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More "Undertaker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hussars. That may be all very well in a salon, or in the drawings you see in 'La Vie Parisienne,' but it takes something more than that to be a true officer. He's got to know the ropes at playing miner, bombarder, artilleryman, engineer, optician, accountant, caterer, undertaker, hygienist, carpenter, mason—I can't tell you what all. And in each particular job he's got to bear the terrible responsibility of human lives; maintain the discipline and the moral standard, assure the cohesion of his section. Moreover, he's called ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... holding a meeting in a neighboring town. A long distance call came asking him if he would not come and conduct the funeral of Nellie, the girl who had not been allowed to join the Church. He went. The undertaker said that it was a request of the mother that the preacher ride with her and her other daughter to the cemetery. The journey was made in silence. The remains were being lowered when the mother ordered the undertaker to open the coffin again. All the crowd was requested to stand back. ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... can make? There is a wealth of ready humor waiting not only in varying combinations, but in placing the characters in new businesses. For example, doesn't a "Jew" aviator who is pestered by an insurance agent or an undertaker, strike you as offering ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... help it. It is so absurd for the old man to have left instructions for all this meretricious romance to surround his end. As for old Girtle, he seems to delight in it, and goes about the house rubbing his hands like an undertaker." ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... down an excellent ground of all kind of mortification, viz. the believer's union with Christ crucified. Jesus Christ suffered and died for us, as a Common Person, to sustain the guilt of our sins. He died as a Cautioner and Undertaker for us and as our Head and King, and we by virtue of that, are obliged to crucify sin also. In verses 3d and 4th, the other consideration is set down. There ought to be a vast difference between a believer now, and before his conversion. He should not be the same man, but as Paul, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... son?" asked Dr. Le Grand, eagerly. There was no answer; the boy was gone into undying life. The minister gently laid the little hero back upon the ground to await the arrival of the undertaker's wagon, and went on his way. This incident somewhat awed the bandits, some of whom stood off some little distance and watched him through the scene; and his progress was attended with but little further difficulty. ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... Designatorem. This may mean (1) an official who shewed people to their places in the theatre; (2) an undertaker's man, who marshalled funerals. To the latter office a certain infamia was attached. We know nothing more of Decimus (see pro Domo, Sec. 50). Gellius was an eques and a stepson of L. Marcius Philippus. He afterwards ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... 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. ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... told Mrs. Smith, that after prayers (for she did not return till between nine and ten) they carried her to a house in Fleet-street, whither they never waited on her before. And where dost think this was? —Why to an undertaker's! Good Heaven! what a woman is this! She went into the back shop, and talked with the master of it about half an hour, and came from him with great serenity; he waiting upon her to her chair with a respectful countenance, but full of curiosity ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... The Plea of the Simla Dancers Ballad of Fisher's Boarding-House "As the Bell Clinks" An Old Song Certain Maxims of Hafiz The Grave of the Hundred Head The Moon of Other Days The Overland Mail What the People Said The Undertaker's Horse The Fall of Jock Gillespie Arithmetic on the Frontier One Viceroy Resigns The Betrothed ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of them, and the youngest seems about thirty, and the oldest about double that age. The Doctor must have rescued them from Epsom Race Course, and apparently is attempting to give them an education fitting them to follow what seems to be his own calling—the profession of an undertaker. These elderly pupils follow their kind preceptor (for, although he is called Burch, there is not the slightest suggestion of the rod about him, and, moreover, his charges are really too elderly to receive chastisement) to the Royal Exchange, the Thames Embankment, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... 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 ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... dialect, and mimics public characters. He is a type of a class, and I take him to be one of the elementary forms of animal life, like the acalephae. His presence is capable of adding a gloom to an undertaker's establishment. The last time I fell in with him was on a coaching trip through Devon, and in spite of what I have said I must confess to receiving an instant of entertainment at his hands. He was delivering a little dissertation on "the English and American languages." As there were two Americans ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... hope some God, 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]
... consumption, and, being ordered to ride, her father drew a map 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 they proved, for both died ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... him out to answer the phone. 'I just spoke up,' she said, 'and told him I didn't see how he was going to do any good to the pour soul over a telephone wire.' 'It isn't that,' he said, 'but I might have put them on to Peter Fratch for the funeral. We've never had an undertaker in the church before,' he said; 'he's just come, and he ought to be supported. Now I expect it's too late, they'll have gone to Liscombe.' He rang them up right away, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... 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 ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... when the body still lay in the parlor of the Tollman house and Conscience sat almost as motionless near by, Eben Tollman paced the floor with features set in an expression unpleasantly suggestive of the undertaker's professional solemnity. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... before! Lord bless you! yes, a dozen of times. I seed him afore he died, and I seed him arter; and when the undertaker's men came, I came up with them and I seed 'em put him in his coffin. You see I kept an eye on 'em, gentlemen, 'cos knows well enough what they is. A cousin of mine was in the trade, and he assures me as one of 'em always brings a tooth-drawing concern in his ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... 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 Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... they had ordered another fine coffin for her. (Of course, when I refer to the bodies as Mr. and Mrs. Parasang it must be understood that I consider only the earthly tenements, for I am a religious man.) I did not like it. I went to the undertaker and asked him if he could not make a coffin for two. He answered that it was somewhat of an unusual order, that there were styles and fashions in coffins just as there are in shoes and hats and things of that sort, and that it would be a difficult work ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... short-haired scalp. At last the priests left the high altar and came down to the coffin, to sprinkle it and do whatever was now possible for its occupant; and in a few minutes the church was empty save for the undertaker's men, myself, and the Bellini. It is truly a lovely picture, although perhaps a thought too mild, and one should go ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... except they were undertakers. To the ordinary inquirer you lied in return; for you made no conscientious diagnostic of your case, but answered at random, and usually missed it considerably. You lied to the undertaker, and said your health was failing—a wholly commendable lie, since it cost you nothing and pleased the other man. If a stranger called and interrupted you, you said with your hearty tongue, "I'm glad to see you," and said with your heartier soul, "I ...
— On the Decay of the Art of Lying • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... moth eaten. Why is it that so many of the words connected with death are so disagreeable? I do wish that the custom of calling a dead body 'the remains' could be abolished. I positively shiver when I hear the undertaker say at a funeral, 'All who wish to see the remains please step this way.' It always gives me the horrible impression that I am about to view the scene of a ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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 a born banker—inherited it from father; and I guess I didn't ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... 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 ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... assures me that those people who never need a doctor until they are well advanced in life are not likely to require a physician's services more than once. The next call is for the undertaker." ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... to 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
... 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
... 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
... personalities who run like a rich vein through the whole story, Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp; there is one blinding patch of brilliancy, the satire on American cant; there is Todgers's boarding-house; there is Bailey; there is Mr. Mould, the incomparable undertaker. But yet in spite of everything, in spite even of the undertaker, the book is sad. No one I think ever went to it in that mixed mood of a tired tenderness and a readiness to believe and laugh in which most of Dickens's novels are most enjoyed. We go for a particular novel to Dickens ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Silius!" The original motive of this cry—which has its modern parallel in the case of a dead Pope—was to make sure that the man was actually dead and beyond reply. This point made certain, the professional undertaker is called in and instructed to take charge of all the proceedings usual in such cases. It is he who will provide the persons who are to wash and anoint the body and lay it in state, and also, on the day of the procession, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... though the latter know not whose death it is that they wish for, while the former wish for the death of their dearest friends, from whom, on account of their intimacy, they have most hopes of inheriting a fortune. No one's life does the undertaker any harm, whereas these men starve if their friends are long about dying; they do not, therefore, merely wish for their deaths in order that they may receive what they have earned by a disgraceful servitude, ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... the body with a winding-sheet and sent for the undertaker to make preparations for the funeral. Cassim was buried with all due solemnity the same day. Ali Baba now removed his few goods, and all the gold coin that he had brought home from the cavern, to the house of his deceased brother, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... appeared to remember either her or the dead man was the druggist's assistant, who sent in the necessary medical certificate as to the cause of death. Elizabeth took it to the Registrar, and thence proceeded to an undertaker hard by, with whom she arranged all about the funeral, and that it should took place in the new cemetery at Kensal Green. She thought she should like that better than a close, noisy ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... smallest audience and making the best Budget speech for 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 ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... purity, of honesty of administration make against this big manifestation of human friendliness, this stalking survival of village kindness? The notions of the civic reformer are negative and impotent before it. Such an alderman will keep a standing account with an undertaker, and telephone every week, and sometimes more than once, the kind of funeral he wishes provided for a bereaved constituent, until the sum may roll up into "hundreds a year." He understands what the people want, and ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... for anybody to eat up alive without all this foolishness," all in a very few seconds. Now I have to beg her to help me and I heard her tell her nephew, who does the gardening, that she felt like an undertaker with such goings-on. At any rate, if it all kills me it won't be my fault if anybody has to lie in saying that I was ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... sobs in a strange and uncontrolled voice—"oh, I am so miserable—everything is so miserable. There are father's debts not paid, not even the undertaker's bill paid for his funeral, and no money for anything, and poor Aunt Euphemia working herself to death. And now she says she will have to sell the little things we have in the house, and then when there is a chance of a decent ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... 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
... really cannot. It is preposterous. How could the chaplain have put my sword into the hands of an undertaker?—Get me a hammer; I will knock the case ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... St. Occupants from about 1915 to 1919 were Mr. and Mrs. Sheldon S. Cline, Sr. He was the Managing Editor of old The Washington Star. Several of their children have remained in the Falls Church area. Eli Northrup, an undertaker, ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... every morning to prove it. I've been listed six times as a commercial traveler, twice as a con man, eight times as a clerk, three times as a policeman, with scattering votes for a reporter, a clergyman, an actor and an undertaker. But you're the first to roll the little ball into the little hole. I am a physician, or was. Better than that, you got it that I specialized on surgery—and I didn't plant that. You draw ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... a rare talent for making ladies' slippers, which, it had been more than once hinted, was the trade of his early youth. It was now charged upon him, though I do not assert it of my own knowledge, that he had found it profitable to become the assassin of criticism and the undertaker of literature, for which offices he was amply qualified, notwithstanding the very serious writers in Putnam's Magazine thought he ought to be transported to Sandy Hook, there to do penance among the breakers a whole November. And this punishment they would no doubt have carried out, but for ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... 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 third ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... telegram that she should reach Penfield too late to see Parson Dorrance alive. A strange certainty that he had died in the night settled upon her mind as soon as she waked from her troubled sleep; and when she reached Lizzy's door, and saw standing before it the undertaker's wagon, which she so well remembered, there was no shock of surprise to her in the sight. At the first sound of Mercy's voice, Lizzy came swiftly forward, and fell upon her neck in a passion ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... 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. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Even when our dearest lies in her coffin, there are certain phrases which announce in cold and heartless print that the heart's life-blood is flowing from its wound, and, however sacred that silent form, the undertaker's hands must ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... bell-ringer in the steeple of St. Giles's, Cripplegate; and her grandmother, for long and long, not only head dry-nurse to one of the noblest families in all England, but bona fide twenty-two stone avoirdupois—so that it was once proposed, by the undertaker, to bury her at twice! As to this nonpareil of lovely flesh and blood, her name was Lucy Mainspring, the daughter of a horologer, sir,—a watchmaker—vulgo so called—and though fattish, she was very fair—fair! by Jupiter, (craving your honour's pardon for swearing,) ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... He was much exercised about his Irish estate; and he cast his burden upon Cecil: 'Your cousin, the doting Deputy,' Fitzwilliam, he wrote, had been distraining on his tenants for a supposed debt from himself as Undertaker. A sum of L400 for arrears of rent was demanded, though all Munster had scarce so much money in it. The same Fitzwilliam, he alleges, had been mulcting the Queen L1200 a year for a band of worthless soldiers in Youghal, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... 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. ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... opera 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 False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... case has been recorded of an English lady of good social position who fell in love with an undertaker at her father's funeral and insisted on marrying him. It is known that some men have been so abnormally excited by the funeral trappings of death that only in such surroundings have they been able ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the unfortunate inventor had been removed to the nearest undertaker's for interment, at the expense of Mrs. Crull. The apartments had been diligently searched, and the personal effects of the deceased examined, under the direction of the coroner. A number of documents had been discovered, which, in the coroner's opinion, threw a flood ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... hasten death. "The saddest thing about the life of a Denver minister," writes Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, "is the number of lonely funerals that he is called upon to attend. Often I have been hastily summoned to say a prayer over some poor body at the undertaker's {106} shop, where there would be present just the undertaker and the minister, with perhaps the keeper of the boarding-house where the lad died or an officer of the Charity Organization Society. I look at the youthful ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... your part, Wigan. Doubts are often the forerunners of convictions. My doubt led me to a curious discovery. When I went to the undertaker's I saw the men who actually made the coffin. It was a very plain coffin, less expensive than might have been expected for a man in Sir Grenville's position. Now one of the men, in answer to a careful question or two, mentioned ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... while a sigh of sheer rapture rose from the crowd, "is pre-eminently the car for a medical man or pushful undertaker. No horn is supplied, though this will be fitted if desired. The car is not cheap, but properly used will soon repay itself. Amongst the accessories supplied with the standard chassis I should like to call your attention to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... feathery group as for a man to successfully brood over his ills in lively society. Do not go for relief among those who feel as badly as you do. Let not toothache, and rheumatism, and hypochondria go to see toothache, rheumatism and hypochondria. On one block in Brooklyn live a doctor, an undertaker and a clergyman. That is not the row for a nervous man to walk on, lest he soon need all three. Throw back all the shutters of your soul and let the sunlight of genial faces ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... "The undertaker'll do it for you," groaned Stubbs. "This contraption is bound to come down pretty quick and when it ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes
... measles and was doctoring them, but one of them grew so much worse she sent for Dr. Lewis and he was so busy he didn't get there until five, just as the boy died, and the other one hadn't seemed so bad, but he died at nine, and the youngest girl has the fever. Dr. Lewis sent for the undertaker right away and they put something on the bodies and sealed up the coffin and they were to be buried this morning and the clothes to be burned and the house fumigated. Oh, isn't it horrible! The woman ought to ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... skins as they stood beside the open grave and saw, through blurred eyes, the last of Uncle Joe. Both of Mr. Bingle's ears were frozen quite stiff. A much be-furred undertaker's assistant rubbed snow on them with what seemed to be unnecessary vigour and told him to have 'em looked after when he got back to New York. They were ugly things, those ears of his, and Mr. Bingle was acutely conscious of their size and colour as he sat ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... outlive anything," retorted Charlton. "No, you belong to the old stock. You used to see 'em around when you were a boy. They usually coughed and wheezed, and every time they did it, the family used to get ready to send for the undertaker. But they lived on and on. When did your ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... old man, jerking and twitching in the doorway. He was dressed in rusty black, with a very broad brimmed top-hat and a loose white necktie—the whole effect being that of a very rustic parson or of an undertaker's mute. Yet, in spite of his shabby and even absurd appearance, his voice had a sharp crackle, and his manner a quick intensity ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... telling the story of Herr Schwillmun, the famous pianist who was found crazy with wine in a Fourth Avenue undertaker's shop trying to play the Dvo[vr]ak Concerto on the lid of a highly polished coffin. The Finnish virtuoso thought he was in a piano wareroom. Another lie, I knew, for Schwillmun was most poetic in appearance and ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... night of 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
... stables perform the labours of a groom of the chambers? or can the gamekeeper arrange in tempting order the carcasses of the birds he has shot, strew them with flowers, and garnish them with piquant sauces? It would be as reasonable to expect a gallant soldier to act as undertaker, and conduct the funeral of the enemy he ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... thunder, so that it is far more glorious here than on the plain. Hark!—someone at the door. Who is this that chooses a time of thunder for making calls? And why don't he, man-fashion, use the knocker, instead of making that doleful undertaker's clatter with his fist against the hollow panel? But let him in. Ah, here he comes. "Good day, sir:" an entire stranger. "Pray be seated." What is that strange-looking walking-stick he carries: "A ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... of like mind, for he said: "Sure! We was a coupla brave guys in Dyea, but what's the good of runnin' up to an undertaker and giving him your measurements? He'll get a tape-line on ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... 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 greenhouse came ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... black one that suited—but the man who owned that horse was mighty honest, as most of my constituents are. 'You don't want him,' he told the man. 'He's too blamed slow.' 'That doesn't hurt him a bit for me,' said the buyer. 'I want him to mate another black horse to haul my hearse. I'm an undertaker!' 'Then you certainly don't want him,' insisted the fellow. 'The living can wait, but the dead ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... mean that 'ar livin' skellington I packed up to yer house," said Bill promptly, "it's a pair of them in size and color, and ready for any first-class undertaker's team in the kintry. Why, you remember that curve on Break Neck hill, where the leaders allus look as if they was alongside o' the coach and faced the other way? Well, that woman sticks her skull outer the window, and sez she, confidential-like to old yaller-belly, sez she, 'William ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... 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
... in slices, fire-wood, a few loaves of bread, and sweetmeats in dirty bottles. Fowls, strange to say, black as the flagstones, walked in and out of these shops, or descended into the dark areas. The undertaker had not put up his shutters. He had drawn down a yellow blind, on which was painted a picture of a suburban cemetery. Two funerals, the loftiest effort of his craft, were depicted approaching the gates. When the gas was alight behind the blind, an effect was produced ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... hearse-horse to the coffin, "What the devil have you there? It has fingers, it has hair; Yet it neither kicks nor squirms At the undertaker's terms." Said the coffin ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... The coroner and an undertaker were already there, and the former was expecting Herndon. Kennedy and I had already met him and ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... Bessy, and don't sing funeral dirges over your own coffin afore it comes from the undertaker. What, Doll, hast really got here? I scarce looked to see ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... the ambulance were playing 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 ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... wired that he was coming, 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
... 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
... convinced that in a not distant future either others or myself would discover this bridge. But in expounding the consequences springing from the above-mentioned general principles, I at first allowed an error to escape my notice. That ground-rent and undertaker's profit—that is, the payment which the landowner demands for the use of his land, and the claim of the so-called work-giver to the produce of the worker's labour—are incompatible with the claim of the worker to the produce of his own labour, and that consequently in the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the birdling en route or en passant, as our dear professor of modern languages used to try to get us to remark. Say, between us old college friends, I cleared up a couple of thousand last week just too easy for any use. You know Singerly, the popular undertaker,—Egyptian secret of embalming, lady and gentleman attendants, night and day,—always wears a spray of immortelles in his lapel and a dash of tuberose essence on his handkerchief. Well, Singerly and I operated together in the smoothest ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... the funeral; and then proceeded to put a mourning-band on my hat,—a black-silk band, covering the whole hat, and streaming nearly a yard behind. After waiting the better part of an hour, nobody else appeared, although several shipmasters had promised to attend. Hereupon, the undertaker was anxious to set forth; but the landlady, who was arrayed in shining black silk, thought it a shame that the poor man should be buried with such small attendance. So we waited a little longer, during which interval ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... don't care," cried Bostock. "It ain't any of my interests. I haven't underwrote your life. Only I'm blest if I'm not sorry for the cannibal as tries to eat your head. And what I recommend is a cheap, smart coffin and a good undertaker. See if you can find a house to give you credit for a coffin! Look at your friend there; HE'S got some sense; he's laughing at you so as ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... that old Doc Mason has been kept pretty busy since midnight sewing up their heads. Lyman didn't tell me, but I got it pretty straight that somebody stole the pistol out of his room; and if it hadn't been for that the undertaker would have had no cause to complain of the ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... UNDERTAKER, "one who undertook by his influence in the House of Commons to carry things agreeably to his Majesty's wishes" (Whalley); one who ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... the Composition peculiar to this Immortal Poet. But this was but occasional, and for the sake only of perfecting the two other Parts, which were the proper Objects of the Editor's Labour. The third lies open for every willing Undertaker: and I shall be pleas'd to see it the ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... weeks before Hannah died, very suddenly, and in one of her paroxysms of suffering. 'Rastus was with her at the end, as he had been during the hard weeks preceding it. When he realized that all was over, he left the room, sought an undertaker, had a brief but pregnant interview with him, and then disappeared from the hospital and from the city as well. Where he went no one knew, though Dinah, wellnigh frantic, strove distractedly to learn. On the morning of Hannah's funeral he returned and assumed a leading part in that ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... office in which inventions were examined into, and rewarded if found meritorious, but no one could direct me to such a place. In walking along Finsbury Pavement, I saw written up in large letters, "So-and-so" (I forget the name), "Undertaker," and the thought struck me that this must be the place I was in quest of; at any rate, I thought that a person advertising himself as an "undertaker" would not refuse to look into my invention with a view of obtaining ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... brought him to the Hotel Clericy at once, where he found the ladies already apprised of their bereavement. He and I set off again for Passy, by train this time, as our need was more urgent. I despatched instructions to the Vicomte's lawyer to follow by the next train—bringing the undertaker with him. There was no heir to my patron's titles, but it seemed necessary to observe every formality at this the dramatic extinction of ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... an autocratic and noisy French hairdresser had arrived, demanding electric heat and hand-glasses as casually as if his customer had been the bustling, vain old lady of a week ago. She laughed secretly whenever she recalled the solemn undertaker who had solicited her own aid in filling out a blank. His first melancholy question, "And thud dame of the father——" Norma had momentarily supposed to be the beginning of a prayer, and it had been with an almost hysterical revulsion ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... I 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 ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... 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 ...
— De Turkey and De Law - A Comedy in Three Acts • Zora Neale Hurston
... editor from Phil's native town, the assistant on a Peddletonian weekly, who made his little annual joke about the "first egg laid on our table," and who was the menial of every tradesman in the village and under bonds to him for frequent "puffs," except the undertaker, about whose employment he was recklessly facetious. In Washington he was an important man, correspondent, and clerk of two house committees, a "worker" in politics, and a confident critic of every woman and every man in Washington. He ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... displayed a set of teeth that rivalled crimped skate in their whiteness—a month afterwards they became man and wife. For some years they toiled on together—he, like a caterpillar, getting a living out of cabbages, and she, like an undertaker, out of departed soles! Latterly, however, Jack discovered that his spouse was rather addicted to 'summut short,' in fact, that she drank like a fish, although the beverage she affected was a leetle stronger than water. Their profit (unlike Mahomet) permitted ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... props that Torrance here calls a threstle, ye'd be looking like a pin-cushion dress-making day. It's dangerous, I call it, to lave splinters like thim with their ends up. Some day a thoughtless brakesman like yeerself will take a careless breath in the vicinity—and there ain't an undertaker this side ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... almost gently, "git up and go and stay with grandpa till I tell you to come in here, and don't you come before. I'll have to go down them steps ag'in fer an undertaker." ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... and 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 been here too short a time ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... armour, they never say what they mean, seldom speak from the heart. One is in the dust, and another on the throne, and they all die in like manner, to be buried most probably by a man they would not have dared address without an introduction, measured by an undertaker they could not have been seen walking with in the street, and to mix with thousands of spirits whose ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... Road, Saint Giles's, and Tottenham Court were, at various periods of his residence in town, inhabited by him. At one place he carried on the business of greengrocer and small-coalman; in another, he was carpenter, undertaker, and lender of money to the poor; finally, he was a lodging-house keeper in the Oxford or Tyburn Road; but continued to exercise the ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... youth of twenty nodded, felt to see if he had a revolver in his pocket, and pointed at an undertaker's wagon standing in front of one of a ...
— The Bradys Beyond Their Depth - The Great Swamp Mystery • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... offered to 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 to ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... "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 unisonal ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... cannot think otherwise than that the undertaker of the aforecited poesy hath chosen your Highness; for I have seen painted—I know not where, but I think no farther off than Putney—the identically same Dian, with full as many nymphs, as he calls them, and more dogs. So small a matter as a page of poesy ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... 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 ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... earth he wants to marry her for, I don't see," he thought. "She ought to marry an undertaker." ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... you'll take the Dick Dasher,' says Timothy, then, 'an' it'll be a nice train ride for ye,' he says, some like an undertaker makin' small talk. But he see how Elspie took it, an' so he slid off the subjec' an' ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... 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 ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... silver mountings is considered in the best taste, and the pall-bearers are given at most a white scarf and a pair of black gloves. Even this is not always done. At one time the traffic in these returned bands and gloves was quite a fortune to the undertaker. Mourning is very expensive, and often costs a family more than they can well afford; but it is a sacrifice that even the poorest gladly make, and those who can least afford it often wear the best mourning, so tyrannical is custom. They consider ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... matters in the regular course of business; and regarding the perpetrators in the light of so many customers coming to be served at the wholesale and retail shop of criminal law where he stood behind the counter; received Mr Brass's statement of facts with about as much interest and surprise, as an undertaker might evince if required to listen to a circumstantial account of the last illness of a person whom he was called in to wait upon professionally; and took Kit into custody ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... forward. Lord Kenmure was accompanied by an undertaker, to whom the care of his body was to be entrusted; he was also attended by a surgeon, who directed the executioner how to perform his office, by drawing his finger over that part of the neck where the blow was to be given. Lord Kenmure then kissed the officers and gentlemen on the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... friends the children may have know what has happened the better, and then send for the undertaker," answered Mr Jones. "The boy is sharp—he'll run your errands. I can do no more than ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... violent, and the President of the Metallic National shook his head with the uncontrolled air of a man who is close to the border of insanity. "No, by God, I'm past physicians. What I need next is an undertaker." He dropped his head to the desk and broke into a crazed storm of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... natives, the remorseless deception, the hopeless struggle against the covert odds. With nothing behind: no support from the Government, no adequate supplies, few capable men; and all the time the dead, inert, dust- powdered air; the offices of policeman, doctor, apothecary, even undertaker and gravedigger, to perform; and the endless weeks of it all. A handful of good men under two leaders of nerve, conscience and ability, to fight an invisible enemy, which, gaining headway, would destroy its scores ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... male attendant, 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 reality ...
— "Speaking of Operations—" • Irvin S. Cobb
... National forces, gave orders for a large number of coffins, which were not delivered, as the undertaker wished to be paid cash. It is to be supposed that these coffins were for the ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... couldn't refuse. Between doctors' bills and clothing—and the relatives—he had no chance to save. At last he broke down, and the doctor told him it was an outdoor life, with absolute freedom from the strain of serving a man like Burgeman—or the undertaker for him. So he went to Burgeman, asked him to loan him the money to invest in a fruit-farm, and let him pay it off as ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... Professor Harald Williams, has the most dreadful cover of any book that we have come across for some time past. It is possibly intended to symbolise the sorrow of the world, but it merely suggests the decorative tendencies of an undertaker and is as depressing as it is detestable. However, as the cowl does not make the monk, so the binding, in the case of the Savile Club school, does not make the poet, and we open the volume without prejudice. The ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... unscrupulous person who, although not benefiting himself in the least by his dishonesty, would try in every possible way to evade settlement with all the dead man's legitimate creditors, including the undertaker. Then he left a small bequest to a faithful cook and another to an endowed retreat for tuberculous Baptists which already had more money than it could hope ever to use. The residue, consisting principally of stock in the Plumbers' Supply Company, went to Stanwood, with the earnest ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... dying of typhoid fever, as did the man in question, was to be taken out of the ward and buried as quickly as possible. Immediately the man died, the wardsman was taking the body straight into the morgue, after sending word to the blacksmith, who was also the undertaker, to come up, and remove the body straight away for burial. Some of the patients, seeing the body being carried out, verbally assisted the new wardsman with their suggestions. Thus, the dead man was to be washed, shaved, and have a clean shirt put on. It was late ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... together, parting on the doorstep, and Philip went to a telegraph office in order to send a message to Leonard Upjohn. Then he went to an undertaker whose shop he passed every day on his way to the hospital. His attention had been drawn to it often by the three words in silver lettering on a black cloth, which, with two model coffins, adorned the window: Economy, Celerity, Propriety. They had always diverted him. The undertaker ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... 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 ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... was the coroner's office. A local undertaker held the position at this time and he had been in the country no more than ten years. He knew nothing of his predecessors and had few of their records, none going back ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... led into the next room was partly open. I saw the undertaker's people removing the coffin in order to place it in the hearse. This was a fresh cause for anxiety. I knew that that black, mysterious-looking box contained the cold, pale, sleeping form of my mother; but I ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... the distant East had 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 ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... practitioner shall at the same time sign and deliver to the undertaker or other person having charge of the burial a notice on the printed form to be supplied for that purpose by the Registrar-General to the effect that he has furnished a certificate under the last preceding ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... life. 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 ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Nickie the Kid deliberately undertook to earn his daily bread. For a week he served as waiter in a six penny restaurant. He had been a "super" in drama and a practical crocodile in pantomime and was long in the employ of a fashionable undertaker as second in command on the hearse. In this latter billet he had to keep his hair dyed a presentable black, but otherwise the duties were light, and Nickie might still have been useful mute, only ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... always, that his said friend in return should supply him with 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 to be hoped, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... shock today that was felt when men first gazed upon the dead with awe and wonder and 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
... a greeting, 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
... occurrence. At all events, I have never known a city in which cemeteries and undertaking establishments were so widely advertised. In the street cars, for instance, I observed the cheerful placards of one Wallace Johns, undertaker, who promises "all the attention you would expect from a friend," and I was informed that Mr. Johns possesses business cards (for restricted use only) bearing the gay ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... sent for his overseer, and advised with him as to the expediency of giving up. The overseer, who knew the world and its ways with all the good judgment of his nature, dryly remarked: "That'll never do. Never let the world know you've quit; an' let the undertaker that buries you be the fust man to ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... 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
... lay "help upon one that is mighty," "mighty to save" (Psa 89:19; Isa 63:1) and hence it is again, that God did even of old promise to send his people "a Saviour, a great one" (Isa 19:20). To save is a great work, and calls for almightiness in the undertaker: hence he is called the "Mighty God, the wonderful Counsellor," &c. Sin is strong, Satan is also strong, death and the grave are strong, and so is the curse of the law; therefore it follows, that this Jesus must needs be, by God the Father, accounted almighty, in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... was opened by Sloane's man, Jarvis, who had in queer combination, Hastings thought, the salient aspects of an undertaker and an experienced pick-pocket. He was dismal of countenance and alert in movement, an efficient ghost, admirably appropriate to the twilit gloom of the room ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... 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 ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... 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
... charge may ask one interview with the nearest relative, but after that, relieve them of all care in the matter. If there is no friend who can undertake these trying duties, it is then customary to make the undertaker the ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... taken out of the ward and buried as quickly as possible. Immediately the man died, the wardsman was taking the body straight into the morgue, after sending word to the blacksmith, who was also the undertaker, to come up, and remove the body straight away for burial. Some of the patients, seeing the body being carried out, verbally assisted the new wardsman with their suggestions. Thus, the dead man was to be washed, shaved, and have a clean shirt put on. It was late in the afternoon; the ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... great part of the walls. During the time that this Taylor was in treaty for the chapel, he was much disturbed in his sleep with frightful dreams, and as some say, apparitions; and one, night he dreamt that a large stone, out of one of the windows of the chapel, fell upon him and killed him. The undertaker, though staggered with these intimations, finished his agreement, and soon after fell to work on pulling down the chapel; but he was not far advanced in it, when, endeavouring with a pickax to get out some stones at ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... than discretion in it, some prologues and epilogues he has since written with good success, and some lively notes he is at present writing on dead authors, he sees no reason why he should not be considered as much a dead man as himself, and the undertaker spoken ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... SAME SPERIT 'AT IT'S WRIT IN, don't you understand. It's a' old man a-talkin', rickollect, and a-feelin' kindo' sad, and yit kindo' sorto' good, too, and I opine he wouldn't got that off with a face on him like a' undertaker, and a voice as solemn as a cow-bell after dark! He'd say it more like this."— And the old man adjusted ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... stop at Bayport. Our skipper had made other arrangements. However, the way I figgered it, we was long past needin' a doctor, and you can get an undertaker 'most anywhere. We went through the village like a couple of shootin' stars, Tobias about a length ahead, his hat blowed off, his hair—what little he's got—streamin' out behind, and that blessed red ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and the merry-making about the corpse, carry us back to the twilight of the world, with the poor savage in his bewildered misery, pretending that his dead still lived. Our funeral with its black trappings and its elaborate ceremonies is the lineal descendant of a merry-making. Our undertaker is, by evolution, a genial master of ceremonies, keeping things lively at the death-dance. Thus have the ceremonies and the trappings of death been transformed in the course of ages till the forced gaiety is gone, and the black hearse and ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... sort of convent and monastery mixed," replied the witch. "I am connected with it officially. I undertook to manage it, yet I forget what the proper word for me is. Not undertaker, is it?" ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... exercised about his Irish estate; and he cast his burden upon Cecil: 'Your cousin, the doting Deputy,' Fitzwilliam, he wrote, had been distraining on his tenants for a supposed debt from himself as Undertaker. A sum of L400 for arrears of rent was demanded, though all Munster had scarce so much money in it. The same Fitzwilliam, he alleges, had been mulcting the Queen L1200 a year for a band of worthless soldiers in Youghal, under 'a ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... was very sad and sorry when his Ass died. "My Ass served me faithfully," said he, "and it's only fair he should have a good funeral." So he sent for the undertaker, and told him to make a big coffin, and put it on a hearse, and buried the Ass with great splendour. Then he shaved off every scrap of hair from his head, as the custom was in those parts when anybody ...
— The Talking Thrush - and Other Tales from India • William Crooke
... Thousan' dollars'd be 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham—the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own particular armchair. Fettes was an old ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is making more money for me by lying idle than I could accumulate in a century by hard work as a grocer or an undertaker," he was prone to philosophise when his uncles, who were merchants, urged him to settle down and "do something." Not that there were grocers or undertakers among them; it was his way of impressing his ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... loud, and mebby he duz mean to vote different. He voted license to help Jonesville, most of the bizness men of the town sayin' that it would help bizness dretfully to have license. Well, it has helped the undertaker, the ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... 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 ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... of their children's feet 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
... cloth-covered casket with silver mountings is considered in the best taste, and the pall-bearers are given at most a white scarf and a pair of black gloves. Even this is not always done. At one time the traffic in these returned bands and gloves was quite a fortune to the undertaker. Mourning is very expensive, and often costs a family more than they can well afford; but it is a sacrifice that even the poorest gladly make, and those who can least afford it often wear the best mourning, so tyrannical is custom. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... 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 ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... warned a powerful voice. "I told you we have all been sworn in as deputy police, with all the laws of the state back of us. The first man that steps across that pile of bricks will go to the hospital, the second man to the undertaker." ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... hear a step on the Garden walk." "Be composed," said her mother, "Is your bodice smooth?" She felt of it and it was. The Red Ant and the Black Ant had come in company. The Red Ant is a clerk and the Black Ant is his uncle and an undertaker. They both entered at once and were graciously received. The Red Ant is so methodical and so used to system, that he had arranged beforehand with his uncle precisely what they should say and in what order. So the Black Ant advanced and said ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... ghoul to let the dead rest. He simply won't hear of it. He wants remains. He wants to have 'em out in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls. He don't act subdued or proper about it either, or kind of buttery sad, like a first-class undertaker. He's gleeful. Let him find the skeleton of something as big as a freight car, that perished far in the dead past, and he's as tickled as a kid shooting at little sister ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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, ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... see Aunt Rose. Voices no longer came from the drawing-room. Mr. Batty, genuinely sad in the loss of an old friend, had gone; the undertaker had tiptoed off to his gloomy lair, and Henrietta went downstairs, but when she saw her aunt she dared not ask her if she knew about Christabel Sales. Rose had a look of invulnerability; perhaps she knew, but it ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... certainly warms nobody. The only thing they seem likely to be lavish in is funeral expenses, which come in the wake of leaky shoes and imperfect clothing. These funeral expenses at last swallow all, since nobody can dispute an undertaker's bill. One pities these joyless beings. Economy, instead of a rational act of the judgment, is a morbid monomania, eating the pleasure out of life, and haunting them ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Monte Cristo had 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 Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... remained unsolved 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
... the hardhearted man, would continue to eat and smoke and sleep as though no volcanic lava were threatening to submerge the old homestead. His sympathy was not enough; he should stop eating, stop sleeping, and stop smoking—he should be in direct communication with the undertaker and negotiating about the price ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... seven undertakers call, all within five minutes, won't it be a delicate way of conveying the hint that a Board of Education that thinks it can stop football is composed of dead ones? You see, there'll be an undertaker for each member of the Board. Don't you think the idea—-the hint—-would soak through even those ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... one huge infirmary. The children fell sick 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
... existence together, has most ingeniously contrived to insinuate, that the framers of these first and last receptacles of mankind divide this our life betwixt them, and that all that passes from the midwife to the undertaker may, in strict propriety, go for nothing: an awful and instructive ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... nurse and is out on the dunes watching the figure as it is intermittently illuminated by the gleam of a revolving lighthouse further up the coast. He is in an exalted mood. There is some comic relief in the grave-digger manner between him and a joiner, who is also the undertaker of the island, a well-conceived character. A storm is rising. Gabriel, after many wild and whirling words, leaves a message for his friends. He is bathing. And so he makes by suicide his last flight, his escape from the horns of the dilemma, too weak to decide ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... wash-house on one side, and a turnpike gate on the other. Mr. Wopsle in a comprehensive black cloak, being descried entering at the turnpike, the gravedigger was admonished in a friendly way, "Look out! Here's the undertaker a coming, to see how you're a getting on with your work!" I believe it is well known in a constitutional country that Mr. Wopsle could not possibly have returned the skull, after moralizing over it, without dusting his fingers on a white ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... 200 persons lay huddled in the United Brethren Church on Avondale Avenue, according to O. H. Ossman, an undertaker, who explored the flood district in ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against time has an ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... inflammation of the peritoneum covering the intestines. On the other hand, no case of typhus or typhoid fever is mentioned as giving rise to dangerous consequences, with the exception of the single instance of an undertaker mentioned by Mr. Travers, who seems to have been poisoned by a fluid which exuded from the body. The other accidents were produced by dissection, or some other mode of contact with bodies of patients who had died of various affections. They also differed much in severity, the cases ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... were very much excited as the time approached for their ball. The skating rink was swept and garnished and decorated with bunting and flags, and wreaths of immortelles rented from the undertaker. Extra chairs were also furnished by that accommodating person. The caterer from Louisville came in a truck, bringing with him stylish negro waiters and many freezers and hampers. The musicians arrived on the seven o'clock trolley, almost filling one car with their ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... long evening wore itself out in dismal silence, whilst stealthy footsteps sounded now and then upon the stairs. Later Mr. Nowell was summoned to a conference with some mysterious person in the shop, whom Marian supposed to be the undertaker; and returning from this interview with a gloomy face, he resumed ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... dust that felt greasy to the touch and 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; male hats off and held rigidly vertical with right ears ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... reached the Cliff House, that shabby innocent-looking little building whose evil fame had run round the world, she stared at it fascinated. Its restaurant overhung the sea. On this side the blinds were down. It looked as if awaiting the undertaker. She pictured Howard's horror when she told him of her close contact with vice, and anticipated with a pleasurable thrill the scolding he would give her. They had never quarrelled and it would be delightful ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... evening did she feel the great change that her father's death had brought in her life, not till now did she fully know that her past was dead as well as her father, and not till she had left the house did the feeling come to her that Pinckney was to prove its undertaker. ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... give him something." He turned to me. "I don't know how this got out, but it's quite true," he said. He had a long face, like a horse's. At least, he looked like pictures of horses I'd seen. As he spoke, he pulled it even longer and became as doleful as an undertaker at ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... day-time. Levi K. Brown, who then resided in Baltimore, went with them by moonlight, and they disinterred the body, which they found about two feet under ground, in a rough box, with a narrow lid that freely admitted the dirt to surround his body in the box. No undertaker in Baltimore could be found that would allow the body left at his place of business whilst a coffin was prepared, and it was deposited in "Friends'" vault; a coffin was finally procured and William Morris and Abner Richardson started with it for his home. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... husband and wife cannot die simultaneously. Whatever happened one must bury the other. And Nellie saw her husband dying. This terrible event presented itself to her in every detail. She saw the coffin, the candles, the deacon, and even the footmarks in the hall made by the undertaker. ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 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 after them.—to ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... lies; but she reminds him of the necessity for decent burial. Much is to be done before they can begin to enjoy together their new and freer existence. There is the body to be buried; the obituary notices to be written for the papers: the parson and undertaker to be summoned: the formalities of the funeral: the selection of a proper tombstone, with care for the name and accurate carving of the date of death thereupon: and finally a bit of verse in the way of final flourish. So these two spirits look ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... eyelids. Upon this all those who are present will call "Silius! Silius! Silius!" The original motive of this cry—which has its modern parallel in the case of a dead Pope—was to make sure that the man was actually dead and beyond reply. This point made certain, the professional undertaker is called in and instructed to take charge of all the proceedings usual in such cases. It is he who will provide the persons who are to wash and anoint the body and lay it in state, and also, on the day of the procession, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... found to show how James Wren evolved his design for the Fairfax County Courthouse; but it seems probable that he knew of this style that was enjoying current popularity in England, and that John Bogue, the "undertaker" who built the courthouse, was familiar with the methods of constructing such buildings, for Bogue had just come to ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... fish-boxes. His vats were full of albacore. He was going to give everybody a chance if they "shot square" and became American citizens. Rock and Blankovitch had been taken with the men from Diablo Island to the jail at the county-seat. The body of Mascola was still in the custody of the local undertaker and Bandrist had been removed to a hospital. But of the men themselves little was said. An era of universal friendliness prevailed ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... his Son, in the salvation of poor sinners. The whole work of salvation is laid on Christ, and the Father is glorified in him, who is his Servant and his Chosen, whom he upholdeth and furnisheth for the work, Isa. xlii. 1,2. He is called the covenant itself. He is the undertaker in the covenant of redemption and in the covenant of grace; all is founded on him; all the good things of it are given out by him; all the grace by which we close with it, and accept of him according to it, is given by him. Now, in this gospel contrivance are ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... of them grew so much worse she sent for Dr. Lewis and he was so busy he didn't get there until five, just as the boy died, and the other one hadn't seemed so bad, but he died at nine, and the youngest girl has the fever. Dr. Lewis sent for the undertaker right away and they put something on the bodies and sealed up the coffin and they were to be buried this morning and the clothes to be burned and the house fumigated. Oh, isn't it horrible! The woman ought to ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... The undertaker regarded the deceased in the coffin with severe disapproval, for the wig persisted in slipping back and revealing a perfectly bald pate. He addressed the widow in that cheerfully melancholy tone which is characteristic of undertakers ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— English Satires • Various
... slaughter'd, it made him laugh, (For the man was a coffin-maker,) To think how the mutes, and men in black suits, Would mourn for an undertaker. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... to see you," she said simply, "I have seen nobody except the doctor once, and the undertaker twice. It is dreadful to sit alone hour after hour face to face with the irretrievable. If I had not been so foolish as to enter into that agreement with Messrs. Meeson, I could have got the money by selling my new book ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... counted 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 ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... the artist, laughing, "if you will prepare the dinner, I'll risk undertaker, ancient woman, and all, rather than spend such another long stupid evening as I did last night. I expected to meet you at the concert ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... 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 ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... I could serve her in any way, in the present matter, she simply requested me to send a respectable undertaker, who would perform what was fitting in the last rites due to ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... candlestick maker, tinkers and tailors, and plowboys and sailors—all jostling along together. Here the counsel in his wig and gown, and here the old Jew clothes-man under his dingy tiara; here the soldier in his scarlet, and here the undertaker's mute in streaming hat-band and worn cotton gloves; here the musty scholar fumbling his faded leaves, and here the scented actor dangling his showy seals. Here the glib politician crying his legislative ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... UNDERTAKER, "one who undertook by his influence in the House of Commons to carry things agreeably to his Majesty's wishes" (Whalley); one who ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... large 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
... when Mr. Lyken, the little undertaker from Ghost Lake, arrived with several assistants, a casket, and ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... Stevenage, the one that was engaged to a notorious baby-snatcher, Lady Tonbridge—in a high fever he'd unfortunately said "Yes"—meets her, and you guess the rest. No, you don't. You couldn't possibly guess Mrs. Badger, relict of an undertaker and now in the old-clothes line, who has social ambitions. (I must here say in parenthesis that Mrs. Badger is a double stroke of genius on the part both of Miss JENNINGS the author and of Miss SYDNEY FAIRBROTHER. You ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... ate the piece of bread broken off a small loaf and drank from the bottle out of which the faithless turnkey hobnobbed with the sexton, the undertaker's ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... The eldest, about eighteen, fell into a consumption, and, being ordered to ride, her father drew a map 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; ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... like an animal 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 ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... proper care, so far from effecting a cure, in many cases hasten death. "The saddest thing about the life of a Denver minister," writes Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, "is the number of lonely funerals that he is called upon to attend. Often I have been hastily summoned to say a prayer over some poor body at the undertaker's {106} shop, where there would be present just the undertaker and the minister, with perhaps the keeper of the boarding-house where the lad died or an officer of the Charity Organization Society. I look at the youthful victim of ignorant ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... bier, 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 ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... prove it. I've been listed six times as a commercial traveler, twice as a con man, eight times as a clerk, three times as a policeman, with scattering votes for a reporter, a clergyman, an actor and an undertaker. But you're the first to roll the little ball into the little hole. I am a physician, or was. Better than that, you got it that I specialized on surgery—and I didn't plant that. You draw ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... advertisements. This gentleman among his virtues did not reckon sobriety, and one night, being overcome with much wine, he set fire to his bed curtains, partially burned himself, and totally consumed the house. It was afterwards rebuilt, and for a time an undertaker ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... "Well, them undertaker folk are driving a pretty trade in London. Well-nigh every lady we saw in a carriage had hired one o' them plumes for the day, and had it niddle noddling on her head. It were the Queen's Drawing-room, they said, and the carriages went bowling along ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Thompson, who was high and narrow in build—shaped something like a lath, with a face something like an undertaker's—sang at length. First a doleful ditty ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... finally secured was in an unfashionable locality; there was a tailor shop next door and an undertaker across the street, and a clanging trolley car screeched on the curve at the end of the block; but the dignity of the pillared doorway, and the carved window casings, had appealed to Maurice; and also the discovery in the parlor, behind a monstrous air-tight stove, ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... 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
... with her married sister, whose large family was always reducing itself by the most surprising feats in infant mortality. She helped in the house. She earned her keep by doing little things for the dying babies, and interviewing the undertaker and bargaining for special terms, seeing what a good customer her sister was, when those poor babies were dead. But that great source of crisis in the households of the poor—the mother-in-law—came to live ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... trust the details of the arrangements for the funeral to some relative or friend of the family, and if there be no friend who can perform this duty, it can be safely left with the undertaker to perform the painful duties of master of ceremonies. It is prudent to name a limit for the expenses of the funeral, and the means of the family should always govern these. Pomp and display should always be avoided, as they are out of keeping with the solemn occasion, and ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... me that those people who never need a doctor until they are well advanced in life are not likely to require a physician's services more than once. The next call is for the undertaker." ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... pathos—their blind stoniness toward the sky. Against such a background, Bibbs was not incongruous, with his figure, in black, so long and slender, and his face so long and thin and white; nor was the undertaker's coupe out of keeping, with the shabby driver dozing on the box and the shaggy horses standing patiently in attitudes without hope and without regret. But for Mary Vertrees, here was a grotesque setting—she was a vivid, living creature of a beautiful world. And a graveyard is not ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... becomes me, as an honest man, to make passing mention of my father's sister, auntie Mysie, that married a carpenter and undertaker in the town of Jedburgh; and who, in the course of nature and industry, came to be in a prosperous and thriving way; indeed, so much so, as to be raised from the rank of a private head of a family; and at last elected, by a majority of two votes over a famous cow-doctor, ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... morning at his master's window. In this case too a large sheet of plate- glass was uncovered, and to form an idea of the etalage you must imagine that a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has struck an unnatural partnership with an undertaker. The black mummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered and gloved, glittering with votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of death and life; the desiccated clay, the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... from the old-time custom that I marveled. Instinctively I turned to inspect the possible foe that menaced us in the rear. I saw a horseman dressed in black, who might have been a lawyer or a parson or an undertaker, trotting peaceably along the road ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... want of leisure in the credulous Bishop, our readers will regret with us, especially those inventive geniuses, who, like the projector in the reign of George I., published a scheme for manufacturing pine plank from pine saw-dust, or the still more ingenious undertaker of later times, who proposed to make pine plank out of oak saw-dust, by the mere addition of ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... Relations, was the centre 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 ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... 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 ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... an undertaker were already there, and the former was expecting Herndon. Kennedy and I had already met him and he ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... the Guard," 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. ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... a few undertaker's men in weepers to be a really classy funeral!" was the Crown Prince's tribute to this equipage. "'Come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,' as Hamlet or some other Shakespearian Johnny ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... to be sure! You see, I am the city undertaker, and the people are dying here so fast, that I can hardly supply the demand for coffins. You will have to wait until your turn comes, which will be to-morrow morning—say ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... melancholy event which has aroused so much sensation." There is one point connected with the deceased upon which the court is particularly anxious, namely, that the fiction of a full-sized coffin should be preserved, though there is so little to put in it. Upon the undertaker's stating in the Sol's bar in the course of the day that he has received orders to construct "a six-footer," the general solicitude is much relieved, and it is considered that Mr. Smallweed's conduct ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... 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
... speak; but after a look at her face he stopped. He had come from a church two blocks away. Joe and Amy had never been to his church, and it was Nourse who had brought him here. Nourse had learned of him from the undertaker. ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... 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 ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... town, the assistant on a Peddletonian weekly, who made his little annual joke about the "first egg laid on our table," and who was the menial of every tradesman in the village and under bonds to him for frequent "puffs," except the undertaker, about whose employment he was recklessly facetious. In Washington he was an important man, correspondent, and clerk of two house committees, a "worker" in politics, and a confident critic of every woman ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... $10,000, was offered in New York to the most successful ticket-holder in some scheme, and one of $5,000 to the second. It was arranged that one of these parties should be a man and the other a woman; and the amiable suggestion was added, on the part of the undertaker of the enterprise, that if the gentleman and lady who drew these prizes liked each other sufficiently well when the distribution was made, they might regard the decision as a match made for them in Heaven, and take the money as the dowry of the bride. ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... and Germans may share the dominating crest of a position, at another point, they may be equally matched, and at another, such as Les Eparges, the French, after fearful losses, have carried the coveted eminence. One phase of the business of violence is the work of the military undertaker attached to each secteur, who writes down in his little red book the names of the day's dead, and arranges for the wooden cross at the head of each fresh grave. Every day along the front is a battle in which thousands of ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... down the great house, Jason was setting out the simple "funeral baked meats" which are considered appropriate to the occasion, and Mr. Wordley paced up and down the hall with his hands behind his back, listening to the undertaker's men upstairs, and glancing through the window in expectation of the carriage which had been sent for Mr. John Heron. Presently he saw it rounding a bend of the drive, and went into the ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... After a few days we arrived at the Chilkoot Pass. The 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 ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... physician. I could look forward with pleasure, and even joy, to the moment when my physician would come for the last time in his professional capacity and go to work on me officially. Then the county would be obliged to pay him, and the undertaker could take charge of the fragments ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... Sikora explained he gave her $400 for the policy and she went to an undertaker. Her eyes were still red with crying. They stared at the luxurious fittings of the undertaker's parlors. There were magnificent palms in magnificent jardinieres, and plush chairs and large, inviting sofas and an imposing ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... 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 turn the faucet and the water runs. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... dungeon, where every attention was 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 to Angelica, as the clock kept always ticking, ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and was taken back to his dungeon, where every attention was 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 to Angelica, as the clock ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... comes up for formal discussion Lord CURZON will doubtless have something to say, and will say it in vigorous fashion. To-day, with the air and mien of a highly respectable undertaker, he contented himself with acknowledging Lord HARDINGE'S ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... walking down in the blood-red distance. He also saw that the hand motioning was really black, and not merely in shadow; and, coming nearer, found the doctor's dress was really funereal, down to the detail of the dark gloves. It gave the American a small but queer shock, as if this were actually an undertaker come up to bury the corpse that could not ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... his legs and was beginning to speak, but the first selectman broke in savagely: "Now look here, mister, this ain't either a morgue, a receivin'-tomb, nor an undertaker's parlor. If you want to get buried and ain't got the price I'll lend it to you. If you want to start over again in life I'll pay for havin' your birth-notice put into the newspaper. But you want to say what you do want and get ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... grade crossings, and accidents must be of common occurrence. At all events, I have never known a city in which cemeteries and undertaking establishments were so widely advertised. In the street cars, for instance, I observed the cheerful placards of one Wallace Johns, undertaker, who promises "all the attention you would expect from a friend," and I was informed that Mr. Johns possesses business cards (for restricted use only) bearing the gay ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was in full operation. It was rather expensive at first, in consequence of the increase in the undertaker's bill, and the necessity of taking in the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two's gruel. But the number of workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... patriarchs and prophets have got ages the start of you; they know more in two minutes than you know in a year. Did you ever try to have a sociable improving-time discussing winds, and currents and variations of compass with an undertaker?" ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain
... ourselves. Many a choice adventure, of which I was the hero, 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 the world, toujours ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
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