown carelessly about the churchyard, as if of no value, until it was broken up ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... Pere Rousselet, as he was generally called, was an old peasant who, disheartened with life, had made various efforts to get out of his sphere, but had never succeeded in doing so. Having been successively hairdresser, sexton, school-teacher, nurse, and gardener, he had ended, when sixty years old, by falling back to the very point whence he started. He had no particular employment in M. de Bergenheim's house; he went on errands, cared for ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the sexton's house—it is very near. I have sent Dawson for a stretcher; he and Humphreys will carry her. This young woman declines to give her name, or tell who she ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... of the noble old Puritan church-goers! The services curtailed to half their proper length, yet finding the patience of the listeners all too short! The degenerate descendants carried the day, however, the most bigoted of their opposers becoming disabled by rheumatism. The old sexton, resignation to inevitable evils being a lesson he had had much opportunity to learn, submitted with a good grace, though very much of opinion that fires in a church were an absurdity and a waste. The stoves were provided, ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... grave. The earth that covered it was drawn back like a floating drapery. She sunk down, and the spectre covered her with a black cloak; night closed around her, the night of death. She sank deeper than the spade of the sexton could penetrate, till the churchyard became a roof above her. Then the cloak was removed, and she found herself in a large hall, of wide-spreading dimensions, in which there was a subdued light, like ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... himself today in a French and tomorrow in a Prussian mood, is instructive at least, for such dualistic patriotism was not unknown at the time; the Collector follows his vocation with inspiring avidity, the Sexton is droll without knowing it, and each of the Hofschulze's servants has something about him that separates him from his confederates even though he be nameless. There are no supernumeraries among ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... before the time for the ceremony, the ushers arrive at the church and the sexton turns his guardianship over to them. They leave their hats in the vestry, or coat room. Their boutonnieres, sent by the groom, should be waiting in the vestibule. They should be in charge of a boy from the florist's, who has nothing else on his ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... meanwhile stayed inside; came to a corner in the organ stairs; saw people go out little by little; remained unobserved, and finally heard the sexton and the church-keeper go away. When the last door was closed, Azouras stepped out of her hiding-place. Shut out from the entire world, severed from all human beings, she found herself the only occupant of the large, light building, into which ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... shut up on Sundays, whilst his master went to church, howled so terribly as to disturb the whole village; wherefore his master resolved to take him to church with him: but when he came to the church door, the dog having perhaps formerly been whipped out by the sexton, refused to enter; whereupon Hunt exclaimed loudly against his dog's obstinacy, who would neither go to church nor stay at home. This shortly became a bye-word for ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... February 15.—A lively sitting, with an unexpected ending. Debate on Address resumed by SEXTON in excellent speech, an effect largely contributed to by comparative brevity. Only an hour long; remarkable compression. Would have been better still had it been reduced by the twenty minutes occupied in preliminary ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... our village is dark after nine o clock. There is a street light—a kerosene lamp—on a post in front of the Methodist meeting house, but the sexton forgets it, generally speaking, or, at any rate, neglects to fill it except at rare intervals. Simmons's front windows are ablaze, of course, and so are the dingy panes of Simpson's barber shop. But these two ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... reaching over the road, and leaving a passage beneath, being very similar. The church has been restored and is in capital preservation. As there were so many objects of interest, chiefly connected with the great St. Savin himself, we sent for the verger, sexton, bellringer, parish beadle, or whatever the "goitreux" individual called himself, and paid great attention to all he had to say. Although a good deal was quite unintelligible, the following are some of the most interesting facts. ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Rivers, just beyond the meadows of the Grand Pre, where lived Gabriel Lajeunesse, and Benedict Bellefontaine, and the rest of the 'simple Acadian farmers.' I arrived too early at one of the village churches; and, while I was waiting for a sexton, a door opened, and out poured the Sunday school, whose services had just ended. On they came, dividing in the centre, and falling to the right and left about me, thirty or forty boys and girls, between the ages of seven and fifteen. They all had fair skins, red cheeks, and clear ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... be the sexton of a country parish on the northern shore of Lake Maelaren who had devised this means of eking out his probably limited professional income. The ensuing correspondence had proved quite satisfactory. The mother was evidently ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... moment, was trying to suppress Parnell and his associates. The Irish leader himself had been in gaol since October 12th, 1881; Mr. Dillon, Mr. Sexton, Mr. Davitt, and many hundreds of lesser men, had been imprisoned without sentence or form of trial. Sir Charles Dilke, whom nobody believed to be an adviser of coercion, experienced as a member of the Government ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... awfully cold. Storm and wind and snow. Blizzard and gale and hurricane. You never saw anything like it. In the middle of December the sexton was taken down with rheumatic fever, and there wasn't a soul to ring the bell, or clear away the snow, or keep fires going in the church, and not a man in the parish was willing to take the extra work upon him. The old sexton was a good deal worried, ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... is gone. The last relic of him was lost in the burning Grammar School, but to this day the sexton of St. Boniface Church avers that the tolling bell on Christmas Eve never fails to provoke that weird and melancholy Wolf-cry from the wooded graveyard a hundred steps away, where they laid his Little Jim, the only ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... ordered his sexton to eat the bell-rope from knot to knot whenever the latter awakened him too early for the sermon. This preacher has also a rope around his neck—make him also eat it up before ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... HEALY thinks he's pretty smart as a debater; SEXTON believes he knows a thing or two; O'BRIEN is understood to be something of an orator. FLYNN will show House how all these qualities may be combined in one man. Does it by the tiresome twenty minutes, the lamentable half-hour; popping ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... had all gone away, and the sexton had come out and locked the gate behind him, Sophy crept back. Her roses were faded now, and from some of them the petals had fallen. She stood there irresolute, loath to leave with her heart's desire unsatisfied, when, as her eyes fell upon the teacher's last resting place, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... right-hand side of the altar, and the bridegroom's on the left-hand side. At the arrival of the bridal party the ushers get together and form in the back of the church for the procession up the aisle or nave. Their meeting thus is the cue for the sexton, who signals the organist, and the march is started. The ushers advance up the aisle, two by two, until they reach the chancel, where they divide on the right and on the left, allowing the bridesmaids to pass before them, standing in a semicircle around the altar rails. If it is ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... spent his childhood. He learned to read, write, and cipher at a small school kept by Hobby, the sexton of the parish church. Among his playmates was Richard Henry Lee, who was afterward a famous Virginian. When the boys grew up, they wrote to each other of grave matters of war and state, but here is the beginning of their correspondence, written when they were ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... old and long-tried cook, Bathsheba, who had been an heirloom in the family, suddenly fell in love with the older sexton, who had rung the passing-bell for every soul who died in the village for forty years, and took it into her head to marry him, and desert our kitchen for his little brown house ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... the church steps without having met even the sexton; somewhat disappointed, it was not with indifference that he saw a stranger standing in the churchyard among the graves; by the grave, it chanced, of a child who died in October, five years old. When the organist perceived this, a purpose which he would have formed later in the ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... originally from Hainburg, where Haydn's great-grandfather, Kaspar, had been among the few to escape massacre when the town was stormed by the Turks in July 1683. The composer's father, Matthias Haydn, was, like most of his brothers, a wheelwright, combining with his trade the office of parish sexton. He belonged to the better peasant class, and, though ignorant as we should now regard him, was yet not without a tincture of artistic taste. He had been to Frankfort during his "travelling years," and had there picked up some little information of a ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... at the head of the coffin and began the service; behind him the sexton had taken up his position with folded hands. On either side sat the officers and men, holding their helmets on their knees and looking on with serious countenances. The old woman knelt crouching on a prie-dieu, and hid her face in her hands. When the pastor had pronounced a final "Amen," the four ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... beautiful, and I don't need anything. I—I shall have to see to things for the funeral, you know. And don't forget to thank your mother for the cheese. It looks real good, and Georgie doos like it the best of anything for breakfast. I guess I'll get on my bonnet, and go to see Abel Mound, the sexton." ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... of C-, and such the company amidst which I found myself. After my probation it was arranged that I should begin my new duties at once, and accordingly I took lodgings—two rooms over the shop of a tailor who acted as chapel-keeper, pew-opener, and sexton. There was a small endowment on the chapel of fifty pounds a year, and the rest of my income was derived from the pew-rents, which at the time I took charge did ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... to the enemy. Real leaders of our party fought, suffered, and starved, but they never deserted the flag. Christianity could not convert a Bradlaugh or a Holyoake; it could only bribe or allure a Sexton or a Gordon, or others of the "illustrious obscure" in Mr. Whitmore's fraudulent catalogue. In short, the "conversions" to Christianity so trumpeted are mostly dubious, generally insignificant, and all ancient. If the prophecy which Dr. Hitchens preached from is to be accomplished, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... was said, now lay sick of a fever brought on by grief and fretting for the loss of her best friend,—and rich and poor alike had vied with one another in assisting the weird beauty of this exceptional and strange burial, in which no sexton was employed but the wild wind, which would in due time scoop a hollow in the sea, and whirl down into fathomless deeps all that remained of a loving woman, with the offerings of a People's ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... one Johann Peter, intendant of the royal and imperial prisons of Vienna, conceived the grim idea of forming a collection of skulls, made, as he avowed in his will, to corroborate the theory of Dr Gall, the founder of phrenology. This functionary bribed the sexton, and—in concert with Prince Esterhazy's secretary Rosenbaum, and with two Government officials named Jungermann and Ullmann—he opened Haydn's grave and removed the skull. Peter afterwards gave the most minute details of the sacrilege. He declared that ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... than any corporation has given to P.R.A., for majesty and consortship in full. There is, moreover, in the room, by way of household furniture, a ricketty, triangular, and tri-legged table, a bench, two old chairs with rush-bottoms, and a yard or two of matting that the sexton gave when the chancel was new laid. I don't know that there is any thing else to mention, unless it be a gaunt lurcher belonging to Ben Burke, and with all a dog's resemblance to his master, who lies stretched before the hearth where the peaty embers never quite die out, but smoulder away ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... clammy in the air, as if a cellar door was opened close by your elbow. Well, one Sunday, at a time that William was in very good health to all appearance, the bell that was ringing for church went very heavy all of a sudden; the sexton, who told me o't, said he'd not known the bell go so heavy in his hand for years—it was just as if the gudgeons wanted oiling. That was on the Sunday, as I say. During the week after, it chanced that William's wife was staying up late ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... Muller walked on toward a little house built up against the church, which was evidently the dwelling of the sexton. ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... in his berth, At forty-odd befell; They went and told the sexton, and The sexton tolled ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and four young pine trees were placed in front of it for supposed Christmas decoration. The pulpit platform, and the "wing pews" left vacant for the village players, took the place of a stage; the two aisles served for exits and entrances; and the sexton with three rings of the church bell, announced the scenes. The Carpet Committee of the Dorcas Society furnished the exposition of the first act, while sewing the last breadths of the new, hardly-bought ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... return again to Boston; for I shall go to a land from whence no traveller returns. Apropos of this rather dismal topic: A queer cousin of mine, 'Sans Souci,' who has a taste for 'morbid anatomy,' was the other day enjoying himself with Mr. Smith, the cheerful sexton of the King's Chapel. These two were 'down among the dead men,' under the church, when Mr. Smith apologized for leaving my cousin, on the plea that he had a previous engagement to take a young gentleman into the country—a delicate way of stating that he was about to convey ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... into a sweet sleep. His nap might have proved a very unfortunate event for him, but for the kindness of a wide-awake Quaker. For he did not wake up when the meeting closed, and the congregation might have dispersed, and the sexton locked him in, without disturbing his slumbers. But the kind-hearted Quaker moved his spirit by giving him a gentle rap on the shoulder. He started up, somewhat surprised that the service was over, and ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... brow of the youthful Anna Louisa— Sole child that survived to thee, oh, aged pastor of Esthwaite. Clad in his morning gown, the reverend priest at a table Of sculptur'd stone was seated; and his seat was a massy but easy Settle of oak, which in youth his ancient servitor, Isaac, Footman, sexton, and steward, butler and gardener also, Carved by the winter fire in nights of gloomy November, And through many a long, long night of many a dark December. 21 The good man's heart was glad, and his eyes were suffus'd with a rapture Of perfect love as they settled on her—that pulse of his heart's ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... paces. After church, he disappeared as quietly as he had entered, and fortunately escaped hearing the comments on his rash act. His appearance was generally considered as an impertinence, attributable only to some wanton fancy, or possibly a bet. One or two thought that the sexton was exceedingly remiss in not turning him out after discovering who he was; and a prominent pew-holder remarked, that if he couldn't take his wife and daughters to that church, without exposing them to such an influence, he would try to find some church ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Sunday evening, and the congregation had dispersed. I was making my way into the church to take a last look at a famous fourteenth-century tomb. Not a soul was visible; but the sound of a pick and the sight of fresh earth announced that the sexton was at work digging a grave. I walked to the spot. A bald head, the shining top of which was now level with the surface of the ground, raised the hope that he would prove to be a sexton of the old school. ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... preference to the Barker lever. One builder confessed to the writer that he had suffered severe financial loss through installing this action. After expending considerable time (and time is money) in getting it to work right, the whole thing would be upset when the sexton started up the heating apparatus. The writer is acquainted with organs in New York City where ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... Rocky Mountains Clifton Johnson Trails of the Pathfinders G.B. Grinnell Stories of California E.M. Sexton Glimpses of California Helen Hunt Jackson California: Its History and Romance J.S. McGroarty Heroes of California G.W. James Recollections of an Old Pioneer P.H. Bennett The Mountains of California John Muir Romantic California E.C. Peixotto ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... more than those of the earth, with its varied features of swelling hill and lovely dale, to one dull, long, common level. Death, the great grim leveller, does that office both for cottagers and kings. Let it be left to the sexton's spade. The mountains which give shelter to the valleys, and gather the rains that fill their rivers and fertilise their pastures, have important uses in nature, and so have the corresponding heights of rank and wealth ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... and weather-worn, and the Thaxtons of 1840, no living Thaxton could tell, every spiritual trace of them having disappeared more utterly than their bones. Their bones, indeed, did not disappear, and were a source of much trouble to the sexton, for in digging a new grave they came up to the surface in quantities, and had to be shovelled in and covered up again, so that the bodily remains of successive generations were jumbled together, and ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... but close to it, were the boys' school and girls' school, two distinct buildings, which owed their erection to Lady Lufton's energy; then came a neat little grocer's shop, the neat grocer being the clerk and sexton, and the neat grocer's wife the pew-opener in the church. Podgens was their name, and they were great favourites with her ladyship, both having been servants up at the house. And here the road took a sudden turn to the left, turning, as it were, away from Framley Court; and just beyond the turn ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... time concluded, and nothing now remained but the last summons of the sexton. At this juncture, while the coffin was being lowered into its resting place, my eyes, accidentally, it may be said, but in reality by some fatal instinct, fell full upon the lid, on which I instantly recognised a name, long and fearfully known to me—the name of the Mysterious Tailor of High Holborn. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... I've been into every shop I could find, chiefly to talk to people who are not soldiers. Even went into the church to look around and listened to the parrotlike description of the place by the sexton. ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... to visit the sexton, who is ill of the plague," replied the watchman. "I have told you all I know about him. You can ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... If my old father dies first, I shall say to the gravedigger, 'Dig a big hole, sexton, for my mother will lie ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... service of the dead;" and I even entertained an affection for the clergyman who officiated. But when I witnessed the lowering of the coffin to its future resting-place—heard the soft crumbling of the churchyard soil, as it dropped from the grasp of the sexton on the below-sounding coffin, down below—the anguished but stifled moan of the childless father, who had apparently expended his hard-got earnings for the interment of his child—I not only repassed the gates considerably affected, but overpowered with an indescribable dread of impending ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... well whom he should find standing there, old Adam, the village sexton and grave digger, who always stopped when he saw a light in ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... 14th of November, 1744, honourable interment in the chancel vault, to the tolling of the great tenor bell, and with the fullest ceremonial of the time. Indeed it is evident, from the charges still preserved in the sexton's book, that Fielding rendered to his wife such stately honours as were occasionally accorded to the members of the few great families interred ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... of private devotion. When I raised my head and opened my eyes, the very last man of the congregation was actually making his exit through the doorway; and it was quite as much as I could manage to put on my top-coat and gloves and reach the door before the sexton closed it. This rushing habit in the House of God strikes a stranger as rude and irreverent. You meet with no indications of private devotion, either preceding or following public worship. A man marches into his pew, or his pulpit, sits down, wipes his nose, ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... come amiss, even in a moral point of view, to Mr. Mountford. He ate so much, and took so little exercise, that we young women often heard of his being in terrible passions with his servants, and the sexton and clerk. But they none of them minded him much, for he soon came to himself, and was sure to make them some present or other—some said in proportion to his anger; so that the sexton, who was a bit of a wag (as all sextons are, I think), said that ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the cathedral, Catherine of Arragon, who died at Kimbolton Castle, in 1536; and Mary Queen of Scots, who was executed at Fotheringhay Castle fifty-one years afterwards. The accompanying engraving is a representation of the old sexton, with his spade, pickaxe, and other emblems ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... the requiems rest silent In the lull of deep thanksgiving. For the wrath of heaven is lifted, Lifted from the rescued city. Gone, the sound of rolling death-cart, Hushed, the ringing, tolling belfry, Still, the bier and gloomy shovel, Still, the idle, listless sexton. Other days of anxious watching Followed, one or two years later; Days when fierce, destructive fevers Darkened many homes with mourning.[2] Yet the citizens are happy In this season of glad respite; Now ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... "Jack" Hemingway, sexton of the First M. E. Church, and asked him to refrain from ringing the curfew bell last night, as Underwood's execution had been set for the hour when the bell was to ring. Hemingway refused, alleging it to be his duty ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... influence in New York at the opening of the Civil War position in the Mason and Slidell case sustains Stillman in matter of passports his manner of making appointments dispatch from, to Stillman at Crete consents to Stillman's recall, which, however, is revoked Sexton, Samuel, portrait painter, teacher and friend of Stillman Shawnik Shefket Pasha, inaugurator of the "Bulgarian atrocities" defeated by Lazar Socica recalled Sheridan, Irish patriot Sigourney, Mrs., contributes ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... a sexton with a key as large as that of Saint Peter opened a mysterious door. "Ring the bell," he said, "when you come back and want to get out," and with a great grinding of rusty old hinges he separated us from the noise of the busy street ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... if he had. For when they got back to the Marshalsea the prison gates had closed for the night and they had to stay out till morning. They wandered in the cold street till nearly dawn; then a kind-hearted sexton who was opening a church let them come in and made Little Dorrit a bed of pew cushions, and there she slept a while with a big church-book for a pillow. Arthur did not know of this adventure till long afterward, for Little Dorrit would not ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... The old sexton heard some one shouting and pounding in the church, and thought it was some drunken vagabond who had stolen in during the service. He came to the door with his keys and called out, "Who ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... the heart that I can save Is used to furnish forth its epitaph. Gay as a sexton digging his own grave I burst into a ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... and now, as we came forth by the back door, he raised for a moment a pale and tell-tale face that was as direct as a confession. The rascal had expected to see Fenn come forth alone; he was waiting to be called on for that part of sexton, which I had already allotted to him ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she soon reached the Church of St. Lawrence, which the old sexton was just opening. She was the first person who entered the stately house of God that morning and knelt in one of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... no one to play the organ if the schoolmistress failed to turn up—as she often did. David however scrupulously turned the normal congregation of five—Bridget, the maid of the time-being, the gardener-groom, the sexton, and a baker-church-warden—into six by his unvarying attendance. In the course of half his stay the rumour of his being present and of his good looks and great spiritual improvement attracted quite a considerable congregation, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... these meadows Colonel Hammond meant to walk back to the station, and Alick and Rachel conducted him far enough to put him into the right path, and in going back again, they could not but go towards the stile leading to that corner of the churchyard where the sexton had finished his work, and smoothed the ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the programme was an entertainment by a gentleman bearing the delightfully sepulchral name of Dr. Sexton, whose mission in life it is to "expose" the tricks of Dr. Lynn and Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke. How those gentlemen are to be "exposed," seeing they only claim to deceive you by legerdemain, I cannot comprehend; ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... upon the glorious sky And the green mountains round, And thought that when I came to lie Within the silent ground, 'Twere pleasant, that in flowery June, When brooks send up a cheerful tune, And groves a joyous sound, The sexton's hand, my grave to make, The rich, green mountain turf ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... shoulders of six men from Ivy Cottage to the graveyard near the chapel. Shaw at that time had only a chapel, a hideous building on a bleak piece of rising ground, surrounded by many graves. It never looked more dreary than on that wretched January day in 1844, when we stood round as the sexton threw earth on my father's coffin. He was laid in the same tomb with the poor young wife who had loved him truly, and to whom he had been a tender and devoted husband ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... husband had turned heathen, and 'twould be the ruin of the children. But when he came he said he knew no more about 'em than she; and found they were this Mr. Fitzpier's property. So he wrote 'Beware!' outside, and sent 'em on by the sexton." ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... deceased miller's measure for his final sleeping room, I heard a couple of your good friends slandering you. I thought right away: I guess Leonard has not broken his neck.—At the house I heard more about it from the sexton, who had come to console the widow, and, incidentally, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... there rested awhile; She went to the door and there rested a little more; She went up the aisle and there rested awhile; She looked up; she looked down; She saw a corpse lie on the ground; She said to the sexton, must I look so When I ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... thought Susan, when she saw the head-waiter come forward so smilingly to meet Ella and herself at the Palm Garden; when Leonard put off a dozen meekly enduring women to finish Miss Emily Saunders' gown on time; when the very sexton at church came hurrying to escort Mrs. Saunders and herself through the disappointed crowds in the aisles, and establish them in, and lock them in, the big empty pew. The newspapers gave half a column of blame ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... man's well advisd to offer good counsell, and be laught at for his labour: we shall shortly have no counsellors, but Physitians; I spend my breath to thee, and thou answerest me some half an houre after in a sem[i]breve, or like to a Sexton, ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... along the streets until he arrived at the inn, from the front of which the dismal flag of death flapped slowly and heavily in the breeze. At this moment the death-bell of the town church tolled, and the sexton of the parish bustled through the crowd to inform him that the grave which he had ordered to be ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... people thought a great deal from this time of Mr. Dyer; and there was a town council held to consider what they should do to express their feelings to him. He had declined six times being made selectman, and he did not want to ring the bell as sexton. There did not seem to be anything in the way of an office they could offer ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... already gone. The sexton was turning out the lights, and a moment later Dick found himself once more on the street, looking with a grim smile on his hunger-pinched features, at the figure of the Christ, wrought in the costly stained glass window. "One of the least of these," he muttered hoarsely to himself. Then the ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... assertion that he spent any time in watching the British; Revere, knowing the route, may have signalled in order to make sure that the news crossed the river, even though he himself might fail. The person who displayed the signals seems to have been one Newman, the sexton of the church, rather than Captain Pulling, a friend of Revere's. At any rate, the signals were hung while Revere was crossing the river to Charlestown. He passed unobserved not far from the Somerset man-of-war, and remarks that "it was then young flood, the ship was winding, ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... the names and ages of the persons interred. The men are buried in one division, the women in another. We read one or two of the names, and they were quaint and strange: "Anne Rypheria Hurloch;" "Anna Benigna La Trobe;" and one was especially interesting, James Gillray, forty years sexton to this simple cemetery, and father of Gillray, the H. B. of the past century. One thing pleased us mightily, the extreme old age to which the dwellers in this house ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... than that gathered by Parson Weems. He says: "The first place of education to which George was ever sent was a little old field school kept by one of his father's tenants, named Hobby, an honest, poor old man, who acted in the double capacity of sexton and schoolmaster. Of his skill as a gravedigger tradition is silent; but for a teacher of youth his qualifications were certainly of the humbler sort, making what is generally called an A, B, C schoolmaster. While at school under Mr. Hobby ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... and highly scientific treatise was then read by Dr. Sexton, upon a disease which had been very prevalent in town during the spring, and had been usually termed the influenza. He defined it as a disease of convenience, depending upon various exciting causes acting upon the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... as the churchyard was clear of the funeral train, the mad laird peeped from behind a tall stone, gazed cautiously around him, and then with slow steps came and stood over the new made grave, where the sexton was now laying the turf, "to mak a' snod ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... we found the parson rebuking the gray-headed sexton for having used mistletoe among the greens with which the church was decorated. It was, he observed, an unholy plant, profaned by having been used by the Druids in their mystic ceremonies; and though it might be innocently employed in the ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... my crowns, That I may, walking in my gallery, See'm go pinioned along by my door. Being young, I studied physic, and began To practise first upon the Italian: There I enriched the priests with burials, And always kept the sexton's arms in ure With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells; And, after that, was I an engineer, And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany, Under pretence of serving [helping] Charles the Fifth, Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems. Then after ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... sleep, with a delicious sense upon me of being done with bother, and grief, and anxiety, and doubt, and fear, forever and ever, and listening with comfortable and increasing satisfaction to the sexton's work, from the startling clatter of his first spadeful on my coffin till it dulled away to the faint patting that shaped the roof of my new home-delicious! My! I wish you could try it to-night!" and out of my reverie deceased fetched me a rattling ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... through the kitchen where I was setting the tea, and she took the key of the church off the nail in the wall. Our farm was full a mile from the village, and half way between it and the church. So we kept one key, and Jack's uncle, who was the sexton, he had the other. ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... scandal that the bones should be allowed to lie out in the light of day, until the new corpse came to be buried. Abraham the sexton had his orders, to take such bones at once to the house which was appointed for them, and which was a mere shed in one corner of the cemetery, where it was left to each skull to discover the bones belonging to it as best it might. But when any of the officials ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... task; the long rough sods are laid over and patted into place; the old minister takes farewell in a few words of gentle sympathy; the brother and sister, with lingering looks at the two graves side by side, the old and the new, step into the farmer's carriage, and drive away; the sexton locks the gate and goes home, and we are left ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... newspapers copy into their columns the opening tirade and no more. Who wrote that paper? And who wrote the paper on Montaigne in the Westminster? I read with great satisfaction the Poems and Thoughts of Archaeus in Blackwood. "The Sexton's Daughter" is a beautiful poem: and I recognize in them all the Soul, with joy and love. Tell me of the author's health and welfare; or, will not he love me so much as to write me a letter with his own hand? And tell me of yourself, what task of love and wisdom ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... as the story proceeded, Tupper of Swinsthwaite winked at Ned Hoppin of Fellsgarth, and Long Kirby, the smith, poked Jem Burton, the publican, in the ribs, and Sexton Ross said, "Ma word, lad!" spoke more eloquently than ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... steeple of an old church was a beautiful chime of bells, which for many years had rung out joyous peals at the touch of the sexton's hand upon the rope. ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... which banish for the moment, all feelings of the drear realities of life; if one may be pardoned for being sometimes romantic, it is surely on such occasions as these. We descended the tower—"Please remember the Sexton——!" ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... clothing-club payments were collected by Mrs. Brock, the sexton's wife, and distributed by tickets to be produced at the various shops in the town. Mrs. Brock had detected some women exchanging their tickets for gin, and the offending parties retaliated by accusing her of embezzling the subscriptions, both parties launching ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... It was a weary way for them to be carried up in winter, when the steep wood-paths are covered with ice, and the steps slippery and covered with snow. The coffin creaked; the bearers panted; the old clergyman leaned heavily on the sexton and the grave-digger. Now no one has to be buried up there who ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... him go; the sexton would soon ring the bell, and he wished to pray some time alone in the church. Her tears had again disturbed his spirit, and made him weak. But he would use the holy keys of his office, which his Saviour had entrusted to him, to His glory alone, even if this accursed sorceress ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... call at the sexton's about the bell, too," said Arabella. "It is just round here, isn't it? I'll meet you at ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... contemporaries and rivals of Shakspeare. B—— said he had anticipated this objection when he had named the author of Mustapha and Alaham; and out of caprice insisted upon keeping him to represent the set, in preference to the wild hair-brained enthusiast Kit Marlowe; to the sexton of St. Ann's, Webster, with his melancholy yew-trees and death's-heads; to Deckar, who was but a garrulous proser; to the voluminous Heywood; and even to Beaumont and Fletcher, whom we might offend by complimenting ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... evenings to come. All was very still, but I could hear the tapping of a hammer farther down the street, and walked to see what was doing, for we had no trades in Moonfleet save that of fishing. It was Ratsey the sexton at work in a shed which opened on the street, lettering a tombstone with a mallet and graver. He had been mason before he became fisherman, and was handy with his tools; so that if anyone wanted a headstone set up in the churchyard, he went ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... cluster, The sunny mounds lie thick; The dead are more in muster At Hughley than the quick. North, for a soon-told number, Chill graves the sexton delves, And steeple-shadowed ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... av coorse, who was standin' tremblin' fornint him, while the sexton was diggin' the grave to putt him in alive—in the dark shadow ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... the little dingy building not far from the south end of the horse-sheds are seen standing open, it is a pretty sure sign that somebody lies dead in the parish. In this gloomy place the sexton keeps his dismal apparatus,—the hearse, with its curtains of rusty sable, the bier, the spades and shovels for digging graves; and in a corner lies a coil of soiled ropes, whose rasping sound, as they slipped through the coffin-handles, while the bearers lowered the corpse into the earth, has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... laid to rest, within That deep grave newly made; Wol th' sexton let a tear drop fall, On th' handle ov ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... into the church-yard by being acquainted with the sexton, who, though he did not refuse me at all, yet earnestly persuaded me not to go, telling me very seriously—for he was a good and sensible man—that it was indeed their business and duty to run all hazards, and that in so doing they might hope to be preserved; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... sexton came in for a gossip, so the father told him his troubles, and how that his younger son was such a simpleton that he knew nothing and could learn nothing. "Just fancy, when I asked him how he intended to earn his bread, he desired to learn what shivering meant!" "Oh, if that be ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... stopped at the old mansion, which I had not seen for six long years. Alas! it was tenanted by strangers. A new tombstone was in the village grave-yard, and on one side of it the name of my father, and the other bore my own. I asked the sexton, who was just opening the church for an evening lecture, when Richard Colman died. He replied very readily,—'O, about a year since. The old gentleman heard of the loss of the vessel in which he sailed, and dropped away ...
— Hurrah for New England! - The Virginia Boy's Vacation • Louisa C. Tuthill
... Simpson's pup followed him in; and it took Simpson, Jenks the sexton, and two small boys, ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... who was howled down at a meeting at St. Helens recently, said he refused to bow the knee to a lot of body-snatchers who wanted him to sacrifice his manhood and conscience to satisfy their inclinations. A self-respecting sexton ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... given us Dench (Chapter XI) and Dennis (le daneis). Visitors to Margate will remember the valley called the Dane, which stretches from the harbour to St. Peters. Saxon is not racial, but a perversion of sexton (Chapter XVII). Mr. Birdofredum Sawin, commenting on the methods employed in carrying out the great mission of the Anglo-Saxon race, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... are several gradations through which every member of the fraternity must regularly pass before he arrives at the high office of a Bhurtote, or strangler. He is first employed as a scout — then as a sexton — then as a Shumseea, or holder of hands, and lastly as a Bhurtote. When a man who is not of Thug lineage, or who has not been brought up from his infancy among them, wishes to become a strangler, he solicits ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... friends, to be sure. All the boys in the place liked him, and were very angry with the way the farmer treated him, and greatly to their credit, they admired his superior learning instead of being jealous of it. Mrs. Hayward, the sexton's wife, the same who had bound up his hand when he cut it at harvest, even asked him to come in and help her boys in the evenings with what they had to prepare for Mr. Cope. He was not sorry to do so sometimes. The cottage was a slatternly ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... grave that was newly made, Leaned a sexton old on his earth-worn spade; His work was done, and he paused to wait The funeral train at the open gate. A relic of bygone days was he, And his locks were white as the foamy sea; And these words came from his lips so thin: "I gather them in: I ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... dingy quarters in the rear lived the sexton. He had the great improvement of having water brought into the house in June, 1847, by a sixty-foot hose. Six years later the hydrant was put up in the front church yard, remaining there until ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... has contributed various poems to the literature of the country, which have stamped him as being possessed of a more than ordinary share of the divine afflatus. Among them is "The Sexton's Spade," which has gained a world-wide celebrity. The writer has been connected with Mr. Burnett in the publication of two or three papers, which, somehow or other, never won their way into popular favor: either the public had very bad taste, or the "combined forces" had not the ability to please, ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... did another fine thing, I sat down. I wish now I had done that earlier. I wish now I had sat down before I got up. I was the last man out of the church—and I hurried. But they beat me out—all nine of them. When I went out the door, the old sexton said as he jiggled the key in the door to hurry me, "Don't feel bad, bub, I've heerd worse than that. You're all right, bub, but ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... door. He crowded the telltale book through the opening in the top of this box, and then with a satisfied air ran blithely down the stone steps. But he stopped short as he came face to face with the sexton who ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... the trufe, and if you don't believe it, go out ter Southview Cemetery and see Sid Heard, my oldest son; he been out there over 20 years as sexton and bookkeeper. Yessir, he tole it ter me and I believe it. This happen long ago, 10 or 15 years. There wuz a couple that lived in Macon, Ga., but their home wuz in Atlanta and they had a lot out ter Southview. Well, they had a young baby that tuck ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... sexton with him and let him have the pick and shovel from the cemetery. I gave him food and thanked God as I watched him eat, that grace was working in ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... since, I was sketching a picturesque trefoil-headed door leading into this part of the vault; and the place being at that time in great confusion with coffins, remains of bodies, some of which were dried like mummies, &c., I could find no better seat than one of the coffins. The sexton's boy, who held my light, informed me this was the coffin of Scratching Fanny, which recalled the Cock Lane story to my mind. I got off the lid of the coffin, and saw the face of a handsome woman, with an aquiline nose; this feature remaining perfect, an uncommon case, for the cartilage ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... several of us making merry at a friend's house in a country village, when the sexton of the parish church entered the room in a sort of surprise, and told us "that, as he was digging a grave in the chancel, a little blow of his pick-axe opened a decayed coffin, in which there were several written papers." Our curiosity was immediately ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... at the number of skulls thrown upon the stage. To which Jones answered, "That it was one of the most famous burial-places about town." "No wonder then," cries Partridge, "that the place is haunted. But I never saw in my life a worse grave-digger. I had a sexton, when I was clerk, that should have dug three graves while he is digging one. The fellow handles a spade as if it was the first time he had ever had one in his hand. Ay, ay, you may sing. You had rather sing than work, I believe."—Upon Hamlet's taking up the skull, he cried ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... visit to their camp four miles below Ukiah, and finding there a unique kind of assembly-house, desired to enter and examine it, but was not allowed to do so until I had gained the confidence of the old sexton by a few friendly words and the tender of a silver half dollar. The pit of it was about 50 feet in diameter and 4 or 5 feet deep, and it was so heavily roofed with earth that the interior was damp and somber as a tomb. ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... also sells charms, consisting of verses of the Koran written on paper, to be tied round the arm or hung on the neck. These have the effect of curing disease and keeping off evil spirits or the evil eye. Sometimes there is a mosque servant who also acts as sexton of the local cemetery. The funds of the mosque and any endowment attached to it are in charge of some respectable resident, who is known as Mutawalli or churchwarden. The principal religious officer is the Maulvi, who corresponds ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... who arrested Captain Barnaby in a thousand pound action, for what he had said of her husband. Captain Barnaby gave bail to it, and it came on to a trial in the Court of King's Bench, and they had Mr. Booty's wearing apparel brought into court, and the sexton of the parish, and the people that were with him when he died; and we swore to our journals, and it came to the same time within two minutes; ten of our men swore to the buttons on his coat, and that they were covered with the same sort of cloth his coat was made of, and so it proved. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various |
