"Gallows" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... So, 'tis all ended—all except my boiling, And that will make a holiday for some. Perhaps I'm selfish. Fagot, axe, and gallows, They have their uses, after all. They give The lookers-on a deal of harmless sport. Though one may suffer, twenty hundred laugh; And that's a point gained. I have seen a man— Poor Dora's uncle—shake himself with glee, At the bare thought of the ridiculous style In which some villain died. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... to pass that Toozle attended the trial of Bumpus, entered his cell along with him, slept with him during the night, accompanied him to the gallows in the morning, and sat under him, when they were adjusting the noose, looking up with feelings of unutterable dismay, as was clearly indicated by the lugubrious and woe-begone cast of his ragged countenance,—but ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the reign of Richard I, was hanged at Smithfield, the utmost eagerness was shown to obtain a hair from his head, or a shred from his garments. Women came from Essex, Kent, Suffolk, Sussex, and all the surrounding counties, to collect the mould at the foot of his gallows. A hair of his beard was believed to preserve from evil spirits, and a piece of his clothes from aches ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... agony, when he made the sign of the cross toward the Czar, as the crown and captain of his Christianity. But the Kaiser does not regard the Czar as the captain of Christianity. Far from it. What he supported in Stolypin was the necktie, and nothing but the necktie; the gallows, and not the cross. The Russian ruler did believe that the Orthodox Church was orthodox. The Austrian Archduke did really desire to make the Catholic Church catholic. He did really believe that he was being pro-Catholic in being pro-Austrian. But the Kaiser cannot be pro-Catholic, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... rope would be inevitably his end, if he came again under British authorities; yet, no guardian would like to secure for his ward a wife, whose parent was to be got rid of in such a way; and the old gentleman's notion always had been that Altamont, with the gallows before his eyes, would assuredly avoid recognition; while, at the same time, by holding the threat of his discovery over Clavering, the latter, who would lose every thing by Amory's appearance, would be a slave in the hands of the person who knew ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have you To keep me from the galleys, or the gallows? My father prov'd himself a gentleman, Sold all 's land, and, like a fortunate fellow, Died ere the money was spent. You brought me up At Padua, I confess, where I protest, For want of means—the University judge ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... affections are strongest, and the first smile of her infant compensates for the pangs of the past—the scaffold and the hangman! Think of the last terrible scene,—the tearing of the infant from her arms, the death-march to the gallows, the rope around her delicate neck, and her long and dreadful struggles, (for, attenuated and worn by physical suffering and mental sorrow, her slight frame had not sufficient weight left to produce the dislocation of her ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... as the gallows could exalt them to," replied Lord Dalgarno, with the same indifference; "they were both hanged, I believe—at least the gipsies, from whom I bought him five years ago, intimated as much to me.—You are surprised ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... cross of the Order of St. Procopius hung under the skinny throat. For a time, it may be remembered, not a month passed without his portrait appearing in some one of the illustrated papers of Europe. He served the monarchy by imprisoning, exiling, or sending to the gallows men and women, young and old, with an equable, unwearied industry. In his mystic acceptance of the principle of autocracy he was bent on extirpating from the land every vestige of anything that resembled freedom ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... preparations. In truth, life was only crushed out of him by hauling the writhing body up and down, several times in succession, by the rope, which was wound round a large bough of his green-leaved gallows. Almost everybody was surprised at the severity of the sentence, and many, with their hands on the cord, did not believe even then that it would be carried into effect, but thought that at the ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... soldiers, and he saw in a corner of the Place d'Armes a great wooden gallows that made him shudder. It was a gallows very often used, too, and any one could have pointed out to Paul the spot in the middle of the Place d'Armes where five gallant French gentlemen, among the best citizens ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... always reported to be well, and in good spirits, and indeed was so, to all appearance. He ate, drank, and slept much as if he had never committed crimes that at one period would have brought him to the gallows; and to the last moment of his leaving the prison for his trial, jauntily talked of what he should do when he was out ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... the key turned, Janet entered and found Sally in her night-dress, a white ghost of what she was, swinging unsteadily before her—so a dead body, swung from a gallows, ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... don't whip the little wretch within an inch of his life, he'll have a gallows end on't," ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... abominated revolutionists, with the instinctive fear of all the rich who have built up a fortune and remember their humble beginnings. Tchernoff's socialism and nationality brought vividly to his mind a series of feverish images—bombs, daggers, stabbings, deserved expiations on the gallows, and exile to Siberia. No, he was not desirable as a ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... them to have too much reasoning power, and, what's more, a false reasoning, because it is absurd to save one's life at the expense of all that makes it reasonable and valuable. It is further said that fear keeps them obedient, and it is true that prison, gallows and wheels are excellent assurers of submission to existing laws. But it is also certain that prejudice conspires with the laws, and it is not easy to see how compulsion could have been universally established. ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... as she called them, which would otherwise perhaps have been murdered; and of many women who, made desperate by the misfortune, would otherwise be tempted to destroy their children, and bring themselves to the gallows. I granted her that this was true, and a very commendable thing, provided the poor children fell into good hands afterwards, and were not abused, starved, and neglected by the nurses that bred them up. She answered, that she always took care of that, and had no nurses in her business ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... him, and have treated him as one who had brought an ineffaceable stain on their cause, and also had rendered their restoration to their homes impossible. The pistol-shot of Sergeant Corbett saved him from the gallows, and it saved him also from the denunciations of the men whom he thought to serve. He exhibited, therefore, a species of courage that is by no means common; for he not only risked his life, and rendered it impossible for honorable men to sympathize with him, but he ran the hazard of being denounced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... these sketches have been very incomplete, as the material from which they were composed was meagre. M. Michelet alone ventured to give the public an idea of the crimes which brought a marshal of France to the gallows, and his revelations were such that, in the words ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... men have set down all the States as certain for Taylor but Illinois, and it as doubtful. Cannot something be done even in Illinois? Taylor's nomination takes the Locos on the blind side. It turns the war thunder against them. The war is now to them the gallows of Haman, which they built for us, and on which they are doomed to ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... was only postponed. Some were murdered by the tribesmen, some driven back into British territory, captured and hanged, and some were blown from guns before the eyes of the garrison of Peshawur. Of the whole regiment all were destroyed except a few scores who escaped the gallows and the guns to suffer transportation for life. Such was the terrible ending of the 55th Native Infantry; a signal and, as it proved, a most effective warning, the results of which were felt over the whole of ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... a continual fire from Martini-Henry rifles. They also rolled down great stones upon the companies. The 24th continued to advance, and drove the enemy from point to point, and position to position, pursuing them for a distance of two miles. "Gallows Tree" hill, against which the first charge of the counter attack was delivered, was held by nearly 1000 tribesmen. On such crowded masses, the fire of the troops was deadly. The enemy left forty dead in the path of Lieutenant Climo's ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... and of the jara canallis (revenue officers) have hissed about my ears without injuring me, for I carried the bar lachi. I have twenty times done that which by Busnee law should have brought me to the filimicha (gallows), yet my neck has never yet been squeezed by the cold garrote. Brother, I trust in the bar lachi, like the Calore of old: were I in the midst of the gulph of Bombardo (Lyons), without a plank to float upon, I should feel no fear; for if I carried the precious ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... recollect, the first clergyman of our church who has suffered publick execution for immorality; and I know not whether it would not be more for the interest of religion to bury such an offender in the obscurity of perpetual exile, than to expose him in a cart, and on the gallows, to all who for any reason are ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... said Prince John to Hubert, "an thou suffer that runagate knave to overcome thee, thou art worthy of the gallows!" ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... dungeons dark and strong, The wretch's destinie! Macpherson's time will not be long On yonder gallows tree. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... trial he publicly declared his belief that Richard II was still alive; he was even fanatic enough to believe that he himself would soon rise again from the dead.(761) He was sentenced to be hanged and burnt on the gallows, a sentence which was carried out in St. Giles's Fields.(762) Lollardry continued to exist, especially in London and the towns, for some years, but it ceased to have any historical or ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... darkness lifted a moment, and he stole a furtive glance, like a murderer's at the gallows-tree, at ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... all other feelings; and as this was the only thing withheld, so it was the only thing desired. To soothe the disgust and allay the indignation of Haman, the family council decreed the immediate death of Mordecai, and they doomed him to the gallows—a most ignominious death. While this instrument of his destruction was in preparation upon the grounds of Haman, he sought Ahasuerus, that the sentence might be ratified. He who had given him the power to murder a nation, would surely assent to ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... man, at twenty-two he enjoyed life with a rapture that few men have ever known, and he would have clung to it with awful tenacity. Horribly he would have abominated the sight of the rope, and ruefully he would have sighed if I had suggested to him on the gallows any thoughts of that beautiful and quiet Elleray which he had left behind in England. Just at that moment I acknowledge that it would have been fiendish, but yet what a heaven of a luxury it would have been in the way of revenge—to have ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... is the worst of it," said Neddy. "If he is so bad as a boy, what will he be when he is a man! He will be sure to end on the gallows! I hope you ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... They were thin and eager and good-tempered. They ate very little, drank water, slept well, men with hard knuckles, clean bowels, and pale eyes. Anything they hit went down. They were always ready to go to the gallows ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... and raved, and defied. He had seen convicts, after the guards had manhandled them, crippled in body for life, or left to maunder in mind to the end of their days. He had seen convicts, even his own cell mate, goaded to murder by their keepers, go to the gallows reviling God. He had been in a break in which eleven of his kind were shot down. He had been through a mutiny, where, in the prison yard, with gatling guns trained upon them, three hundred convicts had been disciplined with pick handles wielded ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... cousin of the lady's, one given to all the adventures of a man about town, had gone to Tyburn, as was much the elegant fashion, to see a hanging. The victim was a girl of sixteen, to suffer for the murder of her infant, and as she went to the gallows she screamed aloud in frenzy the name of the child's father. The young scapegrace looking on, 'twas said, turned pale on hearing her and went into the crowd, asking questions. Two hours later he appeared at his cousin's ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... lives on the borders of one of those great moors in Somersetshire. Giles, to be sure, has been a sad fellow in his time; and it is none of his fault if his whole family do not end their career either at the gallows, or at Botany Bay. He lives at that mud cottage, with the broken windows stuffed with dirty rags, just beyond the gate which divides the upper from the lower moor. You may know the house at a good distance by the ragged tiles on the roof, ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... collateral workmanship; and surely it may amaze a well-settled judgment to look back into these times and to consider how the duke could attain to such a pitch of greatness, his father dying in ignominy, and at the gallows, his estate confiscated for ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... the same street displayed the following new reading from Genesis: "And God said, It is not good the King should reign alone." A publican at the corner of Half Moon Street exhibited a flag whereon, in reference to the unpopular witness Teodoro Majoochi, was depicted a gallows ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... the feeble candle dimly showed me. It was the picture of a fellow in a high Spanish hat, crowned with a plume of towering feathers. A swarthy, sinister ruffian, looking upward, shading his eyes with his hand, and looking intently upward—it might be at some tall gallows on which he was going to be hanged. At any rate, he had the appearance of thoroughly ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... which gave the effect of buoyancy to her form, she seemed about to walk though standing still. There was a defiant light in her deep brown eyes, that sort of "I don't care" disposition which our grandmothers used to say would take us to the gallows. Defiance, wilfulness, rebellion, was expressed in the very way she stood on the bank, a little higher than they were, and able ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... But serious results followed in the case of two prominent partisans of Guise who had fallen into Conde's hands, and were in prison when the tidings reached Orleans. On the recommendation of his council, the prince retaliated by sending to the gallows Jean Baptiste Sapin, a member of the Parisian parliament, and the Abbe de Gastines, who had been captured while travelling in company with an envoy whom the court ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... another destroyed himself by taking laudanum. D. D. was hired for ten dollars to shoot a man, for which offence he died upon the gallows. ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... so. But do not think I am the man to suffer myself to be sent to the gallows upon such paltry evidence as satisfies that lady. If any accuser comes to bleat of a trail of blood reaching to my door, and of certain words I spoke yesterday in anger, I will take my trial—but it shall be trial by battle upon the body of my accuser. That is my right, and I ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... half to go abroad and win a marquisdom. A girl is glad, When looking in the mirror, at the time of her morning toilette, she finds her colour fair. A girl is joyful, What time she sits on the frame of a gallows-swing, clad in ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... taking place in all highly organised societies. It was also equally impossible to appreciate the effect of punishment for good or evil on the criminal population. Justice had little or no data to go upon; prisoners were sentenced in batches to the gallows, to transportation, to the hulks, or to the county gaol, but no inquiry was made as to the result of these punishments on the criminal classes or on the progress of crime. It was deemed sufficient to catch ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... my seat, drew one long breath, but whether he thought I was going to kill him,—I dare say I looked it,—or whether he saw a sheriff behind, or a phantom gallows before, I know not; but without waiting for the thunderbolt to strike, he rushed from the car as precipitately as he had rushed in. I was angry,—not because I was to have been cheated, for I have been repeatedly and atrociously cheated and only smiled, but because ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... straightway knocked down, stunned, and bound. Some died suddenly. And a few were saved to stretch the judicial ropes of the Bailiwick. For it was always thought a good thing by such as were in authority to have a good show on the "Thieves' Architrave," or general gallows of the vicinity, as a thing at once creditable to the zeal of the worthy dispensers of local justice, and pleasing to the Kaiser's officer if he chanced ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... drew near I felt like a real murderer, and had the prisoner all the time before my eyes, hanging on a gallows. I drank harder than ever, but I could not get that picture out of my mind. I saw worse pictures than before. So I determined what to do. I sat down, wrote a full confession of the murder, which I ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... tories. Some of the gondola gentry broke into and pillaged Red Smith's house on the bank. About noon this day (16th) a very terrible account of thousands coming into the town, and now actually to be seen on Gallows Hill: my incautious son caught up the spyglass, and was running towards the hill to look at them. I told him it ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the persons who formerly trumpeted forth the most loudly the violent resolutions of assemblies, the universal insurrections, the seizing and burning the stamped papers, the forcing stamp officers to resign their commissions under the gallows, the rifling and pulling down of the houses of magistrates, and the expulsion from their country of all who dared to write or speak a single word in defence of the powers of Parliament,—these very trumpeters are now the men that represent the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... name was detected within the British lines, in disguise, in search of military information. He was tried and executed, as stated in the text, as soon as the preparations could be made. It is said that he was reproached under the gallows with dishonoring the rank he held by his fate. 'What a death for an officer to die!' said one of his captors. 'Gentlemen, any death is honorable when a man dies in a cause like that of America,' was his answer. Andre was executed ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... wire-and-sapling gate and across about a mile of bush, and suddenly came on a little slab house nestling under the side of a hill. At the back were the stockyards and the killing-pen, where a contrivance for raising dead cattle—called a gallows—waved its arms to the sky. In front of the house there was rather a nice little garden. At the back were a lot of dilapidated sheds, leaning in all directions. A mob of sheep was penned in a yard ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... mean she'll end on the gallows, if that's what troubles you. But she's frightfully unbalanced, and, to my mind, ought to have some sense knocked into her before it's too late.—That's ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... Then Saltan took the letter, broke the seal, and after reading it exclaimed aloud: "Where are my valiant knights, my faithful servants and warriors? Seize this messenger from King Sensibri, and lead him to the gallows, for he has slain my dear son and ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... is common, common even to vulgarism, to hear the remark that the same gallows-tree ought to bear as its fruit the arch-traitor and the leading champion of aggressive liberty. The mob of Jerusalem was not satisfied with its two crucified thieves; it must have a cross also for the reforming Galilean, who interfered so rudely with its conservative ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... execution of John Brown. There was the court house to which he was brought on his couch to receive his trial for treason, and there the jail in which he spent his last days, and from which he was led to execution. How had all things changed! The people who stood about the gallows of John Brown, and gnashed their teeth in their bitter hatred, were now themselves guilty of treason. The court house was in ruins, and the jail was but a shell of tottering walls. The town also had suffered fearful ravages from war, and now a Union army was marching through its streets, every ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... of May the second Continental Congress had been sitting in Philadelphia. Among the Massachusetts delegates were Hancock and the two Adamses. Gage on the 12th of June had consigned Samuel Adams and Hancock to the gallows, but Hancock was serving as president of the Congress, while the Adamses were important members of committees. They watched and waited for the growth of a sentiment which should support New ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... the minister, 'I really ought not to leave you here. Consider what danger you would be in! Yonder, as you see, a gallows is set up, and two evil-doers are hanging on it. You could not possibly sleep with ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... good tragedy," said Napoleon. "Voltaire has sinned against history and the human heart. He has prostituted the character of Mohammed by petty intrigues. He makes a man, who revolutionized the world, act like an infamous criminal deserving the gallows. Let us rather speak of Goethe's own work—of the 'Sorrows of Werther.' I have read it many times, and it has always afforded me the highest enjoyment; it accompanied me to Egypt, and during my campaigns in Italy, and it is therefore but just ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... told? What booty got you, and where have you hid it? Disclose," says she. "You stand in some danger of the gallows for pirates." ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... was on May 23rd, 1498. A gallows was erected in the Piazza della Signoria on the spot now marked by the bronze tablet. Beneath the gallows was a bonfire. All those members of the Government who could endure the scene were present, either on the platform of the Palazzo Vecchio or in the Loggia de' Lanzi. ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... horse; he said the proof had failed, and he had imagined that he was safe from the halter; but no—he was hardly free before he was arraigned for killing a deer in the King's park; this was proved against him, and now he was on his way to the gallows. There was a tradesman's apprentice whose case particularly distressed the King; this youth said he found a hawk, one evening, that had escaped from its owner, and he took it home with him, imagining himself entitled ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... statute passed against witchcraft, was far milder in tone than the laws of any other European country. Witchcraft itself, where no death could be proved to have followed from it, was visited only with pillory and imprisonment; where death had issued from it, the penalty was the gallows and not the stake. Even this statute was repealed in the following reign. But the fierce religious strife under Mary roused a darker fanaticism; and when Elizabeth mounted the throne preacher after preacher assured her that a multitude of ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... ancestors at a time when to the average Scot the national tartan suggested but an alien barbarian who stole his cattle; and the national bagpipe, the national heather, and the national whisky were merely the noise the brute made, the cover that preserved him from the gallows, and the stuff that gave you your one ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... colours. I have been persuading him to desert for a long time, as I had need of him. This, in fact, is the third time he has deserted, and if they catch him now they will undoubtedly string him up. Not a bad idea for him to fly to the headsman's house, eh? They will seek him everywhere but under the gallows-tree. And if they find him here, they won't have very much more trouble with ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... him—fixed you for a dope-fiend. I've told you a hundred times you had precisely the kind of temperament that must avoid that sort of thing like the gallows." Burns hit the desk with his fist as he spoke, with a ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... believe, he was exceeded by no man of his time; he said, 'My master whipt me very well. Without that, Sir, I should have done nothing.' He told Mr. Langton, that while Hunter was flogging his boys unmercifully, he used to say, 'And this I do to save you from the gallows.' Johnson, upon all occasions, expressed his approbation of enforcing instruction by means of the rod[148]. 'I would rather (said he) have the rod to be the general terrour to all, to make them learn, than tell a child, if you ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... committed. As to the Highland costume, he may urge that, like many Southrons, he had bought it to wear on a Highland tour, and was trying it on. How can you keep him? You have no longer the right of Pit and Gallows. Before what magistrate can you take him, and where? The sheriff-substitute may be at Golspie, or Tongue, or Dingwall, or I don't know where. What can we do? What have we against the man? "Loitering with intent"? And here Logan and I have knocked him down, ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... on a lovely Sabbath morning that Nathan Hale was led out to death. The gallows was the limb of an apple tree. Early as it was, a number of men and women had ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... Then you raised freight rates on him and robbed him of all he had. You ruined him and drove him to fill himself up with Caraher's whiskey. He's only taken back what you plundered him of, and now you're going to hound him over the State, hunt him down like a wild animal, and bring him to the gallows at San Quentin. That's my version of the affair, Mister Genslinger, but it's worth your subsidy from the P. and S. W. to ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... again by hearing the tread of a horse, but it was only the old grey munching round. Her father finished skinning, and drew the carcase up to a make-shift "gallows". "Now you can go to bed," he ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... to grow a little uneasy. A disagreeable surprise, if my excursion, in which I was to break banks and hearts, and, as you see, heads, should end upon the gallows or the guillotine. I was not clear, in those times of political oscillation, which was ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... out of the house in a cold sweat. The only pressure in heaven or earth which could have forced me to renounce Cytherea was now put upon me—the dread of a death upon the gallows. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... question was a gallows, from which rotted, pendant, the corpse of an unhappy Englishman, ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Bow down or break, when saw I tremble The surface of earth; I might then all My foes have felled, yet fast I stood. The Hero young begirt[5] Himself, Almighty God was He, Strong and stern of mind; He stied on the gallows high, 40 Bold in sight of many, for man He would redeem. I shook when the Hero clasped me, yet durst not bow to earth, Fall to surface of earth, but firm I must there stand. A rood was I upreared; I raised the mighty King, The Lord of Heaven; ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... had? They are children of France, and have been trained by your humble servant. Had they been caught they would have gone to jail, or even to the gallows, without a word of protest or indiscretion; at any rate it was well worth the risk. A crowded inn is safer for these little operations than you think, and ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... astonished than in need of cordials, he hastened up-stairs and flung open the door. A table stood there, furnished with jugs and pipes and cans, and by light of candles that burned as blue as brimstone could be seen the three gallows-birds from Gibbet Island, with halters on their necks, clinking their tankards together ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... the shoulders and threw into the rivers, laughing and joking, and when they fell into the water they exclaimed: "boil body of so and so!" They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords. 6. They made a gallows just high enough for the feet to nearly touch the ground, and by thirteens, in honour and reverence of our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and, with fire, they burned the ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... must remain; No writ of error lies—to Drury Lane: Yet when so kind you seem, 'tis past dispute We gain some favour, if not costs of suit. No spleen is here! I see no hoarded fury;— I think I never faced a milder jury! Sad else our plight! where frowns are transportation. A hiss the gallows, and a groan damnation! But such the public candour, without fear My client waives all right of challenge here. No newsman from our session is dismiss'd, Nor wit nor critic we scratch off the list; His faults can never hurt another's ease, ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... great Pope, was a still greater executioner. That man of God delivered over to the gallows a Pepoli of Bologna, who had bestowed upon him a kick instead of a piece of bread when ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... a gallows?" inquired one of the travellers, and pointed toward the hill, where at this distance the cross looked like ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with a new significance. He snapt his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at random, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... done it without the impulse of an insane passion; but it was dreadful because it would have shut him out from society; because it would have placed the mark of Cain upon him; because the dungeon and the gallows were beyond it,—rather than because it was the sacrifice of a human life, of one created in the ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... some chance of rescuing this unhappy lady. I swore I would try, the day I saw you strike her. Kill me, you woman's bully! You would if you dared; but you have not the heart. Your very servants like me better than you. Touch me, and they will rise and send you to the gallows ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... convinced me of my mistake, adding, that such engines were as necessary to the proper discipline of the negroes in that latitude as the overseer himself. He then proceeded to detail several instances of fugitive negroes being dragged in capture to the foot of the gallows, where, with halter-encircled necks, they were made not only to acknowledge the error committed and expose accessories, but "pumped dry," as he facetiously termed it, as to the intended flight of ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... electrical quacks, that "electricity is life," and the possibility of reviving the dead was believed by many. Executed criminals were in active demand; their bodies were expeditiously transferred from the gallows or scaffold to the operating table, and their dead limbs were made to struggle and plunge, their eyeballs to roll, and their features to perpetrate the most horrible contortions by connecting nerves with one pole, and muscles ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... themselves prevent him. In consequence of this threat Captain Maitland was instructed by Lord Keith to tell those gentlemen that as the English law awarded death to murderers, the crime they meditated would inevitably conduct them to the gallows. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... and that mischievous pride may at any moment hurry him? Does it never occur to you that these are the causes of terrible crime, bringing terrible punishment; and that against brute force, impelled by savage passions, society protects itself by the hulks and the gallows?" ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... brief sermon and the sentence, which seemed to him of all punishments the most futile. He had hoped to see his son-in-law sent to the Plantations for life; had been angry at the thought that he would escape the gallows; and for sole penalty the seducer was sentenced to forfeit less than a year's income. How corrupt and venal was a bench that made the law of the land a nullity when a great ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... he would turn out to be a genius, the next she declared positively that he would come to the gallows, and the third she wondered helplessly whether he could by ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... of rarin' a family, it ain't mine. Why, can't you hear the parson's everlastin' preaching and giving examples how taking a pin has been the start of a feller coming to the gallows; and this is a much worse beginning than a pin! If the only way of rarin' them not to steal was to put 'em where there was no possibility of stealing nothink, a pretty sort of honesty that would be; you might as well ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... produced a snuffbox of tortoise shell and gold. He opened it deliberately. "If he does, you'll admit that he will hang on the gallows that he has built himself—although intended for another. I'faith! He's not the first booby to be caught in his own springe. There is in this a measure of poetic justice. Poetry and justice! Do you know, Ruth, ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... of folk-etymology is seen in the old superstition of the hand of glory. This is understood to be a skeleton hand from the gallows which will ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... obliged to look sharply after the others at every point. He had warned the cooks, the bakers, and the brewers, in the most stringent manner, not to allow any strange mouth to taste the food or drink, and any one who broke this command was threatened with the gallows. If such a greedy stranger should make his appearance anywhere, he was to be brought immediately to the superintendent of ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... of the cell, he suddenly rushed forward and kissed his hand. 'God, in His mercy, pity and pardon you, Mosk,' said Gabriel, and left the wretched man with his frozen heart shivering under the black, black shadow of the gallows. ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... came by a great crowd leading his brother Louis to the gallows; and on his head they had stuck a high paper cap with the Stargard arms painted thereon, namely, a tower with two griffins (Sidonia, indeed, had painted it, and she was by, and clapping her hands with delight); ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... Arroquhar now? If it's Andy, the gang will be crying 'Loch Sloy!' about the house in a couple of nights; if it was a common man of the tribe, there might be no more about it, for we're too close on the Duke's gallows to be meddled with noisily; that's the first advantage I ever found ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... men, and had taken passage with the captain to go for England. And as for the captain, he could not carry them to England other than as prisoners in irons, to be tried for mutiny, and running away with the ship; the consequence of which, they must needs know, would be the gallows; so that I could not tell which was best for them, unless they had a mind to take their fate in the island. If they desired that, I did not care, as I had liberty to leave it. I had some inclination to give them their ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... certain land of faith and understanding, unless they are perverted and vile. There was no vileness in Arrowhead. There were no handcuffs on his hands, no sign of captivity; they two ate out of the same dish, drank from the same basin, broke from the same bread. The crime of Arrowhead, the gallows waiting for him, seemed very far away. They were only two silent travellers, sharing the same hardship, helping to give material comfort to each other—in the inevitable democracy of those far places, where small things are not great nor great things small; where into men's ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... we left a goodly portion of our crew out there. That is a campaign! As to my own notions, this is what I think,—a nasty country, a wretched climate, a people fit for the gallows." ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... account permitted to enter the bakehouse, brewhouse, and granary, excepting the brother in charge, and he was not to dare to touch the bread and beer, since it was "most unfitting that persons with such a malady, should handle things appointed for the common use of men." A gallows was sometimes erected in front of the houses, on which offenders were summarily despatched from this world, ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... for her sake after all, and what mattered it if they did send him to the gallows? He had not sacrificed his honor—he had done his best to assert it. He was innocent. They could kill him but they couldn't make him guilty. A thousand juries pronouncing him so could not make it true that he ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... stubbornly conservative. He held office under three Democratic administrations, and wrote a campaign life of his old college friend Franklin Pierce when he ran for President. Commenting on Emerson's sentence that John Brown had made the gallows sacred like the cross, Hawthorne said that Brown was a blood-stained fanatic and ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... prisoner. Egil was also taken prisoner, for he would not leave his wife. King Magnus then ordered both of them to be taken out to Vambarholm; and when they were leading Thorer from the ship he tottered on his legs. Then Vidkun called out, "More to the larboard, Thorer!" When he was being led to the gallows ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... perpendiculars and as many connecting horizontals. At a little distance on a similar erection, but made for half the number, were two victims, one above the other. Between these substantial structures was a gallows of thin posts, some thirty feet tall, with a single victim hanging by the heels head downwards." Hard by were two others dangling side by side. The corpses were nude and the vultures were preying upon them, and squabbling ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... man. If you and the rest of your titled associates receive your deserts (as there is no doubt you will) from the gracious hand of our sovereign lord, the king, the strongest rope and highest gallows at Tyburn will ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... guards shall go to the place and as near to them as they can, in order to be able to hear in case one shall cry for grace; and if one cry and they hear, they shall say to the other, 'Cease; it is enough.' And then shall the lord cause the conquered party to be taken to the gallows and hanged by the neck' (a grace scarcely worth crying for), 'or his corpse, in case he had been killed without crying for grace. The weapons of the vanquished man and those which the victor threw away belong to the lord. Should it appear in the course of the contest that one of the parties ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... the money immediately towards placing her child at school. If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its' hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Hainan's. You began to calculate, and to compare wealth and numbers: we threw up a few pulsations of our blood; we supplied enthusiasm against wealth and numbers; we put our existence to the hazard, when the hazard seemed against ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... After having ascended the gallows ladder he again broke forth in the following words of touching eloquence: 'And now I leave off to speak any more to creatures, and begin my intercourse with God, which shall never be broken off. Farewell father and mother, friends and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... due order that my Lord of Arundel was he that was tried with him, but he suffered not till later. [This appears to be the case from comparison of the best authorities.] He, therefore, was had back to prison; but Sir Hugh was hung on the common gallows in his coat armour, in strong cords, and when he was cut down, after four days, his head was struck off and his quarters cast to the dogs. On whose soul God have mercy! Amen. In very deed, I think he ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... penalty he had brought upon his father and mother, more than upon himself and his future. He knew that his father's life-work had been ruined, and that his honorable career would be summed up in the remembrance that he was the old man who bankrupted himself to save his son from the gallows. He knew that this very house, which remained as the last refuge, was mortgaged again as when his father and mother had come into it before he was born. The ironic circle ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... how many Roman Catholics were there in Fairfax's army? I believe, not one. They were all under the banner of Charles the First. When a reward of five thousand pounds was offered for Charles the Second alive or dead, when to conceal him was to run a most serious risk of the gallows, it was among Roman Catholics that he found shelter. It has been the same in other countries. When everything else in France was prostrate before the Jacobins, the Roman Catholic peasantry of Brittany and Poitou still stood up for the House of Bourbon. Against ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... they dared to offer him any insult." Certainly, gentlemen, this would have been an honor far above the merits of such inconsiderable rascals—to be spitted like larks upon a Cartesian sword; and therefore I am glad M. Des Cartes did not rob the gallows by executing his threat, especially as he could not possibly have brought his vessel to port, after he had murdered his crew; so that he must have continued to cruise for ever in the Zuyder Zee, and would probably have been mistaken by sailors for ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of Assize,—both Man and Woman to be set on the Gallows an Hour with a Rope about their Necks and the other end cast over the Gallowses. And in the way from thence to the common Gaol, to he Scourged not exceeding Forty Stripes. And forever after to wear a Capital A of two inches long, of a contrary colour ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... gust struck us. I looked up to see what was next to happen. Before me stood our stout mainmast. Then, as if wrenched by a giant's grasp, the shrouds and stays were torn away, and with a loud crash down it came by the board, crushing the booms, gallows, bits, gangway-rails, and the fore part of the quarter-deck, and staving in the long-boat and a large cutter so as to destroy them completely. The daylight enabled those on deck to stand from under in time to escape injury; but it was a work of time, danger, and difficulty ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... having received Sentence of Death for their Adherence to King Charles, were accordingly ordered to the Place of Execution. It is the Custom there, on all such Occasions, for all the Musick of the City to meet near the Gallows, and play the most affecting and melancholy Airs, to the very approach of the Condemn'd; and really the Musick was so moving, it heightened the Scene of Sorrow, and brought Compassion into ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... too late—the Law led Mercy about twenty minutes. The crowd dispersed, horror-stricken; but it assembled again that night before the sheriff's domicile and expressed its indignation in groans. His effigy, hanged on a miniature gallows, was afterwards paraded ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... are rogues, Perdie! While men of honest mind are banned To creak upon the Gallows Tree, Or squeal in prisons over-manned We want a chief to bear the brand, And bid the damned Burgundians dance. God! Where the Oriflamme should stand If Villon were ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... la Pigoreau are confirmed; and that she, arraigned and convicted of the offences imputed to her, is condemned to be hung and strangled at a gallows erected in the Place de Greve in this city, if taken and apprehended; otherwise, in effigy at a gallows erected in the Place de Greve aforesaid; that all her property subject to confiscation is seized and confiscated from whomsoever may be in possession of it; on which property and other ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE COUNTESS DE SAINT-GERAN—1639 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... 1818 was so moved at one of these executions that he made a picture which represented eight men and three women hanging from the gallows, and a rope coiled around the faces of twelve others. Across the picture were the words, "I promise to perform during the issue of Bank-notes easily imitated ... for the Governors and Company of ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... ordered Gerard to confess his sins and his plots that he had plotted, which out of very shame he was constrained to do, and then Oberon prayed the emperor to command Gerard and those who had helped him to work ill to be hanged on the gallows which had been reared for Huon, and this was done also; and the emperor Charles and Huon, duke of Bordeaux, made ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... in producing Nelsons than nightingales), and proceeds without more ado to tell how “poor Jerry Abershaw,” on being captured by the Bow Street runners, had left his good sword behind him as a memento of highway glories soon to be ended on the gallows tree. (By-the-bye, I wonder where that sword is now; it was bought by Mr. Adolphus Levy, of Alton Lodge, at the closing ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... present; but I can tell you this, my Quaker friend, that the tree has not yet grown that will furnish a gallows ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... me, and I proffered him thanks. Thereupon we naturally consoled[5] our coffee; when you're consoled, you console! and as one thing led to another, we fell upon each other! There was a very devil of a carnage! The proof of it is that that gallows-bird of a saloon-keeper threw us out-o'-doors ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... jogged on and on, paying his way with the few pennies he had saved in his seven years of service, but for all of his travelling nothing of good happened to him until, one morning, he came to a lonely place where there stood a gallows, and there he sat him down to rest, and it is just in such an unlikely place as this that a man's best chance of fortune ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... down saw a march past of claqueurs and retailers of tickets. It was an ill smelling squad, attired in caps, seedy trousers, and threadbare overcoats; a flock of gallows-birds with bluish and greenish tints in their faces, neglected beards, and a strange mixture of savagery and subservience in their eyes. A horrible population lives and swarms upon the Paris boulevards; selling watch guards and ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... cried; 'I thought as much! This messenger, forsooth, is nothing but a gallows bird—a fellow the city marshal was going to hang, but unfortunately put it off till he should be starved enough to save rope and be throttled with a pack thread. He broke prison, and here he is preaching!' ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... prostitution in some low "crib" in Ann street. And yet philosophy and common sense both level all moral distinction between the two conditions.—A noble murderer once protested against being hung on the same gallows with a chimney-sweep—there was aristocracy with a vengeance! We opine that the lofty and arrogant pretensions of some of our "nabobs," who are often of obscure and sometimes of ignominious birth, are scarcely less ridiculous ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the rest to be slain. The pilgrims therefore fell upon them right eagerly and slew them on ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... law—I? Does it quench the pauper's thirst if the King drink for him? Oh, no, no, no—I wanted no impertinent interference of the law. Laws and the gallows could not pay the debt that was owing to me! Let the laws leave the matter in my hands, and have no fears: I would find the debtor and collect the debt. How accomplish this, do you say? How accomplish it, and feel so sure about it, when I had neither seen the robbers' faces, nor heard their ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hundred ducats that he has stolen from the monastery, and he is now permitted to return and get his clothes. But he treacherously follows the youth, lodges a complaint against him with the council of the nearest city, and succeeds in getting him condemned. When the youth is already on the gallows ladder, he requests the judge to allow him to play just one more song; and he makes all those present dance so violently, that the judge agrees to pardon him if he will only cease playing. Then the monk confesses his own theft ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... intensely or worshipped enthusiastically that liberty which some saw as an imperial goddess for the sake of whose bare limbs and pale, noble face death might be gladly met; while others beheld in her a blood-spattered strumpet whirling in abandoned dance round gallows-altars which ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham |
