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More "Undertaker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Hamlet, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Macbeth, and every once in a while the local literary man, who was also the undertaker, wrote a play based on local traditions. Of course they gave The Village School and Memory's Garland, and if you don't remember those delectable home-made entertainments, so much the worse for you. It is true that in the allegorical tableau at the end of Memory's Garland the wreath, which ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... in a four-wheeled trap, for the solitary hearse that Mudgee boasted then was to meet them some three miles out of town—at the racecourse, as it happened, by one of those eternal ironies of fate. (Jones, the undertaker, had had another job that morning.) The long string of buggies and carts and horsemen; other buggies and carts and horsemen drawn respectfully back amongst the trees here and there along the route; male hats off and held rigidly vertical with right ears as the coffin passed; and drivers ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... the old home he had left. Again and again he had got almost enough money ahead to start, and then there would be an interest payment due, or a death in the family, and the money would all go to the banker, the doctor, or the undertaker. ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... divert you beyond measure; you never saw such a shabby set in your life: but the most amusing thing is to look in their faces, for all the time they are jumping and skipping about the stage as if they could not stand still for joy, they look as sedate and as dismal as if they were so many undertaker's men." ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... burial, sepulture^; inhumation^; obsequies, exequies^; funeral, wake, pyre, funeral pile; cremation. funeral, funeral rite, funeral solemnity; kneel, passing bell, tolling; dirge &c (lamentation) 839; cypress; orbit, dead march, muffled drum; mortuary, undertaker, mute; elegy; funeral, funeral oration, funeral sermon; epitaph. graveclothes^, shroud, winding sheet, cerecloth; cerement. coffin, shell, sarcophagus, urn, pall, bier, hearse, catafalque, cinerary urn^. grave, pit, sepulcher, tomb, vault, crypt, catacomb, mausoleum, Golgotha, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... chuckle, "he is a proof of our initiative. I thought as you do three days ago. For it is just three days since he took his stand there. But he is not watching this flat. He is not concerned with us at all. He is an undertaker's tout. In the house opposite to us a woman is lying very ill. Our young friend is waiting for her to die, so that he may rush into the house, offer his condolences and present ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... not infrequently brought into ridicule. The "Bleeding Lamb" and his atheist opponent Gresham, the Polish Countess Vera Voblinska with her unhappy husband who looked like an out-at-elbows mute attached to a third-rate undertaker's business, a dress-reforming lady disciple of Armitage, a queer figure, not more than four feet in height, who looked like a little boy in her knickers and jersey, till you caught sight of the short grizzled hair and wrinkled ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... Marquises must be perpetuated, and Frederic Augustus, the tenth peer of the name, must be made to lie with the others. Lord George, therefore,—for he was still Lord George till after the funeral,—travelled with his sad burden, some deputy undertaker having special charge of it, and rested for a few hours in London. Mr. Knox met him in Mr. Stokes' chambers, and there he learned that his brother, who had made many wills in his time, had made one last will just before he left London, after his return from Rudham Park. Mr. Stokes ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... small, ever-shifting groups held sober discourse in front of business places. He hurried by them and struck off up the road, his mind so intent upon what lay ahead of him that he failed to notice that Jack Trentman had detached himself from the group in front of the undertaker's and was following swiftly after him. He was nearly half-way home when he turned, in response to a call from ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... make a hit with me, Arizona. If I were in your place I'd be waiting for the undertaker. You look like you'd out come of a railroad wreck, two fires, and a cattle stampede over your carcass. Here, boys, hustle along first aid to our friend ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... second thought, and accept the work as a comic instead of romantic opera. The wicked nuns, called back to life by the sorcery of Bertram, amid the ruins of the cloister, appeared to have been stinted by the undertaker in the matter of shrouds, and the procession of gray-wrapped figures in cutty sarks caused the liveliest merriment until the transformation took place, and serious interest was revived by the lovely face, form, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the main thoroughfare of Cologne in succession. I was ready and willing to accept any position, irrespective of its character. I blundered into an undertaker's premises, which I subsequently learned to be the largest firm in this line in the city, and patronised by the rank and fashion of Cologne. I endeavoured to explain the object of my visit to the proprietor by mimicking nail-hammering and pointing to a coffin. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... visit the poor and the sick in their homes. She married Samuel Evans, who was born in Boston, and was a carpenter. He had a brother William, who was a joiner and builder. Their father was a village carpenter and undertaker, honest and respectable, but who took to drink in his later years. He was at an ale-house very late one night, and the next morning was found dead in a brook near his house. Samuel became a Methodist and a preacher, but was teased about it by his brother, who criticised his blunders ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... my pocket now, but that doesn't matter. I had to send him after somethin'! Say, Serena, is it real necessary to have that undertaker hangin' over us ALL the time? Every time he looks at me I feel as if he was takin' my measure. Has EVERY meal got to ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... came into conflict at the death-bed. One night a poor Italian peddler died in Roosevelt Street. The news reached Divver and Foley about the same time, and as they knew the family of the man was destitute, each went to an undertaker and brought him to the ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... UNDERTAKER, "one who undertook by his influence in the House of Commons to carry things agreeably to his Majesty's wishes" (Whalley); one ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... my arrival Savoye and Brou had just been buried at Chamonix, and money was being raised for the relief of their almost destitute families. But Schnurdreher, in his mountain dress, with his spiked shoes on his feet, still lay at the undertaker's, awaiting the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... one half of the articles he would receive from the friends of the parties murdered or to be murdered. The doctor invariably recommended his invaluable friend the pollinctor, (whom let us call the undertaker;) the undertaker, with equal regard to the sacred rights of friendship, uniformly recommended the doctor. Like Pylades and Orestes, they were models of a perfect friendship: in their lives they were lovely, and on the gallows, it is ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... kind of taste," said Judy in defence, "an' whin her eyes was blue an' her hair yalla, I dunno but high colors wint well enough. Her father always dhressed her well. Anyhow she's goin' to make up for all the years she had to dhress like an undertaker. Yistherday it was a gran' opery-cloak, as soon as Artie tould her he had taken four ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Gottesdienst (Divine service) he used to stand sentinel at the church door, wearing a white armlet with black stripes and a silver tassel, leaning on a cane with a curved handle. By trade he was an undertaker. His name was Sami Witschi. He was very tall and thin, with a slight stoop, and he had the clean-shaven solemn face of an old peasant. He was very pious and knew better than any one all the tittle-tattle of the parish. Babi and Sami were thinking of getting married: they appreciated each other's ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... reflection from the face of the Other Man of the least desire to know what ultimately settled the unpopularity of the undertaker. But from the curtains of the various berths several eager and one or two even wrathful faces, anxious for ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... out of the back-shop to serve them, was, if we may say so, very unlike his trade. A grave, tall, long-legged, long-nosed, raw-boned, melancholy-looking creature such as he, might have been an undertaker, or a mute, or a sexton, or a policeman, or a horse-guardsman, or even a lawyer; but it was the height of impropriety to have made him a toy-shopman, and whoever did it had no notion whatever of the fitness of things. One could not resist the idea that his clumsy legs would ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... was undertaker. With his own hands he "rived" the planks, made the coffin, and buried Nancy Hanks, that remarkable woman. There was no pastor, no funeral service. The grave was marked by a wooden slab, which, long years after, in 1879, was replaced by a stone ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... are held at the house the relatives and intimate friends are invited into the back parlor, dining room, or upstairs, and make their appearance only when the services begin. The undertaker attends to seating people, arranging the ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... see Samanon in a bookseller's shop, or calling on a paper-merchant or a printer, you may know that it is all over with that man," said the artist. "Samanon is the undertaker come to take the measurements ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... number of private persons under unstable functionaries. The bishop alone has maintained himself intact and erect, a dignitary for life, the conductor, by title and in fact, of a good many persons, the stationary and patient undertaker of a great service, the unique general and undisputed commander of a special militia which, through conscience and professions, gathers close around him and, every morning, awaits his orders. Because in his essence, he is a governor of souls. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... were useless. Another life had gone out at the very dawning of its day; crushed out by the injustice and the greed of fellow-beings. Faith choked back her sobs as well as she could, and looked on in amazement at what followed the tragedy. An undertaker was called and placed in charge of the body, and the utmost concern seemed to be felt about all the arrangements, especially by Mr. Gibson, who had been put in charge of the matter ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... the strokes of the hammer and the saw as she passed the closed shop of the carpenter, who was also the undertaker. She knew that people were making coffins by candlelight within. Happening to look round after she had passed, she saw a woman come out, wan in countenance, and carrying under her cloak something which a puff of wind showed to be an infant's coffin—a sight from which every ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... Mr. Turfmould, the sexton and undertaker, who seemed to be in a pensive meditation upon all the dead that he had ever buried. He looked upon men in a mild and pitying manner, as if he forgave them for being in good health. You could not help feeling ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to the door again and again, and the house began to smell of tuberoses. Reporters came, waiting patiently for interviews, sitting on the leather chairs in the dining-room, or writing rapidly on a corner of the dining-table, the cloth pushed back. The undertaker's assistants went about in their shirt-sleeves, working very hard, and toward the middle of the afternoon the undertaker himself tied the crepe to ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... hand, it was here, he was last seen; from this point a keen detective would naturally work up the case. Then might not the undertaker return for the candlestick, probably not left by design? Or, again, might not M. Dorine send fresh wreaths of flowers, to take the place of those which now diffused a pungent, aromatic odor throughout ...
— A Struggle For Life • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Nawby—the medical attendant of the deceased, and the solicitor who is her sole executor," said the voice near Mat, in tones which had ceased to be gently inquisitive, and had become complacently explanatory instead. "That's Millbury the undertaker, and the other is Gutteridge of the White Hart Inn, his brother-in-law, who supplies the refreshments, which in my opinion makes a regular job of it," continued the voice, as two red-faced gentlemen followed the doctor and the lawyer. "Something like a funeral, this! Not a halfpenny less than forty ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... the hysterical condition of Paris just before the Reign of Terror, while I, like Benjamin Franklin, in 'undertaker's clothes' in the midst of barbaric ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... till 157they can learn a proper account of what the deceased died of, what condition the body is in, &c. with which account they go to a Resurrection Doctor, who agrees for a price, which is mostly five guineas, for the body of a man, and then bargain with an Undertaker for the shroud, coffin, &c. which, perhaps with a little alteration, may serve to run ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... world go by. And I guess he's got a nice bunch of brothers-in-law on his hands. Poor old Amzi! There was always something amusing about the cuss, even when he was a smug little roly-poly as a boy. But I passed his bank this morning and it looked like an undertaker's office. The contrast between that old tomb and your plant pleases me, Will; it soothes my family pride. You are an able man and I congratulate you on your success. Sam liked to cut didoes on thin ice a little too well; but you're ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... o'clock when I arrived at the house. A slatternly, sulky woman opened the door to me. "Oh! I suppose you're another doctor," she muttered, staring at me with scowling eyes. "I wish you were the undertaker, to get her out of my house before we all catch our deaths of her! There! there's the other doctor coming down stairs; he'll show you the room—I won't ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... and if I am dead he will be glad to see me." When some ladies bantered him on his want of feeling in attending to see the terrible Lord Lovat's head cut off—"Why," he said, "I made amends by going to the undertaker's to see it sewed on again." And yet this was the same individual who delighted in the first words and in the sunny looks of childhood; whose friendship seems to have partaken of all the softness of female affection; and whose heart was never ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... sometimes in the greatest possible hurry as though they never could go quick enough; and then the coachmen would drive very fast also, though they did not know why, for a fast pace of movement is another of those contagious diseases. And then again the sportsmen would move at an undertaker's pace, when the fox had traversed and the hounds would be at a loss to know which was the hunt and which was the heel; and then the carriage also would go slowly, and the ladies would stand up and talk. And then ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... do look so like the undertaker's assistant," she smiled. "You have no right to be glum. I have. I'm the corpse. A corpse might laugh in sheer relief when the lid was ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... order of publication. The second half of A Life's Atonement was written under difficulties which would have been absolutely insurmountable if it had not been for that spirit of camaraderie which distinguished the jolly little Bohemian set amongst whom I had fallen. One chum who lived over an undertaker's shop in Great Russell Street found me house-room, and I had a resource from which, for the space of some ten weeks, I was entitled to draw one pound a week, which came to me in rather an odd fashion. Every morning a half-crown was slipped under the ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... if I am to be ruined by expense, let it come in the shape of the washerwoman's and linen-draper's bills, not in those of the apothecary and undertaker." ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... words, in the handwriting of Rale, meant as a fling at the English invaders: "It [the church] is ill built, because the English don't work well. It is not finished, although five or six Englishmen have wrought here during four years, and the Undertaker [contractor], who is a great Cheat, hath been paid in advance for to finish it." The money came ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... gave the commissions, and stipulated that although they were to be employed only in suppressing the rising, the officers should have permanent rank.[16] So, as was shown in Mrs. Clarke's case, a patent for raising a regiment might be a source of profit to the undertaker, who again might get it by bribing the mistress of a royal duke. The officers had, according to the generally prevalent system, a modified property in their commissions; and the system of sale was not abolished till our own days. We may therefore say that the ruling class, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... barred, Raymond is barred, I am barred. I told them about my baseball career out West. The directors said some pretty plain things about you, Worry, I'm sorry to tell. You're a rotten coach. In fact, you ought to be a coach at an undertaker's. Homans gets the credit for the work of the team. They claim you are too hard on the boys, too exacting, too brutal, in fact. Andrews recited a record of your taking sandwiches from us and aiding and abetting ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... was a huntsman, you know, and a great breaker of hosses. And now one's broke him. Dead and buried, and nought for me but his watch and chain and a bill from his undertaker. It happened in Ireland three weeks ago; and I've only heard tell to-day; and I thought if Mary Tuckett knowed, 'twould soon have turned her laughter into tears, for she was cruel fond of him, and wept ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... been the great misfortune of my life that I have never been able to escape from the Irish question. It was discussed round my cradle by a nurse whom my parents selected for her sound Protestant principles. The undertaker will give his views of the Irish question to his assistant while he drives the nails into the lid of my coffin. I should not have supposed that any one could have hit on an aspect of it wholly new to me. But Mrs. Ascher did. Never before had I heard the problem ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... show his heart was not of human decency bereft, Peter paid the undertaker. He got drunk on what was left; Then he shed some tears, half-maudlin, on the grave where lay the Co., And he drifted to a township where the city failures go. Where, though haunted by the man he was, the wreck he yet might be, Or the man he might have been, or by each spectre ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... afterwards, the same gentleman, sitting one night at twelve o'clock with a sick brother, heard a noise, as of the driving of nails into a coffin, in the workshop of an undertaker, who was a neighbour. The gentleman thought it was very unkind of the undertaker, an intimate acquaintance of the sick person, to disturb him. As soon as the noise of nail-driving ceased, other and more disagreeable sounds reached his ears. The street door was opened, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... the paper, and do nobody any good but the coroner and the undertaker! It was inevitable that you should have gone into a passion, Le! Your provocation would have upset a doctor of divinity, if it had taken him by surprise. Think no more of it, my boy! I dare ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Clara, 'you gentlemen have been very entertaining this morning. One would think Polly and I had come out for a stroll with a couple of undertaker's-men. There's surely time enough to think of such things yet! None of us are ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... from the ground, its splintered portions bearing decided witness to the dreadful struggle I had made to obtain my freedom. I advanced and examined it closely. It was a frail shell enough—unlined, unornamented—a wretched sample of the undertaker's art, though God knows I had no fault to find with its workmanship, nor with the haste of him who fashioned it. Something shone at the bottom of it—it was a crucifix of ebony and silver. That good monk again! His conscience had ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... to be led away by his friend. They passed the day between the registrar of deaths, the undertaker, and the cemetery. As Jacques had no money, the doctor pawned his watch, a ring, and some clothes, to cover the cost of the funeral, that was fixed for ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... were called, differed widely from the Norman invaders of a former age. The Norman generally espoused the cause of some native chief, and took his pay in land; what he got by the sword he held by the sword. But the Undertaker was usually a man of peace—a courtier like Sir Christopher Hatton—a politician like Sir Walter Raleigh—a poet like Edmund Spencer, or a spy and forger like Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork. He came, in the wake of war, with his elastic "letters ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... his own way after that. He went with Miss Letitia to the inquest; he won over the coroner and the newspaper men to his will; he kept your aunt's name out of the papers; he took charge of the coffin; he hired the undertaker and his men, strangers from London; he wrote the certificate—who but he! Everybody was cap in hand to the ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... English chiefs on the Council of Munster, and also with the leading men among the Undertakers as they were called, among whom more than half a million of acres of the escheated and desolate lands of the fallen Desmond were to be divided, on condition of each Undertaker settling on his estate a proportionate number of English gentlemen, yeomen, artisans and labourers with their families, who were to bring the ruined province into order and cultivation. The President and Vice-President of the Council were the two Norreys, John and ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... attempt to save expense by limiting its proper size, materials for walls, windows for ventilation, drainage, etc., for money so saved will inevitably be paid out many times over in coal bills, doctor's fees, and, perhaps, undertaker's bills. A dry cellar must be secured at all costs, for the air from it permeates the whole house. Where this is damp, it leads not alone to disease among the inmates, but to the disintegration of the house ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... because he wanted to train his children to work. Willard, my mother's master, should have been a Berth because he was old man Berth's son, but he called himself Blue. It might have been that old man Berth was his stepfather. Anyway he went by the name of Willard Blue. He was an undertaker. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... who would care to know the news, would see Mr. Bayweather about the funeral, would telephone the man in West Ashley who dug graves, would do what was to be done outside; and she would do what was to be done inside, as now, when she sat on the stairs waiting in case the undertaker ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of the by-lanes about London, which he made the footman carry in his pocket and observe, that she might ride without paying a turnpike. When the poor girl was past recovery, Sir Robert sent for an undertaker, to cheapen her funeral, as she was not dead, and there was a possibility of her living. He went farther; he called his other daughters, and bade them curtsy to the undertaker, and promise to be his friends; and so ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... names of justice to what I write; and do presently call you to the exercise of that noblest, and manliest virtue; as coveting rather to be freed in my fame, by the authority of a judge, than the credit of an undertaker. Read, therefore, I pray you, and censure. There is not a line, or syllable in it, changed from the simplicity of the first copy. And, when you shall consider, through the certain hatred of some, ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... epitaph had said, 'Here lies the body of John Blank; he was born a man and died a banker,' it would have been just as bad. Or, if he had died an undertaker, and buried himself, it would not have ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... mad undertaker in the autumn," continued Malkiel, with conscious pride; "he floated past ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... National Agent and gravely informs him that this head-dress, borrowed from the guillotined, is a rallying point for anti-revolutionaries, whereupon, the next day, wigs are denounced at the Commune-council, and suppressed; "Barere roared with laughter on alluding to this piece of fun." The humor of an undertaker and the dexterity of a commercial drummer: he plays with Terror.—In like manner he plays with his reports, and at this latter exercise, he improvises; he is never embarrassed; it is simply necessary to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... what a horrid thing it would be to have marriage destroyed, and us honest fellows turned loose among the virgins, from whom we should catch and ravish each a new damsel every new day, and had you seen what a fine serious undertaker's face I put upon the business, your heart would have chuckled! To the day of your death it would ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Afterwards, they stole everything they could find, and with their comrades swept the shops clean of shirts, boots, groceries, and everything they could lay their hands on. They even took the hearses out of an undertaker's yard and filled them with loot. Before they left Crepy-en-Valois, they fired deliberately, I was told, upon Red ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... jotting, "I lodged with the cheeriest little undertaker in the world, who had a capital low-class practice. His wife, four children, and whoever happened to be the lodger, were all pressed into the merry service. We sang Funiculi funicula as we drove in the nails. When I make coffins again I shall sing that refrain. It has an ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... fought shy of meeting people. Their hard, matter-of-fact faces showed him only too plainly what they thought of him. At first he had been fool enough to scan them eagerly, in the hope of finding one saving touch of sympathy or comprehension. But he might as well have looked for grief in the eyes of an undertaker's mute. And so he had shrunk back into himself, wearing his stiffest air as a shield and leaving it to Mary to ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... a fifth, Mr. Banger. The name of her fourth was McFadden. The name of her first and third was Smyth, while that of her second, oddly enough, was Smith. Soon after her return from her last wedding-tour she was visited by Mr. Toombs, the undertaker, who called ostensibly to correct an error in his last bill. When Mrs. Banger entered the parlor, Mr. Toombs greeted ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... dispensed with. In some instances only the undertaker and his assistants are present, and in others only one or two members of the ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... return to him again with a profit; the other, when once he parts with it, very seldom expects to see any more of it. Those different habits naturally affect their temper and disposition in every sort of business. The merchant is commonly a bold, a country gentleman a timid undertaker. The one is not afraid to lay out at once a large capital upon the improvement of his land, when he has a probable prospect of raising the value of it in proportion to the expense; the other, if he has any capital, which is not always the case, seldom ventures ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... furnished with a list of their own attending physicians, all of whom have performed remarkable cures. It is a full and complete list of fifty-eight physicians in good professional standing, and I will dispose of it at a moderate compensation to any apothecary or undertaker who ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... unventilated den, about ten feet square; one of them is a camel-driving descendant of the Prophet, and sings out "Allah-il-allah!" several times during the night in his sleep; another is the patriarch of the village, a person guilty of cheating the undertaker, lo! these many years, and who snuffles and catches his breath. The other two men snore horribly, and the boy gives out unmistakable signs of a tendency to follow their worthy example; altogether, it is anything ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... everything in the Palazzo Chiaromonte within an hour of her brother-in-law's death; she locked the drawers of his private desk herself, sent for the notary and had the customary seals placed on the doors of the inner apartments 'in the name of the heirs'; she spoke with the undertaker and made every arrangement for the customary lying in state of the body during the following night and day; saw to the erection of the temporary altar at which masses for the dead would be celebrated almost without interruption from midnight to noon by sixteen ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... half the infantile mortality would disappear. It only costs twopence to put a piece of thick felt or cork into the bottom of a boot or shoe, and the difference is often between that and a doctors bill, with, perhaps, the undertaker's besides."—Daily Telegraph, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... lay the poor lovey was took from gert evil to come. You knaw so well as me. You can guess wheer her'd be now if livin'. She'm in a better home than that. I s'pose the bury-in' might be two days off, or three. I'll step awver to Sancreed bimebye, an' if the undertaker come, Mrs. Bartlett can be with him when he do ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... any any other woman come near my coffin de undertaker would have to do his job all over—cause I'd git right up and walk off. Furthermore, Miss Daisy, ma'am, also m'am, which would you ruther be a lark a flying or a dove a settin'—ma'am ...
— De Turkey and De Law - A Comedy in Three Acts • Zora Neale Hurston
... the quantity and quality of the spirit yielded from that hogshead. Cleanliness in every matter and thing, in and about a distillery becomes an indispensable requisite, without a strict observance of which the undertaker will find the establishment unproductive and injurious to his interest. Purity cannot exist without cleanliness. Cleanliness in the human system will destroy an obstinate itch, of consequence, it is the active handmaid of health and comfort, and without ...
— The Practical Distiller • Samuel McHarry
... Art recovered is little less than an Art invented. The Works of the former Artists remain indeed; but the Manner in which they were done, is entirely lost: the inventing then the Manner is really due to this latter Undertaker, since no Writings, or other Remains, are to be found by which the Method of former Artists can be discover'd, or in what Manner they executed their works; nor, in Truth, has the Italian Method since the Beginning of the 16th Century been attempted ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... Some God hath put his mercy in your manhood Whereto heel infuse powre, and presse you forth Our undertaker. ...
— The Two Noble Kinsmen • William Shakespeare and John Fletcher [Apocrypha]
... group includes cases in which the tips of the fingers are fairly pliable and intact, yet due to the presence of wrinkles in the skin, complete impressions cannot be obtained. This condition can be corrected by the injection of a tissue builder, procurable from a dealer in undertaker's supplies. If this is not available, glycerin ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... who introduced me right and left to hundreds of my supporters and their wives and daughters. At the end of it all I felt as if I had got a heavy sort of how-do-you-do smile regularly glued on my face. One of my chief supporters is an undertaker named JOBSON. HOLLEBONE brought him up to me and said, "Mr. JOBSON, permit me to introduce you to our popular young Candidate, Mr. PATTLE. Mr. PATTLE let me have the honour of introducing you to our popular young undertaker, Mr. JOBSON." Gave me rather a shock, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... from the undertaker connected with Mr. Wentworth's chapel that the clergyman would not be back until evening, and she told the former to tell their pastor all that had occurred, and to ask him to keep the circumstances of Mr. Jocelyn's death as quiet ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... the day approach'd, his wife must die: Imagine now the doleful cry Of female friends, old aunts and cousins, Who to the fun'ral came by dozens— The undertaker's men and mutes Stood at the gate in sable suits With doleful looks, Just like so many melancholy rooks. Now cakes and wine are handed round, Folks sigh, and drink, and drink, and sigh, For Grief makes people dry: But DICK is missing, nowhere to be found Above, below, about They searched the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... as this, where all is life and gayety, our clients do not care to be reminded of such an ugly thing as death. Half the people on that floor would have left if they had known that the dead body of a man has been lying there. We keep these things very secret. The coffin has been taken to the undertaker's. The funeral will be ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... talk as plain as a professor. Look! You frightened me at first with your doubts and your impossibilities. You have only to make Kranich's aunt agree with Francine's guardian, and at the same time forgive Francine's husband for having assumed the undertaker's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... of a diplomatic circle, where all of the "great powers," and some of the smaller ones, were represented. Ladies from the rural districts were disappointed in not seeing the gorgeous court costumes, having forgotten that our court-dress is the undertaker-like suit of black broadcloth so generally worn. But they gazed with admiration upon the broad ribbons and jeweled badges worn on the breasts of the Chevaliers of the Legion of Honor, Knights of the Bath, etc., "with distinguished consideration." ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... it show Scrooge? A vision of his death—how he is plundered by laundress, charwoman, and undertaker; the phantom of Death; Scrooge's ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... practice seven years ago to flutter on the Stock Exchange. Lost my money in seven minutes, and have never had a patient since. I went to West Slocum (my old home) the other day, and found the place occupied by three Doctors, and the local Undertaker told me there was not room enough for one! Talk about luck, I am the unluckiest dog ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 31, 1892 • Various
... deficient in spirit: the hero was one Roome, a man only celebrated in the Dunciad for his "funereal frown." But it is uncertain whether this fellow had really so dismal a countenance; for the epithet was borrowed from his profession, being the son of an undertaker! Such is the nature of some satire! Dr. Warton is astonished, or mortified, for he knew not which, to see the pains and patience of Pope and his friends in compiling the Notes to the Dunciad, to trace out the lives and works of such paltry and forgotten scribblers. "It is like walking ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... of Moulines would never have suffered such barbarism, and the country that spent 300,000 pounds a year on this one prison, would never have grudged a coffin apiece to each poor fellow's body that required one. The libel must have originated with somebody (not an undertaker,) who thought in his poor heart that one was good enough for all. "It was ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... and arrived the next day. The others wired that they could not come, but asked for details, which Jennie wrote. The Lutheran minister was called in to say prayers and fix the time of the burial service. A fat, smug undertaker was commissioned to arrange all the details. Some few neighborhood friends called—those who had remained most faithful—and on the second morning following his death the services were held. Lester accompanied Jennie and Vesta and Bass to the ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... author. One bookseller at last, not remarkable for his discernment, but for his speculative turn, engaged in this publication. This bookseller got above a thousand guineas by it; and the booksellers are accumulating money every hour by editions of this work in all shapes. The undertaker of the translation of Rapin, after a very considerable part of the work had been published, was not a little dubious of its success, and was strongly inclined to drop the design. It proved at last to be a most profitable ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... was a covetous undertaker in town, who carted away the corpse, and then told the widow that she must spend much money on the funeral, in order to have her husband buried properly; or else, the tongues of the neighbors would wag. So the ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... feed him. But the young man was too much upset to eat, and having fasted for three days fell seriously ill. He rapidly grew worse, and the landlord, fearing he would not recover, had him moved straight to the undertaker's shop. In a short time the whole of the undertaker's staff was collected round him, offering sympathy and bringing him food. Gradually he got better and was able ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... fire-work! Adieu, thou machine! Although I have given thee from time to time some glimpses of people dear to me, old family portraits,—back with you to the picture dealer's shop, to Madame de T——-, and all the rest of them; take your place round the bier with undertaker's ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... health, the indulgence which you grant me, Maecenas, when I am ill, you will grant me [also] when I am afraid of being ill: while [the time of] the first figs, and the [autumnal] heat graces the undertaker with his black attendants; while every father and mother turn pale with fear for their children; and while over-acted diligence, and attendance at the forum, bring on fevers and unseal wills. But, if the winter ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... travelling man. "Stares at you polite enough but never says anything. No conversation. Just about as lively as an undertaker." ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... reason to expect a letter from Frederick that morning. He was absorbed in one idea—that the last visible token of the presence of his wife was to be carried away from him, and hidden from his sight. He trembled pitifully as the undertaker's man was arranging his crape draperies around him. He looked wistfully at Margaret; and, when released, he tottered towards her, murmuring, 'Pray for me, Margaret. I have no strength left in me. I cannot pray. I give her ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... give him thanks for his favour to me yesterday, at the Committee of Tangier, in my absence, Mr. Povy having given me advice of it, of the discourse there of doing something as to the putting the payment of the garrison into some undertaker's hand, Alderman Backewell, which the Duke of York would not suffer to go on, without my presence at the debate. And he answered me just thus: that he ought to have a care of him that do the King's business in the manner that I do, and words of more force than that. Then down with Lord ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... McMahon went on, unctuously; "setting up with the sick, and laying out the dead. Faith, sometimes, I have to be nurse and undertaker, all in one." ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... piety tell us these are proper."—Family Commentary, p. 64. "For without it the critic, as well as the undertaker, ignorant of any rule, have nothing left but to abandon themselves to chance."—Kames, El. of Crit., i, 42. "And accordingly hatred as well as love are extinguished by long absence."—Ib., i, 113. "But ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... great grief, he had been running about for three days, compelled to attend to everything. At first, as Christine had been picked up half dead, he had been obliged to have her carried to the Hopital de Lariboisiere; then he had gone from the municipal offices, to the undertaker's and the church, paying everywhere, and full of indifference so far as that went, since the priests were willing to pray over that corpse with a black circle round its neck. Among the people who ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... late at night, but this London moved with the decorum and caution of an undertaker. There was a silence, and yet there was no silence. There was a low drone, perhaps a humming contributed inevitably by closely-gathered thousands, and yet on second thoughts it was to me silence. I had perched my ears for the note of London, the sound ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... because his real name was Anderson Hawberry Sandringham. That name had been a great aid to him when he was an undertaker in Kansas City; but Anderson Hawberry Sandringham had fallen from the straight and narrow path of good undertakers some years before and he had sought refuge in the mountain-desert, where most things prosper except sheriffs and grass. He was fully six inches more than six feet in height and ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... she's good to me, and I know them headache powders makes her forgetful. I don't know where the money goes: she has a fistful the first of every month, but she owes bills to everybody in town except the undertaker. What I'm afraid of is as some of 'em'll go to himself. The ice man is gettin' as ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... Oh my Parmeno Inventor, undertaker, perfecter Of all my pleasures, know'st thou my good fortunes? Know'st thou my Pamphila's ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... into work I love. I found my job in my work, not away from it, and the work refreshed me and rejuvenated me. Now I do two men's work, and have grown from a skinny, fretful, nervous wreck into a hearty, happy man. This has been a great surprise to my friends and a great disappointment to the undertaker. I am an editor in the daytime and ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... by its more degraded nags. A very unwholesome coach. No doubt a successful quack-doctor had used it in his prosperous days for his wife and progeny; no doubt it had subsequently become the property of a second-class undertaker, and had conveyed many a quartette of cheap clergymen to the funerals of poor relations whose leaking sands of life left no gold-dust behind. Such was our carriage for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... earth with him has done; He's buried; save the undertaker's bill, Or lapidary's scrawl, the world has gone For him, unless he left a German will. But where's the proctor who will ask his son? In whom his qualities are reigning still, Except that household virtue, most uncommon, Of constancy to a ...
— English Satires • Various
... you know Turnbull died of angina pectoris there is no necessity of sending for the coroner," Rochester spoke in haste, his words tumbling over each other. "I will go at once and communicate with an undertaker." But before he could rise from his chair the sandy-haired man, who had conducted a whispered conversation with the deputy marshal, ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... the waiter and we left the cafe. On the way to Mary's I stopped at the undertaker's and made arrangements for Jim's burial. The man in charge was the saddest looking person I have ever seen. He had a woebegone look about him that was infectious—made you want to weep for him or with him. He discussed the funeral arrangements in a hushed voice and finished ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... Chilkoot Pass, is a high pass about a mile high and steep as a house roof. And is also subject to very heavy snowslides. It was here where a short time before 148 soldiers in the British Army were all burried forever without any Sky-Pilot or Undertaker's assistance. We crossed through Jacobs Ladder where were six-hundred steps cut into the solid ice. There were several Men known as packers who lived at the foot of the ladder, they packed over loads for 45cts per lb. they wore spurs on the bottom of their ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... he repeated slowly. "The undertaker 'oo could guarantee that, mark you, for all his customers—well, 'e'd monopolise the trade, is all I can say. See the horses ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... The undertaker entered the room and screwed down the lid of the coffin; the pall-bearers followed and carried it to the hearse. Then the mourners rose and prepared to set forth, in the order of their relation to the deceased. Elisha Barton led the way, with his wife; ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... heavily when Mr. Lyken, the little undertaker from Ghost Lake, arrived with several assistants, a casket, and what ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... commencement often varies, and sometimes the apothecary and sometimes the physician opens the scene; but, be that as it will, they always appear in a string, like a flight of wild geese, and each confederacy maintains a correspondence with one particular undertaker. Fathom, upon these considerations, set up his rest in the first floor of an apothecary in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, to whom he was introduced by a letter from a friend at Tunbridge, and who being made acquainted ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... no bounds to Blanche's grief, and it was with the greatest difficulty she could be persuaded to leave for a moment the corpse of her grandfather. When she was at last induced to do so, Wilkins sent for an undertaker and had the body fitly prepared for its ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... others will swear that this wise Undertaker By Trade's an At—ney, by Name is a B—r, Who rambles about with a Female Disguise on And lives upon Scandal, as Toads do ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... in the chief. "I'm down here to meet Braceway now. He and Withers are in conference. Braceway doesn't want to go to the inquest. I'm to take him by the undertaker's to look at the body, and then he wants to run up to see you. Says he won't learn anything important at the inquest; ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... of every one of the class we are discussing to live fashionably, so it is their chief wish to be laid in the grave in the same style. The undertaker at a fashionable funeral is generally the sexton of some fashionable church, perhaps of the church the deceased was in the habit of attending. This individual prescribes the manner in which the funeral ceremonies shall ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Ireland," Except that he was born in High'r Land. His chimes, not crampt like thine, and rung ill, Had made Job split his sides on dunghill. There was no limit to his merryings At christ'nings, weddings, nay at buryings. No undertaker would live near him, Those grave practitioners did fear him; Mutes, at his merry mops, turned "vocal." And fellows, hired for silence, "spoke all." No body could be laid in cavity, Long as he lived, with proper gravity. His mirth-fraught eye had but to glitter, And every mourner ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... driven into a corner and surrounded by foes. Her father sat at the feast between two women, Mrs. Steve Hunter who was inclined to corpulency, and a thin woman named Bowles, the wife of an undertaker of Bidwell. They continually whispered, smiled, and nodded their heads. Hugh sat on the opposite side of the same table, and when he raised his eyes from the plate of food before him, could see past the head of a large, masculine-looking woman into the farmhouse ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... many years. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has two manners. He can be as boisterous, exuberant, and gay, as any speaker in the House, and he can also be as lugubrious as though his life had been spent in the service of an undertaker. He was in the undertaker mood this evening. Slowly, solemnly, sadly, he unfolded his story of the finances of the country. He had taken the trouble to write down every word of what he had to say—an evil habit to which he has adhered all his life. But, notwithstanding these ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... had not proved, effectual, they resumed their inquiry, and proceeded with, uncommon vigour on the information they received. A great number of persons who had been pressed were discharged by order of the house; and captain Winter, the chief undertaker for this method of recruiting the army, was carried by the sergeant before the lord chief justice, that he might be prosecuted ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... to conceal it much longer from others. As enlightened undertakers, we must admit that we are of no more use on earth than scavengers. All the good we do is to bury people's dead out of sight. Speaking as a philosopher—which an undertaker surely ought to be—I should say that our business is merely to shoot rubbish. However, the rubbish is human rubbish, and bereaved parties have certain feelings which require that it should be shot ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... pointing out to one another objects of local interest with the fatuous officiousness of people in the foreground of hotel advertisements. Occasionally he paused to contemplate the contents of a shop window. We gazed industriously into the window next door. Our first window, I recollect, was an undertaker's, with ready-printed expressions of grief for sale on white porcelain disks. We had time to read them all. The next was a butcher's. Here we stayed, perforce, so long that the proprietor, who was of the tribe that disposes of its wares almost entirely by personal canvass, ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself. His walk was soft; his voice was melancholy; his long lanky fingers were hooked like claws. He might have been a parson, or an undertaker—or anything else you like, except what he really was. A more complete opposite to Superintendent Seegrave than Sergeant Cuff, and a less comforting officer to look at, for a family in distress, I defy you to discover, search ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... money. These things were always expensive, she said, and she feared that the poor little body hadn't a farthing—anyhow, he might ask her. But Simoneau silenced the old woman; he did not want to have the widow worried; he was going to the municipal office and to the undertaker's. ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... think Michael is a fool," sneered Morris. "Can't you understand he's been preparing this fraud for years? He has the whole thing ready: the nurse, the doctor, the undertaker, all bought, the certificate all ready but the date! Let him get wind of this business, and you mark my words, Uncle Masterman will die in two days and be buried in a week. But see here, Johnny; what Michael can do, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I know how she died in the carriage on your way from Mullingar; how you purchased a coffin and bribed the undertaker to silence; how you laid her, in the dead of night, among the weeds in the graveyard; how you cut her name from the chatelaine bag, and did all in your power to hide her identity, even carrying off with you the postboy who drove you and aided you to place ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; although ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... when I stepped out of the train on my return from the City. To gain time for reflection I resolved to make a detour. As I struck into an unfamiliar side street, I looked up, and there in front of me stood an undertaker's shop. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... four-square, with a patched-up conservatory on one wing. In the front room they found the recluse's body decently disposed, with an undertaker's assistant in charge. From the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the verge of a white apoplexy, though he did not move from his seat. The cadaverous maid lifted an embroidered bodice from one of the chairs and laid it in one of the black trunks; she looked like a female undertaker laying a dead baby in its coffin. The fat maid showed all her teeth and laughed at Schreiermeyer and cleared the other chair, and brought up both together for the ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... queer-looking bundle of clothes, and it was not one of those that can throb or break in silence. When she saw the long covered wagon, and the grave face of the old master, she thought it was all over with the poor girl she loved, and that this was the undertaker's wagon bringing back only what had once been Myrtle Hazard. She screamed aloud,—so wildly that Myrtle lifted her head from the pillow against which she had rested it, and ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... down there and then have to send the remains back. She had to promise him she would send them back, though it did seem a pity with the beautiful "semetary" they had there, and full of Northern folks as it would hold and the undertaker a perfect gentleman, if she ever saw one. But the widow hoped she knew her duty, and she would not wish to be ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... found that Mr. Raleigh-Jones is a member of the Union, Colonial, Town and Country, and Valley Hunt Clubs; upon consulting the telephone directory it is found that the Boraxes live at 1217 S. Main Street, and that Mr. Borax is an undertaker. Shall Mrs. F. B. Gerald (Z) send her daughter Annette to A ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... and a short red nose; as for his head, it seemed as though he had just smeared some sticky fluid over it, and then dipped it into a flour-tub, so thickly laden was it with powder. Mr. Deputy Diddle-daddle was tall and thin, and serious and slow of speech, with the solemn composure of an undertaker. Mr. Bluster was a great Old Bailey barrister, about fifty years old, the leader constantly employed by Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap; and was making at least a thousand a-year. He had an amazingly truculent-looking countenance, coarse to a degree, and his voice matched ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... as soon as they arrived, languished and finally died unless their parents speedily removed them to the safe shelter of their homes. The cure of Nanterre went so often to Bethlehem with his black vestments and his silver crucifix, the undertaker had so many orders for coffins for the house, that it was talked about in the neighborhood, and indignant mothers shook their fists at the model nursery, but only at a safe distance if they happened to have in their arms a little pink ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... contrived for a time to elude their vigilance; and in order to prevent the seizure of his paper, he resorted to an expedient which was equally ingenious and laughable. Close by his little shop in Shoe Lane there was an undertaker, whose business, as might be inferred from the neighbourhood, as well as from his personal appearance and the homeliness of his shop, was exclusively among the lower and poorer classes of the community. With him Mr. Cleave made an ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... must be suppressed. I should blush myself black in the face to say what he would relate with a very quiet smile of self-satisfaction. However, as regrets are quite unavailing, unless, like the undertaker's, they are paid for, I shall exclaim, with the French soldier, who found his long military queue in the hands of a pursuing English sailor, "Chivalry of ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... noticed passed rapidly behind the tomb of Abelard and Heloise, placed itself close to the heads of the horses belonging to the hearse, and following the undertaker's men, arrived with them at the spot appointed for the burial. Each person's attention was occupied. Monte Cristo saw nothing but the shadow, which no one else observed. Twice the count left the ranks to see whether the object ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... terror. Constantly meeting it and seeing it and procuring it will doubtless make it more commonplace. To the seasoned soldier in the army it means less than it did before he became a soldier. Probably the undertaker thinks less of death than almost any other man. He is so accustomed to it that his mind must involuntarily turn from its horror to a contemplation of how much he makes out of the burial. If the civilized savages have ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... not superstitious. Their credulity is, indeed, proverbial, but no one who does not mix with them can conceive the extent of it; it reminds one of the African fetish. The country apothecary's wife who puts the ivory 'fish' on the candlestick 'for luck,' and her partner, the undertaker, who turns his chair in hopes to realise more 'silver threepences,' are in no way more ridiculous than the grave and reverend seigneurs of the Clubs who are attracted to 'the winning seats' or 'the winning cards.' The idea ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... greedily at any large palmers, the larger and rougher the better. A red and a grizzled hackle will always take them; but the best fly of all is an imitation of the black beetle— the 'undertaker' of the London shops. He, too, can hardly be too large, and should be made of a fat body of black wool, with the metallic black feather of a cock's tail wrapped loosely over it. A still better wing is one of the neck feathers of any metallic-plumed bird, e.g., Phlogophorus Impeyanus, the Menaul ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Ercole, smiling. "If you do this thing you must act a part. You must manage to conceal your occupation entirely. You must look as solemn as an undertaker and be a real professor. They will ultimately find you out, and throw you out of the window, and dismiss me for recommending you. ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... forenoon came the wife and daughter of the good physician again upon the mission of mercy. They had requested the attendance of an undertaker, and assumed the whole charge of the funeral of Jenny, which was to take place on the ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... city directory to find out how many and what vocations there are, that I may plan my course of study accordingly when I discover what the life-work of each of my pupils is to be. If I find that one boy expects to be an undertaker he ought to take the dead languages, of course. If another boy expects to be a jockey he might take these same languages with the aid of a "pony." If a girl decides upon marriage as her vocation, I'll have her take home economics, of course, but ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... its course; they call on the citizens to rise and fight the enemy, to save their lives. Do the citizens do it? Not they. Individually they suffer and die. Individually they grieve and mourn, bury,their dead (when they should cremate them), and pay the doctor and the undertaker. Hundreds of dollars they pay as individuals to nurses, doctors, graveyard men, and monument makers. If, collectively they would put up a tenth of the sum to ensure a pure water and milk supply, they would save not only hundreds for themselves, but thousands and millions for those ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... were nearly the last persons expected; and soon after their arrival the funeral procession formed. This part was entirely arranged by the undertaker. The monstrous custom of forbidding ladies to follow their dead had not yet occurred even to the idiots of the nation, and Mr. Peyton and his daughter were placed in the second carriage. The first contained Griffith Gaunt alone, as head mourner. But the Peytons ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... and Edstrom told Hal that his wife had died during the day. There being no undertaker in North Valley, he had arranged for a woman friend to take the body down to Pedro, so that he might be free for the interview with Cartwright. Hal put his hand on the old man's shoulder, but attempted no word of condolence; ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... baseball. Hodder glanced up, involuntarily, at the window of the woman he had visited the night before, but it was empty. He hurried along the littered sidewalks to the drug store, where he telephoned an undertaker; and then, as an afterthought, telephoned the hospital. The boy had arrived, and was seemingly no worse for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Permanent Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man may very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation! He may be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a club, or even an undertaker's man; but not certainly of abstract death. We may trick with the word life in its dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true throughout—that we do not love life in the ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... acquired, and provincial even for Pineville, painfully set off these imperfections, to which a white cravat in a hopelessly tied bow was superadded. A terrible idea that this combination of a country undertaker and an ill-paid circuit preacher on probation was his best holiday tribute to her, and not a funeral offering to Mr. Jeffcourt, took possession of her. And when, with feminine quickness, she saw his eyes wander over her own fine clothes and festal figure, and sink again upon the floor in ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... not so well-to-do as before. As Blackstable became a more important health resort, a regular undertaker opened a shop there; and his window, with two little model coffins and an arrangement of black Prince of Wales's feathers surrounded by a white wreath, took the fancy of the natives, so that Mr Griffith almost completely ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... head to hide (i.e., thou wilt have no occasion to bury me, as Grendel will devour me whole).—Simrock imagines a kind of dead-watch.—Dr. H. Wood suggests: Thou wilt not have to bury so much as my head (for Grendel will be a thorough undertaker),—grim humor. ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... suddenly and her mother entered. She was bristling with curiosity. "Say, Emarine!" She lowered her voice, although there was no one to hear. "Where d' you s'pose the undertaker's a-goin' up by here? ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... made fast," said the other, "I want you to go ashore for me and fetch an undertaker and a policeman. I can't quite make up my ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... grave, and many a lingering shred of the natural and sinful which we would gladly lay down in a bottomless grave. God help us to pass the irrevocable sentence of death and to let the Holy Ghost, the great undertaker, make the interment eternal. Then our life shall be ever budding and blossoming and shedding fragrance ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... on Richard, who was obliged to retire for a while to the continent to avoid arrest and await some settlement. These obsequies cost in all the huge sum of L60,000, which there was a great difficulty in paying. The chief undertaker's name was Rolt. See note on The Widow Ranter —'Trusting for Old Oliver's ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... quite grey. He wore a thick wide-spreading ulster, and between his coat and waistcoat a leather vest, and on his head a grey cap. Put him in the Strand in town clothes, and he might have been taken for a clerk, a civil servant, a club secretary, a retired military officer, a poet, an undertaker—for anything except the last of a long line of immovable squires who could not possibly conceive what it was not to be the owner of land. His face was preoccupied and overcast, but as soon as he realised that Miss Ingate was on the stairs it instantly ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... should travel with a screen. A man in just such a rig attracted no end of comment in a fashionable hotel. The caricaturing effect of his trousers and coat were unspeakably comical. The wearer had a face as grave as an undertaker's and the air of a serious-minded college professor; but he had the nondescript look of a scarecrow composed of whatever available garments could be obtained from the cast-off wardrobe of ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... he's got a nice bunch of brothers-in-law on his hands. Poor old Amzi! There was always something amusing about the cuss, even when he was a smug little roly-poly as a boy. But I passed his bank this morning and it looked like an undertaker's office. The contrast between that old tomb and your plant pleases me, Will; it soothes my family pride. You are an able man and I congratulate you on your success. Sam liked to cut didoes on thin ice a little too ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... heart?" I said. He said it was heart. That was the best thing an old woman could hear. He said, when he saw I wasn't afraid, it was likely to be quick; no doctors, no nurses and daily bulletins for inquirers, but just the whites of the eyes, the laying-out, the undertaker, and the family-vault. That's one reason why I want to see Steignton before the blow that may fall any day, whether my brother Rowsley's there or no. But that Olmer doctor of mine, Causitt, Peter Causitt, shall pay me for being a liar or else ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he came home, a heartbroken boy, from his mother's funeral that day so many years ago, and buried his face in the sweet-mary leaves in the old Bible, and blotted its pages with his tears; for it seemed more like her than anything else in the house. He remembered that the undertaker's black mat with its ghastly white border was still in the front window, where the coffin had rested, and that the room smelled ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... combination van and hearse with the coffin under the driver's box, and John Storm (as the only discoverable mourner) with the undertaker on the seat inside. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the man who's walled up in green cardboard boxes, and sometimes has the blinds down, and sometimes sits so solemn staring like a sphinx, and always there's a look of the sepulchral, something of the undertaker, the coffin, and the dusk about horse and driver? Do tell me—but the doors slammed. We shall never meet ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... came in, a blunt, hard-looking man, self-sufficient and formal. A woman said the undertaker brought him. Icier than the pitiless storm outside, yes, colder than ice were his words. He read a few verses from the Bible, and warned "the bereaved mother against rebellion at the divine decrees." He made a prayer ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... asked the undertaker, who was waiting for him beside the hearse, who these people were. He had not invited anybody, and did not expect there would be a crowd of any kind, although the Hamburg papers had devoted ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... so weiter. Warble your death-song, sweet Thekla! Perish off the face of the earth, poor pulmonary victim, if so minded! Had you survived to a later period of life, my dear, you would have thought of a sentimental disappointment without any reference to the undertaker. Let us trust there is no present need of a sexton for Miss Hetty. But meanwhile, the very instant she wakes, there, tearing at her little heart, will that Care be, which has given her a few hours' respite, melted, no doubt, by her ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Stan was through, the undertaker called by for the old man, and when his assets were boiled down and the water drawn off, there wasn't enough left to furnish Stan with a really nourishing meal. I had a talk with Stan about what he was going to do, but some ways he didn't strike ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... in a livery that made him look like a cross between a headwaiter and an undertaker's assistant, escorted me through an anteroom into a reception-room, where a considerable number of well-dressed men and women were sitting about in strained attitudes, pretending to read magazines while they waited their turns, but in ...
— "Speaking of Operations—" • Irvin S. Cobb
... carriage house and the big door of the barn were wide open. Mary-'Gusta could hear the hens clucking and the voices of people talking. The voices were two: one was that of Mrs. Hobbs, the housekeeper, and the other belonged to Mr. Abner Hallett, the undertaker. Mary-'Gusta did not like Mr. Hallett's voice; she liked neither it nor its owner's manner; she described both voice and manner to herself as "too soothy." ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... he was dead an undertaker was sent for, by order of the executors, who met together immediately to open his will, and take care of all my son's effects. I was present when it was opened and read; but how terribly I was frightened at hearing the codicil repeated any person may imagine by the substance of it, which ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... the fact that the gruesomely bizarre handbill continued to recur to his mind. The thing was so manifestly absurd, he told himself with conviction, that it was not worth a second thought, but this did not prevent him from thinking of it again and again. What manner of undertaker could hope to obtain business by giving away foolish handbills in the street? Really, the whole thing had the air of a brainless practical joke, yet his intellectual fairness forced him to admit that as far as the man who had given him the bill was concerned, brainlessness was ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... incredible, but in thirty-two years he received two thousand and nine hundred and forty pairs of gloves. Of these, though dead men's gloves did not have a very good market, he sold through various salesmen and dealers about six hundred and forty dollars worth. One wonders that he did not "combine" with the undertaker or sexton who furnished the gloves to mourners, and thus do ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... that I could not attend the puppy's funeral in my proper person, because I wished to be the undertaker; but the happy thought struck me of putting my wheelbarrow alongside of the brick wall with a note inside it to the effect that I had "sent my carriage ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fifth, Mr. Banger. The name of her fourth was McFadden. The name of her first and third was Smyth, while that of her second, oddly enough, was Smith. Soon after her return from her last wedding-tour she was visited by Mr. Toombs, the undertaker, who called ostensibly to correct an error in his last bill. When Mrs. Banger entered the parlor, Mr. Toombs greeted her cordially ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... life blood, of that the landlord takes his third for betraying you to him. Nay, more, as soon as ever your blood goes down the stair in that basin there, the landlord will see it or smell it, and send swiftly to his undertaker and get his third out of that job. For if he waited till the doctor got downstairs, the doctor would be beforehand and bespeak his undertaker, and then he would get the black thirds. Say I sooth, old Rouge et ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... said Burtis, with a careless laugh. "Len shall bring home the little chick, and put her under his wife's wing. I should probably misrepresent the family, and make a bad first impression; and as for Webb, you might as well send the undertaker for her." ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... smoke, the buildings tremble as the heavy drays pass and collide at the corners of the narrow streets. Suddenly the marquis stops; he has found what he wanted. Between a charcoal dealer's dark shop and an undertaker's establishment, where the spruce boards leaning against the wall cause him to shudder, is a porte-cochere surmounted by a sign, the word "BATHS" on a dull lantern. He enters and crosses a damp little garden where a fountain weeps in a basin ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... of Peter Brant was the first consideration. No undertaker was called, for in that small settlement one would not have been supported. The ceremonies of death were few and simple. A rude wooden box was put together, and Peter was placed in it, dressed as he was at the time of his death. There was an itinerant minister who preached in the ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... hands was doing their best to start a famine in the fruit market, and Dr. Blatt was waving a banana and cheering us with a yarn about an old lady that his Burdock Bitters had h'isted bodily out of the tomb. He was at the most exciting part, the bitters and the undertaker coming down the last lap neck and neck, and an even bet who'd win the patient, when the kitchen door opens and in marches the waiter with the tray full of dishes of "cereal." Seems to me 'twas chopped hay we ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... I will excuse your congratulations, Mr. Turner," said I, impatiently; for the recollection of the banqueting-house, and the undertaker whom Turner was so eager to introduce, came full into my mind. "Go on, if you please; five minutes is all I am at present able to give to any business, and you sent me word you had something of importance ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... overworked that they can't find time. My idea is to raise a fund so that it can be done for them. My heart aches. Only this morning I saw a barber's with ASH AND RUSH UP on it; and a confectioner's"—she referred to her notebook—"with ICE REAMS, and an undertaker's with PINKING ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... BAZOUGE, an undertaker's assistant who lived in an attic of the same tenement-house as the Coupeaus and the Lorilleux. He was generally drunk and made ribald jests about his dismal calling. It was he who buried Gervaise Coupeau after she was found dead in an ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... uncle is dying, and W. don't much affect our Dutch determinations. I dine with him on Thursday, provided l'oncle is not dined upon, or peremptorily bespoke by the posthumous epicures before that day. I wish he may recover—not for our dinner's sake, but to disappoint the undertaker, and the rascally reptiles that may well wait, since ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... that part of the building gathered round it—listening, uncovered, to the scanty rites, which the Old Capitol concedes to prisoners released by that Power, in presence of whose claims the habeas corpus is never suspended. A tall, lank-haired man, looking more like an undertaker than a divine of any denomination, read straight through, without a syllable of preface, the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, and then, kneeling down, began a rambling, extemporaneous ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... Jim, "as long as I've got ter go ter town ter-morrer, anyhow, it seems a pity not ter do it all up at once. I could order the coffin an' the undertaker—it's only a question of a few hours, anyway, an' it seems such a pity ter make another ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... style as your father or my brother; namely, to one of our better dinners, and perhaps something better to drink than I can afford every day; but just think with what uneasy compassion Mr. Morley would regard our poor ambitions, even if you had an occasional cook and an undertaker's man. And what would he do without his glass of dry sherry after his soup, and his hock and champagne later, not to mention his fine claret or tawny port afterwards? I don't know how to get these things good enough for him without laying in a stock; and, that you know, would be as ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... much characteristic discrimination; the woman looking into the coffin has more beauty than we generally see in the works of this artist. The undertaker's gloating stare, his companion's leer, the internal satisfaction of the parson and his next neighbour, are contrasted by the Irish howl of the woman at the opposite side, and evince Mr. Hogarth's thorough knowledge of ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... no objick at all. There'd be a dead Rink layin' round in less 'n half a shake. I'd want a permit from the undertaker fust, an' hev my measure for a patent casket to order. This child a'n't anxious to cut stick ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... shadow, who spoke to nobody, to whom nobody dared speak and who vanished as soon as he was seen, no one knowing how or where. As became a real ghost, he made no noise in walking. People began by laughing and making fun of this specter dressed like a man of fashion or an undertaker; but the ghost legend soon swelled to enormous proportions among the corps de ballet. All the girls pretended to have met this supernatural being more or less often. And those who laughed the loudest were not the most at ease. ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... was possible, in provincial places, for an undertaker to assume the dimensions of a personage. There was a sexton in Portsmouth—his name escapes me, but his attributes do not—whose impressiveness made him own brother to the massive architecture of the ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Pennypoker would be sorry. It might be that she would never get over it, but would go into a decline. How they would all mourn for her! She went on to plan the minutest details of her funeral with all the gloomy cheerfulness of an undertaker; but, when she came to fancy the loneliness of Howard and Charlie, the distressing picture overcame her, and she began to sob once more. However, the tears would not flow quite so readily this time; and, under all her pity for herself, ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... brother-in-law's death; she locked the drawers of his private desk herself, sent for the notary and had the customary seals placed on the doors of the inner apartments 'in the name of the heirs'; she spoke with the undertaker and made every arrangement for the customary lying in state of the body during the following night and day; saw to the erection of the temporary altar at which masses for the dead would be celebrated almost ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... chimney, the merry wrangling of sleigh-bells, the sonorous clash of fire-bells, and the manuscript grew under my pen, as if by magic. I came to love the nurslings of my fancy as no one else will. I liked the cold, cynical features of Mr. Flint, with his undertaker's aspect; the child-spirit, Bell; Daisy Snarle's eyes; the heart-broken old sailor; the pale book-keeper; Tim, the office boy; Mr. Hardwill, the great publisher; Joe Wilkes, and ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... being carted all the way down there and then have to send the remains back. She had to promise him she would send them back, though it did seem a pity with the beautiful "semetary" they had there, and full of Northern folks as it would hold and the undertaker a perfect gentleman, if she ever saw one. But the widow hoped she knew her duty, and she would not wish to be ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... day before Christmas Eve. Three noblemen sent their carriages to the funeral, and the friends and clients of Mr. Jansenius, to a large number, attended in person. The bier was covered with a profusion of costly Bowers. The undertaker, instructed to spare no expense, provided long-tailed black horses, with black palls on their backs and black plumes upon their foreheads; coachmen decorated with scarves and jack-boots, black hammercloths, cloaks, and gloves, ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... kitchen the fire is dull, but the spits are always bright;' to which Jekyll, pretending to be angry, replied, 'Spits! in the name of common-sense, don't talk about his spits—for nothing turns on them!' When his lordship died, the words 'Mors Janua Vita' were by an error of the undertaker painted on the coffin; but, someone commenting on the substitution of 'Vita' for 'Vitae,' Lord Ellenborough protested that there was no mistake. Kenyon, he declared, had directed that it should be 'Vita,' so that his ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... grave you'll soon inhabit— Ah, to eat at all is such a foolish game. Eating huckleberry pie Is a pleasing way to die, While sauerkraut brings on softening of the brain. When you eat banana fritters Every undertaker titters, And the casket makers nearly ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... kitchen: "You may put the punch-bowl and things on the table, and clear away and go to bed. My Great-uncle Marston Chartain," he continued to me, "was of eccentric taste, and for the last twenty years of his life never had anybody to dinner but the undertaker." He paused at this point to mix the punch, and then resumed: "But for all that, he appears to have been a lively old gentleman to the end, and left us his version of a saying which is considered by some people an ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... which is to be placed in a grand nich, erected on purpose, in the great grove of Vauxhall Gardens (The great grove at Vauxhall Gardens!—Sic transit gloria mundi), at the sole expense of Mr. Tyers, undertaker of the entertainment there, who, in consideration of the real merit of that inimitable master, thought it proper that his effigy should preside there, where his harmony has so often charmed even the greatest crowds into the profoundest calm ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... chase, sometimes in the greatest possible hurry as though they never could go quick enough; and then the coachmen would drive very fast also, though they did not know why, for a fast pace of movement is another of those contagious diseases. And then again the sportsmen would move at an undertaker's pace, when the fox had traversed and the hounds would be at a loss to know which was the hunt and which was the heel; and then the carriage also would go slowly, and the ladies would stand up and talk. And then the time for lunch came; and altogether ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... except perhaps a butcher or an undertaker? Yet I can only keep myself alive with music. That's the jest of the Arch Humorist. My father was a clergyman. He droned out services for fifty years in a hamlet, with a little square church like a wooden money-box. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... account, but their own; not to see how you are, but to show how they are: it is not a ceremony to do honour to you, but to themselves,—not due to your position, but to theirs. If one of a friend's children die, the formal couple are as sure and punctual in sending to the house as the undertaker; if a friend's family be increased, the monthly nurse is not more attentive than they. The formal couple, in fact, joyfully seize all occasions of testifying their good-breeding and precise observance of the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... with a sick mother-in-law stopped in at the undertaker's on his way to call the doctor. All right; ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... in Port Agnew, Donald called upon one Sam Carew. In his youth, Mr. Carew had served his time as an undertaker's assistant, but in Port Agnew his shingle proclaimed him to his world as a "mortician." Owing to the low death-rate in that salubrious section, however, Mr. Carew added to his labors those of a carpenter, and when ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... undertaker came up to the cottage that afternoon, he glanced from the parlor, through the open door, ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... but by no means inactive post. In Washington they are much in demand by Senators' and Congressmen's wives suddenly translated from a small town where the banker's lady hobnobbed with the prosperous undertaker's family, to a city where the laws of social precedence are as rigid as at the court of the Hapsburgs and a good deal more complicated. But these young women must themselves have lived in Washington for many years, or they ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... left to hundreds of my supporters and their wives and daughters. At the end of it all I felt as if I had got a heavy sort of how-do-you-do smile regularly glued on my face. One of my chief supporters is an undertaker named JOBSON. HOLLEBONE brought him up to me and said, "Mr. JOBSON, permit me to introduce you to our popular young Candidate, Mr. PATTLE. Mr. PATTLE let me have the honour of introducing you to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... the piper gives the spleen; Who'rt full of heavy groans and sighs When in their price provisions rise; Who with thy frauds heaven's patience tire To make thy heap a little higher, And, lest death thank thee, in thy will Hast tax'd the undertaker's bill. ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... Baeza with a chuckle, "he is a proof of our initiative. I thought as you do three days ago. For it is just three days since he took his stand there. But he is not watching this flat. He is not concerned with us at all. He is an undertaker's tout. In the house opposite to us a woman is lying very ill. Our young friend is waiting for her to die, so that he may rush into the house, offer his condolences and ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... one notes in Hardy, is akin to the humor of the grave-diggers in Hamlet, but not so grim. I have heard a country undertaker describe the details of the least attractive branch of his uncomfortable business with a pride and self-satisfaction that would have been farcical had not the subject been so depressing. This would have been matter for Hardy's pen. There are few scenes in his books more ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... what about her luggage and her mother's, and the remainder of the money? In her distress she wrote to Graefin von Stachelberg. Minna came over from her hospital at half past six in the evening. By that time the doctor had given the necessary certificate of the cause of death, and an undertaker had come on the scene to ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... white undertaker, a silent little man with a brisk yet sympathetic air, came and made some measurements. He talked to Peter in undertones about the finishing of the casket, how much the Knights of Tabor would pay, what Peter wanted. Then he ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1766, and migrated to Alexandria to enter the shipping business when a young man. In the early nineteenth century he launched into the building trade—an "undertaker" he would have been called in the eighteenth century—an ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... were still being discussed when Mr. Podger, the undertaker, arrived, a broad, cheerfully sorrowful, clean-shaven little man, accompanied by a melancholy-faced assistant. He conversed for a time with Johnson in the passage outside; the sense of his business stilled the rising waves of chatter and carried off everyone's attention in the wake of his ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... on that row of lady typists, either. Honest, I never faced such a battery of friendly smiles in all my more or less cheerful career. Even Miss Muggs, who wears a business face that would have a head undertaker lookin' frivolous, loosens up her mouth corners for a second; while as for some of the other self-startin' queens—well, they had me rosy in the ears, all right. I hurries past to where Mr. Piddie is tryin' to make his ingrowin' dignity let loose ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... wife and daughter of the good physician again upon the mission of mercy. They had requested the attendance of an undertaker, and assumed the whole charge of the funeral of Jenny, which was to take place on the third day after ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... been employed on such services, and thrice 'made the tour of Europe with success'—that is, without breaking his own or his pupil's neck; for if he is such as my eyes have seen, some broken Swiss valet de chambre, some general undertaker, who will perform the journey in so many months, 'if God permit,' much knowledge will not accrue. Some profit, at least: he will learn the amount to a halfpenny of every stage from Calais to Rome; he will be carried to the best inns, instructed where there is the best wine, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... taste. The coffin was in a four-wheeled trap, for the solitary hearse that Mudgee boasted then was to meet them some three miles out of town—at the racecourse, as it happened, by one of those eternal ironies of fate. (Jones, the undertaker, had had another job that morning.) The long string of buggies and carts and horsemen; other buggies and carts and horsemen drawn respectfully back amongst the trees here and there along the route; ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... all this as he looked through his disguises, selecting one suitable for the work he had in hand. He had just decided that the most appropriate disguise would be "Number 13, Undertaker," and had picked up the close black wig, and long, drooping mustache, when he had another thought. Given a bag sufficiently loose to permit free motion of the hands and arms, and a man, even in hot anger, might sew himself in. A man, intent on suicidally bagging himself, would sew the mouth of the ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... than seven in number: provided that they do not take upon them to talk, judge, commend, or find fault with any speech, action, or behaviour of the living. In which case it shall be lawful to seize their persons at any place or hour whatsoever, and to convey their bodies to the next undertaker's; anything in this advertisement to ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... borne by the undertaker's men, passed through the west door, the delicious rays of a winter sun fell on the faces of the women and the roses lying on the coffin. Grouped on either side of the parvis, a few young men from the great colleges sought the faces of celebrities; the little factory girls from the neighbouring ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... inspect the fierce but sleepy-headed town. In the main street I observed six grog-shops, side by side, actually shoulder to shoulder, cheek by jowl. Another street appeared to be all grog-shops but for the ominous exception of an undertaker. About nine o'clock a few people came out of chapel, and shortly afterwards the butchers' shops gave signs of life, one opening on each side of the main street, and blinking like a bloodshot eye upon the slumbering ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... when he found none, had congratulated himself that in all human probability he was the sole heir. He was very properly sad, with an unmistakable air of ownership as he went about the place, giving orders to the servants. To Amy he paid great deference, telling the undertaker to ask what she liked and abide by her decisions. And here he was perfectly safe. With the shock of the Colonel's death Amy had relapsed into a dazed, silent mood, saying always, "I don't know; ask Eloise," and when Eloise was asked, she replied, "I have ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One is tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed by that functionary as the final item of his job. The studies in this book are indebted, in more ways than one, to such works— works which certainly deserve the name of ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... and that is almost as serious an interruption as a fight; because, although a Chinaman does not think much about his soul after he dies, he thinks a vast deal about his dead body, and, in order to be perfectly sure that he will not be cheated by the undertaker, he buys his coffin before he is sick, and sees that he has a good bargain. And so, having a good coffin, he wants a good funeral; and it is said some men spend nearly half of their fortune in having a grand procession ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... announced very gravely, "A second doctor is wanted." The lecture went on in deeper silence than ever. All the audience were waiting for a third announcement. It came. A new message was handed to the chairman. He rose and said, "If Mr. Murchison, the undertaker, is in the audience, ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... energy that only grew in intensity with the deepening realisation of her purposelessness. Yet she was so confident in her bearing, and so capable of foiling with repartee any approach of his, that he contented himself with a studied politeness that was no more personal than the grief of an undertaker at a funeral. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... you are to have a funeral here very shortly. I am an undertaker, and shall be glad to take charge of furnishing the coffin and whatever else ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... out in the parlour, amid a mass of flowers. Miss Laura, for love of him and of the colonel, with her own hands prepared his little body for the last sleep. The undertaker, who hovered around, wished, with a conventional sense of fitness, to remove old Peter's body to a back room. But ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the tone with which these words were spoken that was music to Mr. Flint. He smiled that undertaker's ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... disastrous essay in sharp business. Two and twenty years earlier Old Wirk had been not only dying but "as good as dead." Mr. Pinnock on a stock-replenishing excursion in Tidborough, had bought a coffin, at the undertaker's, of a size to fit Old Wirk, and for the reason that, buying it then, he could convey it back on the wagon he had hired for the day and thus save carriage. He had brought it back, and the first person he had set eyes on in Penny Green was no other than Old Wirk himself, miraculously recovered ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... things," went on Reddy. "Peg is barred, Raymond is barred, I am barred. I told them about my baseball career out West. The directors said some pretty plain things about you, Worry, I'm sorry to tell. You're a rotten coach. In fact, you ought to be a coach at an undertaker's. Homans gets the credit for the work of the team. They claim you are too hard on the boys, too exacting, too brutal, in fact. Andrews recited a record of your taking sandwiches from us and aiding and abetting Murray in our slow starvation. ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... can not follow at present. For he will either return home on his own account or die in New York. "If I can not in time save enough money for the Steamship Company," he said to Shakib, "I can at least leave enough to settle the undertaker's bill. And in either case, I shall have paid my own passage out of this New World. And I shall stand before my Maker in a shroud, at least, which I ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... heroism, or the aspirations of ambition, seem only to heighten the absurdity of the scene, and make the humor more poignant. They feel, in short, as little anguish at their own distress, or the complaints of others, as the undertaker, though dressed in black, feels sorrow at a funeral. Of all the men I ever read of, the famous Cardinal de Retz possessed this happiness in the highest degree. When fortune wore her angriest look, and he fell into the power of Cardinal Mazarin, his most ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of the Strand blossom with white cravats, those lilies of the valley, types of meekness and humility, at least in the pious palmer—and why not of similar virtues in the undertaker, the concert-singer, the groom, the tavern-waiter, the croupier at the gaming-table, and Frederick Augustus Lord Scoutbush, who, white-cravated like the rest, is just getting into his cab at the door of the Never-mind-what Theatre, to spend an hour at Kensington before sauntering ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... song, a mixed assortment of decaying glories—among them, a pair of lovers on a seat, a Christmas family party, a rosebush, a railway accident on Bank Holiday, a rake's deathbed, a battlefield, an oak tree in its pride, and the same oak in process of being converted by an undertaker into a coffin for the poet's only friend. All these and many more the poet "saw" and buried in his fallen leaves, assuring the world that his bosom heaved with woe untold for every one ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... and seemed likely to stay there, for reasons no one ever mentioned at Billingsfield, because no one knew anything about them. From time to time a legal looking personage drove up to the Duke's Head, which was kept by Mr. Abraham Boosey, who was also undertaker to the parish, and which was thought to be a very good inn. The legal personage stayed a day or two, spending most of his time at the Hall and in driving about to the scattered farms which represented the estate, ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... may have noticed his name printed on most everything but the undertaker's and the jail as you came up from the station. The elevator and the bank he inherited from his pap. Mort's got a finger in most everything ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... funeral services are held at the house the relatives and intimate friends are invited into the back parlor, dining room, or upstairs, and make their appearance only when the services begin. The undertaker attends to seating people, arranging the ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... Road—which is also the direct road to South Denboro—join, was the mercantile and social center of Denboro. Simeon Eldredge kept the store, and Simeon was also postmaster, as well as the town constable, undertaker, and auctioneer. If you wanted a spool of thread, a coffin, or the latest bit of gossip, you applied at Eldredge's. The gossip you could be morally certain of getting at once; the thread or the coffin you might have to ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... That old undertaker has joined the throng On the other side of the River, But I'm still unhappy to think I'm a "long," And a tape-line ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... paid to him. The gaoler's wife sent him tea, and the turnkey's daughter begged him to write his name in her album, where a many gentlemen had written it on like occasions! 'Bother your album!' says Bulbo. The Undertaker came and measured him for the handsomest coffin which money could buy—even this didn't console Bulbo. The Cook brought him dishes which he once used to like; but he wouldn't touch them: he sat down and began writing an adieu ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... requested that the remains be sent thither by express for burial, and only a few hours after the accused murderer was taken into custody the body of the victim of the midnight assassination had been turned over to the undertaker in town for necessary preparations. The garrison seemed still paralyzed by the shock, and except the sentries at the storehouses and stables, there was little appearance of military duty going on. Guard-mounting was conducted without music, and the customary drills of the recruits ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... "there's little chance o' an undertaker gettin' a title. You would think na that the man that coffined the likes o' Lloyd ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... said, "is Day Bly, although I'm commonly called Day, for short. I was dragged up in London, and when I was twelve years of age I was apprenticed to an undertaker. I used to take care of the shop, clean the hearse, and sleep in a coffin, with old pieces of mouldy velvet thrown over me to keep me ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... it's the monsters that get into the Cheese Hall of Fame and come down to us in song and story. For example, that four-ton Toronto affair inspired a cheese poet, James McIntyre, who doubled as the local undertaker. ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... impression of that visit remained. Flint House, rising from the basalt summit of the headland like a granite vault, its windows coldly glistening down on the frothy green gloom of the Atlantic far beneath, the country trap and lean black horse at the flapping gate, the undertaker's man (dissolute parasite of austere Death) slinking out of the house, and Thalassa waiting at the open door for him to approach—all these things were engraved on Mr. Brimsdown's mind, never to be forgotten. Who was it that had staged such a crime in such a proscenium, in ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... a sot endur'd, Who all his time in taverns spent, While his affairs in ruin went. Once as insensible he lay, She dress'd him in a corpse's array, And with the undertaker's aid, Into a burying vault convey'd. The fumes dispersed, the man awakes; All for reality he takes. When by the glimmering of a lamp He saw his mansion drear and damp, Reflecting how his life had pass'd, A forced repentance came at last. The wife, with suited voice and dress, Presented an ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... afternoon Mayor Gaynor sent word to the Board of Coroners that it might be well for some of that body to meet the incoming ship. Coroners Feinberg and Holtzhauser with Coroner's Physician Weston arranged to go down the bay on the Patrol, while Coroner Hellenstein waited at the pier. An undertaker was notified to be ready if needed. Fortunately there was no ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... asserted that he was not at home. One morning the provost and the minister (for the Glengyles were Presbyterian) were summoned to the castle. There they found that the gardener, groom and cook had added to his many professions that of an undertaker, and had nailed up his noble master in a coffin. With how much or how little further inquiry this odd fact was passed, did not as yet very plainly appear; for the thing had never been legally investigated till Flambeau had gone north two or three days before. ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... was persuaded to go to a ball, on purpose to see Liddy dance a minuet with a young petulant jackanapes, the only son of a wealthy undertaker from London, whose mother lodges in our neighbourhood, and has contracted an acquaintance with Tabby. I sat a couple of long hours, half stifled, in the midst of a noisome crowd; and could not help wondering that so many hundreds of those that rank as rational creatures, could find ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... dissectors, will throw your remains to the ferocious crocodiles, and on the day of reunion your mutilated soul will find shapeless remains only. You will not go to join, at the end of the passages of which the undertaker keeps the plan, the painted and gilded mummy of your father, the high-priest Petamounoph, in the funeral chamber which has ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... modest computation, is reckoned to be pretty near the current number of wits in this island {50}. These are to be disposed into the several schools of this Academy, and there pursue those studies to which their genius most inclines them. The undertaker himself will publish his proposals with all convenient speed, to which I shall refer the curious reader for a more particular account, mentioning at present only a few of the principal schools. There is, first, a large pederastic school, with French and Italian masters; ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... of hard asphalt covering the scrap of a yard, its four melancholy posts hung about with wire clothes-lines; and so did the clean-shaven, smug-faced butler, who invariably conducted his master's guests to their chairs with the movement of an undertaker, and who had never been known to crack a smile of any kind, long or short, during his five years' sojourn with ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to his age, if one had attempted to guess it, one might have said forty-seven, then corrected himself and said seventy-four. He was really twenty-eight. Emaciated he was; as much, perhaps, as he dared be, with a needy undertaker at Bentley's Flat and a new and enterprising coroner at Sonora. Poverty and zeal are an upper and a nether millstone. It is dangerous to make a third ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... told the people at the inquest that that was the last they saw. A great explosion followed. The men about the dump huddled for a long minute under freight cars, then crawled out, and the dump boss called the roll; Hogan was missing. In an hour they came and took Mrs. Hogan to the undertaker's room near the smelter—where so many women had stood beside death in its most awful forms. She had her baby in her arms, with another plucking at her skirts and she stood mutely beside the coffin that they would not open. For she knew what other women knew about the smelter, knew that ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... "Alfonzo Garcio, undertaker, deposes that he resides in the Rue Morgue. Is a native of Spain. Was one of the party who entered the house. Did not proceed up stairs. Is nervous, and was apprehensive of the consequences of agitation. Heard the voices in contention. The gruff voice was that of a Frenchman. Could ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of The Inca, and that heart-breaking episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for the ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... He heard the decision placing the responsibility on the men from Denver, saw the sheriff and his deputies step forward and lay firm hands on their arms and lead them away; and then was aroused by the heavy entrance of the camp undertaker to make ready, for the quiet sleep, the body of ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... about everything and meant to have a funeral "beyond his betters." This was true; for old Featherstone had not been a Harpagon whose passions had all been devoured by the ever-lean and ever-hungry passion of saving, and who would drive a bargain with his undertaker beforehand. He loved money, but he also loved to spend it in gratifying his peculiar tastes, and perhaps he loved it best of all as a means of making others feel his power more or less uncomfortably. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... kettle, 'but we are in such confusion; and the nurse-maid, whose place it is, has been up most of the night with Mr. Leonard, and must have just dropped asleep somewhere, and I was just giving their breakfast to the undertaker's young men, but I'll call her ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that for me, Jennifer. There are lots of things you dont understand that every woman in the street understands; but you can understand that and do it as nobody else can. Promise me that immortality. Promise me you will not make a little hell of crape and crying and undertaker's horrors and withering flowers ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... names were taken of all who were known and descriptions written of the others. A story comes to us of one young girl who had followed for two days the body of her father, her only relative. It had been taken from a house on Mission Street to an undertaker's shop just after the quake. The fire drove her out with her charge, and it was placed in Mechanics' Pavilion. That went, and the body rested for a day at the Presidio, waiting burial. With many others, she wept ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... robber of grave-worms. One who supplies the young physicians with that with which the old physicians have supplied the undertaker. The hyena. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... ago I had watched them thus, but then I had seen from a different world. I had felt the pulse of a nation beating and I had gloried in its speed. But now I felt the pulse-beats of exhausted straining men, I saw that undertaker's sign staring fixedly from across the way. "Certainly I'm talking to you!" ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... Belots of the world were to them a queer, alien people, regarded with only a mild, derivative interest. They recognized the artist as a decorative appurtenance of civilized life, very much as they recognized the dentist or the undertaker as its convenient appurtenances. It still struck them as rather strange that one should meet artists socially and, perhaps, as rather regrettable, their traditional standard of good faith requiring that the people one met socially should, on the whole, be people whom one ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... place of worship in Calcutta, where we have preaching twice on Lord's day in English, on Wednesday evening in Bengali, and on Thursday evening in English." He took all the work during the week and the Sunday service in rotation with his brethren. The first church was the hall of a well-known undertaker, approached through lines of coffins and the trappings of woe. In time most of the evangelical Christians in the city promised to relieve the missionaries of the expense if they would build an unsectarian chapel more worthy of the object. This was done in Lall Bazaar, a little withdrawn from that ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... was better.' Irons, the clerk, replied, 'he had brought two prayer-books.' Bob averred 'he could not be mistaken; the old lady was buried in the near-vault; though it was forty years before, he remembered it like last night. They changed her into her lead coffin in the vault—he and the undertaker together—her own servants would not put a hand to her. She was buried in white satin, and with her rings on her fingers. It was her fancy, and so ordered in her will. They said she was mad. He'd know her face again if he saw her. She had a long hooked nose; ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in the Club, besides the Surgeon mentioned before, with a Chemist and an Undertaker, who all felt themselves equally hurt and aggrieved by this discourteous Retort:—And they were all five rising up together from their Chairs, with full Intent of Heart, as it was thought, to return the Reproof Valiant thereupon.—But the President, fearing ...
— A Political Romance • Laurence Sterne
... Also there was that undertaker-faced secretary standin' by with his ear out. The prospect of sittin' around watchin' him for the rest of the day wasn't fascinatin'. No; I'd had about all of Barnes I could stand. A few more of his cheerin' observations, and ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... vittles and clothes, even in Trumet, and a place to put your head in nights. Long's Sol was alive and could do his cobblin' we managed to get along somehow. What I could earn sewin' helped, and we lived simple. But when he was taken down and died, the doctor's bills and the undertaker's used up what little money I had put by, and the sewin' alone wouldn't keep a healthy canary in bird seed. Dear land knows I hate to leave the old house I've lived in for fourteen years and the town I was born in, but I've got to, for ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... us, and Godfrey and I accompanied him to the service over the body of the murdered man. We were the only outsiders there, besides the undertaker and his assistants, and they were not admitted to the ceremony. This was witnessed only by Miss Vaughan, Mahbub and us three. The servants were not there, and neither were Miss ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... to, the funeral procession having entered the churchyard, and my informant and the officiating clergyman having taken their places at the head of the grave, the undertaker and his assistants having removed the coffin from the hearse, and the mourners, of whom there was a large crowd, having gathered into a circular audience, the Reverend ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the ambition of every one of the class we are discussing to live fashionably, so it is their chief wish to be laid in the grave in the same style. The undertaker at a fashionable funeral is generally the sexton of some fashionable church, perhaps of the church the deceased was in the habit of attending. This individual prescribes the manner in which the funeral ceremonies shall be conducted, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
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