"Headstone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that is the pride of all that country-side; and my grandfather's vault at Bow is capable of accommodating eight visitors, while my great-aunt Susan has a brick grave in Finchley Churchyard, with a headstone with a coffee- pot sort of thing in bas-relief upon it, and a six-inch best white stone coping all the way round, that cost pounds. When I want graves, it is to those places that I go and revel. I do not want other ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... the stonemason, and sitting down amidst the fragmentary litter of the man's yard, George Talboys wrote in pencil this brief inscription for the headstone of his dead ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... their gray eyebrows all the time of the sermon—intelligently without doubt, but whether sympathetically or otherwise I could not determine. And indeed I hardly know yet. My vestry door opened upon a little group of graves, simple and green, without headstone or slab; poor graves, the memory of whose occupants no one had cared to preserve. Good men must have preceded me here, else the poor would not have lain so near the chancel and the vestry-door. All about and beyond were stones, with here and there a monument; ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... the churchyard," stated Mr. Queed. "I was there just ahead of you. I was struck with that motto or text on the headstone, and shall look it up when I get home. I have been making a more careful study of your Bible this autumn and have found it exceptionally interesting. You, I suppose, subscribe to all the tenets of the ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... alignment of monuments seemed to embody those easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the living. Glennard's eye, as he followed the way indicated to him, had instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone. He had forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a pang he discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a granite shaft rearing its aggressive height at the ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... yellow-topped cypress, which only seems to feel quite at home in country burying-grounds, had kindly spread itself like a coverlet over the grave, which already looked like a very old grave; and the headstone was leaning a little, not to be out of the fashion of the rest. I traced again the words of old Colonel Haverford's pompous epitaph, and idly read some others. I remembered the old days so vividly there; I thought of my cousin Agnes, and wished that I could see ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... my heart the afternoon it was whispered through the town that a body had been washed ashore at Grave Point—the place where we bathed. We bathed there no more! How well I remember the funeral, and what a piteous sight it was afterwards to see his familiar name on a small headstone in the Old ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... locked, but he climbed over the wall and waded through the snow to the spot where he had sat with her so many summer afternoons. The wicker chair was buried out of sight in a drift. A scarcely-visible undulation in the white level marked the position of the mound, and the headstone had a snow-cap. The cedars stood black in the dim moonlight, and the icy coating of their boughs rattled like candelabra. He stood a few moments near the railing, and then tore the letter into fragments and threw them on the snow. "There! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... up the gravestones, and the path, and the front of the building. Suddenly Mr. Melbury paused, turned ill upon the grass, and approached a particular headstone, where he read, "In memory of John Winterborne," with the subjoined date and age. It was ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Simon live and labor to realize these views. But already in a green corner of the pleasant churchyard of Rockville may be read this inscription on a marble headstone:—"Sacred to the memory of Jane Deg, the mother of Sir Simon Degge, Bart., of Rockville. This stone is erected in honor of the best of Mothers by the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... square headstone marking the grave of Charles Considine Smith; and she paused beside it to read once more ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... throat, and he froze to a statue of fear. Beyond the headstone of Jonas Whipple, and toward the centre of the plot, a clump of syringa was plainly observed to sway with the movements ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... railings on the side nearest the river, you will see beneath the shadow of the soot-grimed church's soot-grimed porch—that is, if the sun happen, by rare chance, to be strong enough to cast any shadow at all in that region of grey light—a curiously high and narrow headstone that once was white and straight, not tottering and bent with age as it is now. There is upon this stone a carving in bas-relief, as you will see for yourself if you will make your way to it through the ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... nation in the world shall perish before Rome shall lose her sacred power! She is the 'headstone of the corner'—and 'upon whomsoever that stone shall fall, it shall ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... of the churchyard gates, and, stepping across the somewhat untidily kept graves, stood before an uneven mound, surrounded by a very old mossgrown headstone. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... feeling of surprise. It was away down in the lower corner where there were no plots. It was shut off from the others by a growth of young poplars and was sunken and overgrown with blueberry shrubs. There was no headstone, and it looked dismally neglected. Freda felt a sympathy for it. She had no grave, and this grave had nobody to tend it or care ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... would keep Uncle Hezekiah's headstone. In the end we made an inside walk of the collection, for the old cellar had a dirt floor and was not always dry, but we laid them face down. When we had raked and swept, and brushed and put back the articles accepted by the board, and all was trim ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... visitors from every land were as much interested in this room as in Shakespeare's birth-place. The remark may have been intensified to flatter an American visitor, but there are few names dearer to the Anglo-Saxon race than that on the plain headstone in the burial-yard of Sleepy Hollow. Sunnyside is scarcely visible to the Day Line tourist. A little gleam of color here and there amid the trees, close to the river bank, near a small boat-house, merely indicates its location; and the traveler ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... recognize the nature of these trees, this foliage—the cypress, the willow, the yew. Stone crosses like these are not unfamiliar to you, nor are these dim garlands of everlasting flowers. Here is the place—green sod and a gray marble headstone. Jessy sleeps below. She lived through an April day; much loved was she, much loving. She often, in her brief life, shed tears, she had frequent sorrows; she smiled between, gladdening whatever saw her. Her death ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... from? Some one must have dropped it. She stood up and looked around, but there was no one in sight. On the other side of a holly bush, however, a number of just such roses lay on a grave. Rosalind walked over and stooped to read the name on the low headstone. "Robert Ellis Fair," she repeated half aloud as she laid her rose beside ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... dead and buried. And a fluttering, chirping host of men, little men and unseeing men, have heaped him over with the uncut leaves of Kim, wrapped him in Stalky & Co., for winding sheet, and for headstone reared his unconventional lines, The Lesson. It was very easy. The simplest thing in the world. And the fluttering, chirping gentlemen are rubbing their hands in amaze and wondering why they did not do it long ago, it ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... you'll let me say that a bad temper is an affliction, whoever owns it, and shortening to life. I don't know what your opinion may be: but my grandfather was parish constable in these parts for forty-seven years, and you'll find it on his headstone in Manaccan churchyard that he never had a cross word for man, woman, or child. He took no credit for it: it ran in the family, and to this day we're all terribly mild ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... overcome; he leant upon a headstone and stared at Felix without speaking, and then it was a sort of soliloquy. 'To think of poor dear Master Eddard's son being come to that! and he looking a dozen times more like a clergyman and a gentleman than ever this young ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... their being shut up here, Andrew Black stood one afternoon leaning against the headstone of a grave on which Quentin Dick and Will Wallace were seated. It had been raining, and the grass and their garments were very wet. A leaden sky overhead seemed to have deepened their despair, for they remained silent for an ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... hearthstone. "I spend a good quarter of my time in the churchyard; but when I saw those six little mounds, and read the inscriptions over them, I couldn't help feeling queer. Think of this! On the first tiny headstone ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... and wise and exquisite child, drew a plan for a headstone on the grave of a favorite terrier, and she had in it the words "WHO died" on such a day; the older and more worldly-minded painter put in "WHICH;" and my friend and "Bossy's" said to me, with some displeasure, as we were examining the monuments, "Wasn't he a Who as much as ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... at Three Meadows until after the bleak and austere little funeral, and long enough to help Angelique soften the harshly new grave with flowers and sturdily started plants, and stopped over at Bath and ordered a quaintly simple headstone which would be the Gillespie's pride ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... enough, and crowned with a bunch of pansies. A small headstone had been made from the lid of an old soapbox, on which was printed the ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... shade of a Bronte hero within sight. To this all the fine privilege and fine culture of all the fine countries (collective matter, from far back, of our intimated envy) had "amounted"; just as it had amounted for Vernon to the bare headstone on the Newport hillside where, by his mother's decree, as I have already noted, there figured no hint of the manner of his death. So grand, so finely personal a manner it appeared to me at the time, and has indeed appeared ever since, that this brief record irrepressibly ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Langdon relatives and the little brother, and ordered a headstone with some lines which they ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... At my headstone, kindly kneeling, May I beg a votive tear? Woman, with her pure appealing, Is my angel at the bier. Let me have but one such linger, Praying Christ to help and save, Let me have but one dear finger Place a ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... Dick replied, with a new ring in his voice. "You're right. I've been ten sorts of a fool, but I know now what I'm going to do. Take your paper, old friend, and for my sake go out and clear Jud Clark. Put up a headstone to him, if you like, a good one. I'll ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... have completely altered my intentions. The finger of God is in it. He has not brought us together thus strangely, except to serve some purpose of His own. I think I see that purpose. 'The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner. This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes,'" he quoted unctiously. "I am convinced that it is a waste of good material to crush you; therefore I desire to effect a consolidation with ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... Mark walked round the stone walls that held up the little churchyard and, entering by a gate on the farther side, he looked at the headstones and admired the feathery tamarisks that waved over the tombs. He was reading an inscription more legible than most on a headstone of highly polished granite, when he heard a ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... to have brains. That's the shortest way to account for her refusal of my very valuable devotions. But I'll tell you all about it, and, after that, we'll decide about the headstone. ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... the church-bell was going, and the door was open as if for prayer. I was a little surprised at this, but having visited the grave where my father and mother lay, and then passed on to the simple headstone which marked the resting place of John Thornton and his wife, I brushed through the docks and nettles, towards the lychgate, in the shadow of which stood the clergyman, a gentlemanly looking young man, talking to a very aged ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... in sweet Auburn Where a little headstone stood; How the flakes were folding it gently, As did robins the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... have been watching winds its way, as human processions are apt to do, to the old graveyard. Most of the original settlers are buried here, although not a few were buried on their own land, according to the common custom. Probably this ancient burying ground, with its oldest headstone of 1663, has never been particularly attractive. The Puritans did not decorate their graveyards in any way. Fearing that prayers or sermons would encourage the "superstitions" of the Roman Catholic Church, they shunned any ritual ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... n't seem to get the worth of his money out of it. And old man Tatem was a thrifty and provident man. On the hearth in this best room—as ornaments or memento mori were a couple of marble gravestones, a short headstone and foot-stone, mounted on bases and ready for use, except the lettering. These may not have been so mournful and significant as they looked, nor the evidence of simple, humble faith; they may have been taken for debt. But as parlor ornaments they had ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... constantly came upon bodies of men and women, whose horses had given out, or who had been shot while fleeing for life. In every case the poor fugitives had been scalped and mutilated. They were gathered up and tenderly buried, with no headstone to mark their remains, there to sleep until the ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... childhood—hallowed spot, Through life's vicissitudes still unforgot; The sacred hearth deserted now is found, Or unloved stranger-forms are circling round. In the dear hall, whose sounds were all our own, Are other voices, other accents known; And where our early friends? A starting tear And the rude headstone promptly answer, "Here." ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... each other at right angles. At the famous "White Hart" Newman wrote the opening part of the Lyra Apostolica while awaiting the Exeter coach in December, 1832. The great tower of All Hallows still stands, but little besides of the old building. While the restoration was in progress a Saxon headstone was brought to light. It bears a presentment of our Lord's ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... widow caused a tender sentiment to be chiseled on the headstone of her husband's grave. The exact ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... laughed. "Ye see, I love you so and try ter make ye happy, an' ef there wuz ter come er time that there wuz plenty o' work an' real money in it, I'd stick to it jist ter please you, an' be a lost an' ruined soul! Yessir, they'd carve on my headstone jest ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... eyes filled, and she pointed to the rising mound at her feet. Silently we bent over and reverently laid the lilies and forget-me-nots under the simple headstone. ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... trees was not more than thirty paces across. At one side was a little knoll—a natural hillock, bare of shrubbery but covered with wild grass, and on this, standing out of the grass, the headstone of ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... shall my righteous servant justify many"! But he must be shown to be righteous, in order that he may justify; and this is what his exaltation does. "It was the proof that him whom the world condemned, God justified—that the stone which the builders rejected, God made the Headstone of the corner—that him whom the world denied and lifted up on a cross of shame in the midst of two thieves, God accepted and lifted up in the midst ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... lies here in Barnriff, we—we must be content. We mustn't take it with us, we mustn't rob those who need. We've found it, so we'll just cover it up again, and hope and pray that it may multiply and bear fruit. Then we'll mark it with a headstone, so that others may know that this gold is to be found if folks will only seek long enough, and hard enough ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... will show you his grave. It is back of the town near a little bridge that spans a mangrove swamp. A plain slab of wood stands at its head. Some one has burned upon the headstone with a ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... saying, This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts. 7. Who art thou, O great mountain? before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain: and he shall bring forth the headstone thereof with shoutings, crying, Grace, grace unto it. 8. Moreover, the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, 9. The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it; and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... it "St. George and the Dragon," but the former is afoot—possibly the Bedawin stole his steed. There was a frustum or column-drum of fine white marble, hollowed to act as a mortar; like the Moslem headstone of the same material, it is attributed to the Jebel el-Lauz, where ancient quarries are talked of. There were also Makrkah ("rub-stones") of close-grained red syenite, and fragments of the basalt handmills used for quartz-grinding. Part of a ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... self-denial, the silver of white purity, the precious stones of variously-coloured and Christlike virtues? Then your work will indeed be incomplete, but its very incompleteness will be a prophecy of the time when 'the headstone shall be brought forth with shoutings'; and you may humbly trust that the day which 'declares every man's work of what sort it is' will not destroy yours, but that it will gleam and flash in the light of the revealing and reflecting fires. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... noon when he beheld a certain lonely church where many a green mound and mossy headstone marked the resting-place of those that sleep awhile. And here, beside the weather-worn porch, were the stocks, that "place of thought" where Viscount Devenham had sat in solitary, though dignified meditation. A glance, a smile, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... years ago, I had a marble headstone put on her grave, which was enclosed with a fence, and last fall I saw it there although buried in weeds. A few weeks ago a lady friend asked me if my mother's name was Jane; for that she had, in walking through the cemetery, come across a stone which must have been hers. I went up to investigate, ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... that I must walk out in the air, as I was suffering from a severe headache. I made my way to the church-yard, and sought the graves of my parents; and, seating myself at the headstone of my mother's grave, I remained for a long time wrapped in ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... Hanover Square, situated in the Bayswater Road. His funeral was "attended only by two gentlemen in a mourning coach, no bell tolling;" and his grave has been described as "distinguished by a plain headstone, set up with an unsuitable inscription, by a tippling fraternity of Freemasons." In 1761, long before his death, was published a satire on the tendencies of his writings, mixed with a good deal of personal censure, in a pamphlet entitled "A Funeral Discourse, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... he's deid, we'll gie good heed, an' write it as he askit; We'll carve it on his headstone an' we'll stamp it on his casket: "Wha dees rich, dees disgraced," says he, an' sure's my name is Sandy, 'T wull be nae rich man that he'll dee—an' ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... almost any point in the country which stretches away to the Adirondack wilderness, commemorates, in connection with the church that he erected there, the Father Nash who labored in Lewis and Jefferson counties, and in an obscure cemetery, not far distant, a modest headstone marks ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... with the French nurse firmly established one thing in her mind. The man who was buried in the cemetery of Auteuil with the name of Lord Harry Norland on a headstone, the man who had lingered so long with pulmonary disease, was the man whose death she had witnessed. It was Oxbye the Dane. Of that there could be no doubt. Equally there was no doubt in her own mind that he had been poisoned by the doctor—by Mrs. Vimpany's husband—in the presence and, to all ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... fortune. Then he ran away with another woman. The woman spent his fortune, drove him to dissipation, and when he was dying he came back to Nora, who received him cordially, attended him to the end, and cheered his last hours by singing his own songs to him. Then she raised a headstone recounting his virtues, which were quite numerous, and refraining from any reference to those peculiarities which had caused him ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... resting-place no mention was made of the mighty work he had done for truth. There were fears that when the character of his book was known, the grave of Copernicus would not remain undisturbed, and so the inscription on the headstone was simply this: "I ask not the grace accorded to Paul; not that given to Peter; give me only the favor which Thou didst show to the thief ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... English remarkable visitors desirous of immortality, here and there about the edifice, but Robert the builder—or at least the Master of building, cut his on no stone of it. Only when, after his death, the headstone had been brought forth with shouting, Grace unto it, this following legend was written, recording all who had part or lot in the labour, within the middle of the labyrinth then inlaid in the pavement of the ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... dusty road in his black, and passed me as I stood by the churchyard gate, and up towards the church; but sudden in the path he stopped short, his eyes seeming starting out of his head as he looked at Ellen's grave—not that he could see her name, the headstone being turned the other way,—and he put his hands before his eyes and stood still a-trembling, like a rabbit when the dogs are on it, and it can't find no way out. Then he cried out, 'No, no, cover her face, for God's sake!' and crouched ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... The headstone itself bore not a vestige of moss, but time had cracked it diagonally and the chiselled letters were weathered away. He studied it with painful care, poring intently over each faint impression. He who cared for the grave had apparently been troubled only ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... fox creeps forth to roam at will; where nature, with vine of the wild grape, has builded a fantastic arbor, and the atmosphere is sweet with woodland flowers and blossoms, not far from the ruins of an old cabin, they will kneel before two rough mounds of earth, each marked with a simple headstone, one bearing no inscription save the name and date; the other this: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... accounts say that eight of the ten were killed. The headstone of one of the number, Thomas Lund, has these words: "This man, with seven more that lies in this grave, was slew All in A day by ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... you owe me now. I had to put on another farthing a week because his appetite grew so big. I knew you would rather pay more than see him suffer. And the guinea-pig died. There's twopence extra for funeral expenses. We put him in the orchard beside the dogs, and made a headstone out of your old slate. It's a rattling good idea, because, don't you see, you can write ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... curiously attracted by the old church and the tomb within, so I went across after leaving you and wandered about the churchyard. Close beside the corner of the north transept was the empty grave, as you know, and beside it a quaint old headstone with an interesting coat-of-arms upon it. I knelt down and tried to decipher the blazon in ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... night could I make out all the story, though it was not difficult to define its essential tragedy, and later on a gossip in the neighborhood and a headstone in the churchyard told me the rest. The unquiet young soul that had sung so wistfully to and fro the orchard was my landlord's daughter. She was the only child of her parents, a beautiful, willful girl, exotically unlike those from whom she was sprung and among whom she lived with a ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... a place picked out," said Cal, and led them a little distance up the slope, to a level spot in the shadow of a huge, gray bowlder. "That's his headstone," he said, soberly. "The poor devil won't be cheated out uh that, if we can't mark it with his name. It'll last as long as ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... from the vault, and passing down the yard, I came to a grave the headstone of which had fallen, and was broken. I turned the two pieces over, and read: "To the memory of Eliza ——." And is this, thought I, the end of the only record of the dear friend of my boyhood; the merry, happy girl whom every one loved? No one left after a score of years to care ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... the graveyard in his sleigh, the bells jingling too merrily by far, I thought; and then to a marble-cutter from whom I bought a headstone to be put up in the spring. I worked out an epitaph which Doctor Mix, who seemed to see through the case pretty well, put into good language, reading as follows: "Here lies the body of Mary Brouwer Vandemark, born in Ulster County, New York, in 1815; died Madison, ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... say she mourned him duly, and set a proper headstone at his grave. But, for my own part, I have no faith in that affection which will splinter a loving heart every day of its life, and yet, when it has ceased to beat, will make atonement with an idle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... dew was on the grass, he made his way into the churchyard, and sought about for Geoffry's grave. He discovered it in a corner, marked by a plain headstone and shaded by an elder bush. It was the stone Geoffry had raised in memory of his Elizabeth, and below her name his was inscribed, with the date of his death. The churchyard was all neatly kept—this grave not more ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... none of my business, Mrs. Banger; but casting my eye over those graves to-day, it struck me that I might fix 'em up a little, so's they'd be more comfortable like. I think McFadden wants a few sods over the feet, and Smith's headstone has worked a little out of plumb. He's settled some, I s'pose. I think I'd straighten it up and put a gas-pipe railing around Mr. Smyth. And while you're about it, Mrs. Banger, hadn't you better buy about ten feet ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... emphatically, "and you mustn't say it. Always speak well of the dead." And, as they couldn't honestly do that, they obeyed him and left Mr. Jinks in his unhonoured grave, with a broken wheel-barrow for a headstone and a mass of wire-netting to make resurrection difficult. In order to get the disagreeable epitaph out of their minds Uncle Felix substituted a kinder and gentler one, and made them learn it ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... had it out together in other days, I doing all the talking, and he no less silent than usual there in his holy grave. We had never quarreled as man and wife, because he would not do his part of the contending. I untied my bonnet strings, took it off and laid it on the grass, sat down by his headstone and cried—not so much for him as for fear he would ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... is not a monument fit for a poet. There is nothing airy or graceful about it,—and, indeed, there cannot he many men so solid and matter-of-fact as to deserve a tomb like that. Wordsworth's grave is much better, with only a simple headstone, and the grass growing over his mortality, which, for a thousand years, at least, it never can over Southey's. Most of the monuments are of this same black slate, and some erect headstones are curiously sculptured, and seem to ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... she turned her steps to a grave with a plain headstone. Before leaving England, Joseph Snowdon had discharged this duty. The inscription was simply a name, with ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... disappointment. The tenderest woman about whose knees cluster living children, and who has sowed in tears the blessed seed, that in the resurrection-morn shall be gathered in beauteous sheaves of richest recompense—would smile in pitying contempt over the tiny headstone which ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... churchyard we stood before the grave of William Penn, marked by the plainest kind of a small headstone and identical with the few others beside it. We expressed wonder at this, but the lady with whom we had previously talked explained that it would be inharmonious with the Quaker idea to erect a splendid ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... been lifted, in readiness for its coming. It was something to think that his sister Mabel, who died in her flower, was lying in a sunny churchyard where a brook rippled and sparkled in the daylight and waving trees whispered together all night long; where flowers might nestle close to the headstone, and moon and stars shed their peace upon it, and morning birds sing ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... working ready to cave in. When your body hits it there will be an avalanche—with Mr. Former-sheriff Cullison at the bottom of it. You'll be buried without any funeral expenses, and I reckon your friends will never know where to put the headstone." ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... The one masks the completion of the work on which the world's redemption rests, the other marks the completion of the age- long process by which the world's redemption is actually realised. The one proclaims that the foundation is laid, the other that the headstone is set on the finished building. The one bids us trust in a past perfected work; the other bids us hope in the perfect accomplishment of the results of that work. Taken singly, these sayings are grand; united, they suggest ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... soaking garments. Wimp crept up behind her, but she paid no heed to him. Her eyes were lowered to the grave, which seemed to be drawing them toward it by some strange morbid fascination. His eyes followed hers. The simple headstone bore the ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... that rudely-shaped, dark blue stone, about 2 feet in width, the same in height, and 8 inches thick? Do you see the inscription upon it—E W in coarsely-carved letters, and the figures 1658 over them? That is, doubtless, the headstone of Whalley's grave. The footstone is similar, having the same letters; but above them you see figures that may be read either sixteen hundred and fifty-eight, or sixteen hundred and seventy-eight—16578. ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... in the north part of the town—the first cemetery in the region—is a headstone marking the grave of a pious negro slave, on which is rudely ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... left the fight alone to a chum,—but I'll do it, Bub, because you could not make a quick get-away with me tagging along. Things look murkier in this territory every minute. You'll either have the time of your life, or a headstone early in the game. Billie and I will put it up though we won't know where you're planted. I don't like it, but the minutes and water for the trail are both precious. Come out quick ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... that is what they will call me now. It is as well perhaps that I am to be buried at sea, else it might plague these Christian gentlemen what legend to inscribe upon my headstone. But you—how come you hither? My bargain with Sir John was that none should be molested, and I cannot think Sir ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... take the opportunity of saying that there was an omission of three words in the epitaph quoted on a former page (vol. i. p. 120). The headstone at the grave in Kensal-green bears this inscription: "Young, beautiful, and good, God in His mercy numbered her among His angels at the early ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... plan of the shafts was given, but I inadvertently reversed their position: in comparing that plan with Plate XVII., Plate II. must be held upside down. The capitals, with the band connecting them, are all cut out of one block; their profile is an adaptation of 4 of Plate XV., with a plain headstone superimposed. This method of reduction is that of order d in Fig. XXII., but the peculiarity of treatment of their truncation is highly interesting. Fig. LXV. represents the plans of the capitals at the base, the shaded parts being ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... reaction he passed to a higher field of romance. He would die for George and then she would bring the little boy she had named William to the lonely headstone—Suddenly William saw himself in his true and fitting character—Sydney Carton! He had lately read A Tale of Two Cities, immediately re-reading until, as he would have said, he "knew it by heart"; and even at the time he had seen resemblances between himself and the appealing ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... ever had the privilege of knowing him in the faulty flesh. She eliminated all his bad qualities, and projected from her imagination a Mr. O'Rourke as he ought to have been—a species of seraphic being mixed up in some way with a violin; and to this ideal she erected a costly headstone in the suburban cemetery. "It would be a proud day for Larry," observed Margaret contemplatively, "if he could rest his oi on the illegant monumint I 've put up to him." If Mr. O'Rourke could have read the inscription ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Senate Chamber showed signs of flopping and the Press Gallery became impatient, some Alkali Statesman of the New School would arise in his Place and give our Hero a Turning-Over, concluding with a faithful Pen-Picture of the Dishonored Grave marked by a single Headstone, chiseled as ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... last. It seems just as much to the point, that youth comes first. And the scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to add that age, in a majority of cases, never comes at all. Disease and accident make short work of even the most prosperous persons; death costs nothing, and the expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it becomes ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reached the churchyard we found the old man kneeling on a grave before its headstone. It was a very old one, with a death's-head and cross-bones carved upon the top of it in very high relief. With his pocket-knife he was removing the lumps of green moss out of the hollows of the eyes of the carven skull. ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... shadows grow Over the new name on the door, Over the face unseen before. Yet who shall number, by any art, The chasms that keep so wide apart The dancing step and the weary heart? Oh, who shall guess that the polished wall Is a headstone over his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... tired, my heart and I. We sit beside the headstone thus, And wish that name were carved for us. The moss reprints more tenderly The hard types of the mason's knife, As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life With which we're tired, my heart ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... was the vengeance which by the devising of Zeus those sons[16] of Aphareus suffered: for on the instant came Leto's son[17] in chase of them: and they stood up against him hard by the sepulchre of their father. Thence wrenched they a carved headstone that was set to glorify the dead, and they hurled it at the breast of Polydeukes. But they crushed him not, neither made him give back, but rushing onward with fierce spear he drave the bronze head into Lynkeus' side. And against ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... writes:—"One of your correspondents suggests that the silence of the Gipsies concerning their dead is carried so far as to consign them to nameless graves. In my churchyard there is a headstone, 'to the memory of Mistress Paul Stanley, wife of Mr. Paul Stanley, who died November, 1797,' the said Mistress Stanley having been the Queen of the Stanley tribe. In my childhood I remember that annually some of the members of the tribe used to come and scatter flowers over the ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... of Edwards Marjoribanks of the Hall (d. 1879) and his wife. Silas Titus, whose name is remembered for his supposed authorship of the notorious pamphlet Killing noe Murder, was born at Bushey and buried in this church; there is a headstone to ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... those who bring flowers to this lonely grave, Some facts on its headstone we wish to engrave; If this mound could speak no doubt it would tell Bill Sherman was right when he said, 'War is Hell.' He charged on two pickets whose names are below; They took him for niggers,—poor wronged buffalo. As to the way he met death, everybody knows how; ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey
... of seaweed. At my feet spread the great churchyard, with its hundreds of little green hillocks and white gravestones, sprinkled here and there with square, box-like tombs. All quietly asleep in the moonlight! Here and there an aged headstone seemed to nod to its neighbour, as though muttering in its dreams. The old church, bathed in the radiance, seemed larger than it had ever done in daylight, and ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... cowlstaff[obs3], lathi[obs3], mahlstick[obs3]. post, pillar, shaft, thill[obs3], column, pilaster; pediment, pedicle; pedestal; plinth, shank, leg, socle[obs3], zocle[obs3]; buttress, jamb, mullion, abutment; baluster, banister, stanchion; balustrade; headstone; upright; door post, jamb, door jamb. frame, framework; scaffold, skeleton, beam, rafter, girder, lintel, joist, travis[obs3], trave[obs3], corner stone, summer, transom; rung, round, step, sill; angle rafter, hip rafter; cantilever, modillion[obs3];; crown post, king post; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... caught the name of some one whose glory had exalted the character of his native land, and resounded across the waters of the Atlantic. Philosophers, historians, musicians, warriors, and poets slept side by side around me; some beneath the gorgeous monument, and some beneath the simple headstone. But the political intrigue, the dream of science, the historical research, the ravishing harmony of sound, the tried courage, the inspiration of the lyre—where are they? With the living, and not with the dead! The right hand has lost its ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... lie here. Not there with the other dogs, the favorites of the King, but here, alone, disgraced, without even a headstone. Without even their names, although they saved the great King from death and gave their lives for his. Yet they lie here, and the others lie there. It is the ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... rough loyal natures, who would follow him with as much confidence and devotion as the grognards of the Guard had in the case of the Great Emperor. There were some who feared that in Roberts's case, as in so many more, the donga and kopje of South Africa might form the grave and headstone of a military reputation, but far from this being so he consistently showed a wide sweep of strategy and a power of conceiving the effect of scattered movements over a great extent of country which have surprised his warmest admirers. In ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... said. "I must bear the thought and get accustomed to it. I was given a name in charity, and in charity my father was granted a grave. All I can look to as in some fashion my own—and yet they are not my own—be the headstone in the churchyard to show how my real father was killed, and the gallows on Hind Head, with the chains, to tell where those hung who killed him. 'Tain't every one can show that." She raised her head with ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... the days that followed he seldom thought of Helena. He buried his wife in the village church-yard, and the wondering villagers might presently read on the headstone he placed over her grave, the short inscription—"Anna Buntingford, wife of Philip, Lord Buntingford," with the dates of her birth and death. The Alcotts, authorized by Philip, made public as much of the story as was necessary, and the ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
