"Hangman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bring the worst of the heathen, and they shall possess their houses' (verse 24). For the truth is, this work is too bad for men either of reason or conscience to be found in the practice of. The hangman is usually none of the best: The witnesses are also to be slain; but not a man, but a beast must slay them; 'a den of thieves, a hold of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... make jokes with the hangman!" said Mrs. Mulholland. "Ah, well, I think you know Douglas Falloden"—the tone was just lightly touched with significance—"and if you can lecture him—do!" Then she abruptly changed ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... given cause for offence and were secretly removed,(593) but others had apparently been set up in their place. The demolition of the cross, which took place on the 2nd May amid signs of public rejoicing, was followed (10 May) by the public burning of the "Book of Sports" by the hands of the common hangman in Cheapside.(594) Another measure in the same direction was the placing of the appointment of preachers in St. Paul's Churchyard in the hands of the mayor and aldermen, a proposal which the mayor had formerly suggested ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... Rue Briconnet, quite near,—indeed nothing is very far away in this old town,—is the house attributed to Tristan l'Hermite, who held the unenviable position of hangman-in-chief to His Majesty, King Louis. There is no foundation for this tradition, which probably owes its origin to a knotted rope and some hooks on the wall, which are sufficiently suggestive of hanging. ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... a missile to be flung in the enemy's face, and found or not, when the fray was over. There was no intoxication of fury now, there was no far ring of glory in the air, there was no victory to be won. The hard and hideous fact stared him in the face, that he was to die like a malefactor by the hangman's hand, and that the sovereign who had graciously deigned to accept the sacrifice had tortured him for nearly half an hour without mercy in the presence of an inferior, in order to get a few facts on paper which might help his own royal credit. And as if that were not enough, his own daughter was ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... obey his Stadtholder, the Prince, who reigns in his name. The perjured hangman needs a guardian. Ask on; I'll ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ghastly prologue? Shakespeare himself, unplayed script in hand, mused how tragedy and farce go hand in hand. In those golden days with which our comedy concerns itself, a gibbet stood on Wapping wharf and pirates stepped off the fatal cart to a hangman's jest. We may hear the shouts of the 'prentice lads ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... recompence that Couetise yeelds those that haue serued it all their life, is oftentimes like that of the Deuill: whereof the ende is, that after a small time hauing gratified his disciples, either he giues them ouer to a hangman, or himselfe breakes their neckes. I will not heere discourse of the wickednes and mischiefes wherevnto the couetous men subiect themselues to attaine to these goodes, whereby their conscience is ...
— A Discourse of Life and Death, by Mornay; and Antonius by Garnier • Philippe de Mornay
... the market-place they found a dense crowd of sympathizers watching pityingly the hangman's cart, in which lay William of Cloudeslee, bound hand and foot, with a rope round his neck. The sheriff and the justice stood near the gallows, and Cloudeslee would have been hanged already, but that the sheriff was hiring a man to measure the outlaw for his grave. ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... in the wrong as to the nature and objects of civil government. The great truth, hidden from every preceding generation, and at length revealed, in the year 1846, to some highly respectable ministers and elders of dissenting congregations, is this. Government is simply a great hangman. Government ought to do nothing except by harsh and degrading means. The one business of Government is to handcuff, and lock up, and scourge, and shoot, and stab, and strangle. It is odious tyranny in a government to attempt to prevent ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... against Bankrupts—but it was my speculation when I could see better. Half the world's misery (Eden else) is owing to want of money, and all that want is owing to Bankrupts. I declare I would, if the State wanted Practitioners, turn Hangman myself, and should have great pleasure in hanging the first after my salutary law should be establish'd. I have seen no annuals and wish to see none. I like your fun upon them, and was quite pleased with Bowles's sonnet. Hood ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Greybeard was probably some ballad, alluding to the execution of Charles I, who was beheaded by a person disguised by a visor and greybeard. The name of the common hangman, at that time, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... historical error that passage in which it is recorded that, in the reign of Queen Anne, the famous degree of the University of Oxford respecting passive obedience, was ordered by the House of Lords to be burnt by the hands of the common hangman, as contrary to the liberty of the subject and the law of the land. Nevertheless, I wish, whatever be the modesty of those who impute, that the imputation was a little more true, the Catholic cause would not be quite so desperate ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... say a messenger has come From that same godless hangman whose lean neck I'd like to twist, saying he is delayed. 'Tis the first godly ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... not know how to get a body of men together! You send the priest with the crucifix in his hand. All know that he wishes peace, and no one rises for him. You send the hangman with the axe on his shoulder to remind people of his business, but you forget that with such a fellow no one will speak. In such wise you will not get a pack of dogs to follow you. But if you want to raise a great host you will have to go out yourself with sixty men and ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... having done it; there seems to me a degree of wanton cruelty in punishing an animal so severely, unless he had been actually forced to do it. Public executioners may be necessary for the prevention of crime; but that is no reason why one need volunteer as an amateur hangman." ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... there is fear in the honor we pay a sanctuary, and yet we do not flee from it as from a punishment, but draw near to it all the more. Such a fear mingled with love is the true honor; the other fear without any love is that which we have toward things which we despise or flee from, as we fear the hangman or punishment. There is no honor in that, for it is a fear without all love, nay, fear that has with it hatred and enmity. Of this we have a proverb of St. Jerome: What we fear, that we also hate. With such a fear God does not wish ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... celibacy, decency, indecency, piety and sin are all against human nature. The present system in particular is against human nature, or what is the policeman for, the soldier, the debt-collector, the judge, the hangman? What means the glass along my neighbour's wall? Human nature is against human nature. For human nature is in a perpetual conflict; it is the Ishmael of the universe, against everything, and with everything against it; and ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... friend Dinmont, without reckoning their unexpected assistant Hazlewood, who was unarmed, and of a slighter make; but Bertram felt, on a moment's reflection, that there would be neither sense nor valour in anticipating the hangman's office, and he considered the importance of making Hatteraick prisoner alive. He therefore repressed his indignation, and awaited what should pass between the ruffian and ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... orders of a soldier!" shouted the prisoner, enraged beyond all control. "They are orders for a jailer, a hangman, a scullion—no soldier who wears the sword of a civilized nation can take such orders. The war is over; the South is conquered; I have no country save America. For the honour of the flag, for which I once poured out my blood on the heights of Buena Vista, ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... waist, with his large sombrero and long pigtail hanging down his back, like a mandarin of twenty buttons. Next followed his two black assistants, naked as I have described them, all three with their coils of rope in their hands, like a hangman and his deputies; then advanced friend Bang and myself, without our coats or hats, with handkerchiefs tied round our heads, and our bodies bent down so as to stem the gale as strongly as ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... like snakes around the handle of his revolver. Nothing kept him from shooting that man, yes, and that woman also, but the certainty that the deed would make him a fugitive for life, subject everywhere to the summons of the hangman. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... a thief the patron saint of honesty, nor is a liar expected to champion the truth. The hangman is not elected as president of a society for the preservation of human life; why, then, in the name of common sense, do people continue to see in the State the seat of justice and the patron saint of those whom it wrongs ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... went into a store and cut off about fifty feet of new rope. Some fellows that knew how tied a hangman's knot. As we came up to the stranger, we heard him say to a man, 'I tell you, sir, these bonds will pauperize unborn gener—' But the noose dropped over his neck, and cut short his argument. We led him a block and a half through the little town, during which there was a pointed argument between ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... play with are still in my possession; kept, like my poor wife's favorite jewels, for old remembrance' sake. These I took from their repository when the attraction of my watch showed signs of failing. The child pounced on them with her chubby hands, and screamed with pleasure. And the hangman was waiting for her mother—and, more horrid still, the mother ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... my youth, there were detestable books which ought to have been burned by the hands of the common hangman, for they contained questions and answers to be learned by heart, of this sort, "What is a horse? The horse is termed Equus caballus; belongs to the class Mammalia; order, Pachydermata; family, Solidungula." Was any human being wiser for learning that magic formula? ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... rents, four priests, a reporter of the Freeman's Journal, some local reporters, and four of the tenants rushed into the room; and the priests in the rudest possible manner (the Rev. P. Farrelly, one of them, calling me "Francy Hyne's hangman," and other terms of abuse) informed me that unless I re-instated a former Roman Catholic tenant in a farm which he had previously held, and which was then let to a Protestant, and gave an abatement of 30 per cent., no rent would be paid me that day. Dr. ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... catchpoles, I don't see it. They're a necessary part of the administration of justice, as we understand it, and have it; and I don't see how a detective who arrests, say, a murderer, is not as respectably employed as the judge who sentences him, or the hangman who puts the rope round his neck. The distinction we make between them is one of those tricks for shirking responsibility which are practised in every part of the system. Not that I want you to turn catchpole. It's all so sorrowful and sickening that I ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... taken to York to be hanged; she was brought out on the scaffold, and the hangman said, "Now, lass, thou must hang by the neck till thou be'st dead." But she ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... of trades have their moments of pleasure. Now, if I were a grave-digger, or even a hangman, there are some people I could work for with a great deal ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would have all such rogues scourged by the Hangman!" ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them cried to his comrade in presence of Marie Antoinette: "If the hangman does not guillotine this accursed family, I will ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... So, too, the London hangman one night went into the pit of her Majesty's Theatre to hear Jenny Lind sing, and remarked with a sigh of professional longing, "Ah, ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... my rude companions, Whose names are registered in the hangman's book? Whose hearts are ever eager as their swords, Edged by a personal impulse of revenge? Will you become the queen, dear, of my band? Will you become a hunted outlaw's bride? When all Spain else pursued and banished me,— In her proud forests and air-piercing ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... murder committed on the West Coast. All day and night before the execution took place the women of the tribe squatted on the ground in front of the jail, keeping up the monotonous howl or chant, even up to the time the hangman completed his task. After hanging the prescribed time, the murderers were cut down and handed to their friends, who took them away in their canoes for burial. In the earliest days, I don't think they used the regular coffin; the common ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... sir, as the hangman is of the thief; the squire of the poacher; the judge of the libeller; the lawyer of his client; the statesman of his colleague; the bubble-blower of the bubble-buyer; the slave-driver of the negro; as these are brethren, so am I and the worthies ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... the famous bond which he and his friends had made a short time before they were put in prison, and the clamour was so great that even his own party was alarmed, and gave it up to be burned by the hangman. ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... under glass. They are hardy plants, springing naturally in eager and animated natures. Artificial remedies might be efficacious in an artificial world. In a real world, the best we can do is to meet the plagues of life as Dick Turpin met the hangman's noose, "with manly resignation, though with considerable disgust." Moreover, disagreeable things are often very stimulating. A visit to some beautiful little rural almshouses in England convinced me that ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... with drinking, and leering stupidly upon the surging heads below. Some asked if Calcraft did the "job," and others volunteered sketches of Calcraft's life. One man boasted that he had taken a pot of beer with him, and another added that the hangman's children and his own went to school together. "He pockets," said the man, "two-pun ten for every one he drops, besides his travelling expenses, and he has put away three hundred and twenty folks. He is a clever fellow, is Calcraft, and he is ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... hangman took him and bringing out the knife, offered to cut off his hand, what while El Muradi said to him, "Cut and sever the bone and sear[FN24] it not for him, so he may lose his blood and we be rid of him." But Ahmed, he who ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... in consternation. Not all their politeness could conceal it: horror of horrors, they were dining with a hangman! Besides their sense of degradation in this companionship, superstitions had been bred in them which doubled their distress. A dead silence fell over all. I was the first to break it by ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... line's the hangman's rope, savin' your presence. You'll learn to-morrow how we rethreated to dhraw thim on before we made thim trouble, an' that's what a woman does. By the same tokin, we'll be attacked before the dawnin' an' ut would ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... even so; and must I do the hangman's office? Recreants! see How you should fell a traitor. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... would a sub-chanter of the sixteenth century say, on beholding the beautiful yellow wash, with which our archiepiscopal vandals have desmeared their cathedral? He would remember that it was the color with which the hangman smeared "accursed" edifices; he would recall the Hotel du Petit-Bourbon, all smeared thus, on account of the constable's treason. "Yellow, after all, of so good a quality," said Sauval, "and so well recommended, that ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Kansas, and I have my family with me, for which I thank my Deliverer from the jaws of the lion of oppression, and praise the Lord of hosts for a free country, where I can vote as well as preach according to the dictates of my own conscience without the torturing whip or the hangman's rope." ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... stuck there, but nothing else to be seen of him; and, if you will have that, compound for it, lest it be sold among the sequestred goods, or burnt with the next Popish pictures, by the hand of the hangman. ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... refused to pay, "Why do you not dun him?" that is, Why do not you set Dun to arrest him?—Hence it became a cant-word, and is now as old as since the days of Henry VII. Dun was also the general name of hangman, before ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... time for some purpose, either good or bad, not sleeping it away in bed. If one has to be hung on a given day, would it not be well to be hung as soon after waking as possible? I can fancy that the hangman would hardly come early enough. And if one had to be hung in a given week, would not one wish to be hung on the first day of the week, even at the risk of breaking one's last Sabbath day in this world? Whatever be the misery to be endured, get it over. The horror of every agony is in its anticipation. ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... I to thee, hangman? Forsooth, well do I know thee, Roger the Black: come ye into the glade yonder, so will I split thy black ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... and both of the only two professions of which I can claim to know anything—the law and the stage—are closed to me, since I cannot find employment in either without revealing myself as a fellow who is urgently wanted by the hangman. As things are it is very possible that I may die of hunger, especially considering the present price of victuals in this ravenous city. Again I have recourse to Epictetus for comfort. 'It is better,' he says, 'to die ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... if we understand you correctly, you think that we of the Confederacy have committed treason; are traitors to your Government; have forfeited our rights, and are proper subjects for the hangman. Is not that about what ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... up with the lark—Oh, no doubt —you'll get up with the hangman one of these days. But you ought to be ashamed to be jawing here like this, in a red blanket, on a forty-foot scaffold on top of the Alps. And no end of people down here to boot; this isn't any place for an exhibition ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... condition, are attached to life, while the English frequently detest life in the midst of affluence and splendour. English criminals are not dragged, but run to the place of execution, where they laugh, sing, cut jokes, insult the spectators; and if no hangman happens to be present, frequently hang themselves.—Memoirs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... eye was bright and searching, and there was no hint at superannuation in either port or movement. He was dressed in a long skirtlike garment of black cloth—true priest garb—and for a girdle he wore a length of hempen rope tied in the peculiar and sinister fashion known as the "hangman's knot." Around his neck, suspended like a priest's stole, hung a steel chain with pendent manacles or handcuffs that jangled unmusically as he moved. A grotesque, almost ridiculous figure this priest of the Doomsmen, ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... Its secret reached the abstract. You felt that the man had known the foretaste of evil which is the calculation, and the after-taste which is the zero. In his impassibility, which was perhaps only on the surface, were imprinted two petrifactions—the petrifaction of the heart proper to the hangman, and the petrifaction of the mind proper to the mandarin. One might have said (for the monstrous has its mode of being complete) that all things were possible to him, even emotion. In every savant there is something of the corpse, and this man was a savant. Only to see him you caught ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... peace, upon which Benton instantly rose and said: "I'll rot in jail, sir, before I will do it! No, sir! I'll rot in jail first. I'll rot, sir!" and he poured forth a fresh torrent of bitter words upon the man who was then so well known throughout the Northern States as "Hangman Foote."* Benton was not only a man of tremendous passion, but unrivalled as a hater. Nor did his hatred spend itself entirely upon injustice and meanness. It was largely personal and unreasoning. He was pre-eminently unforgiving. He hated Calhoun with a real ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... You inexorable fate! To be a murderer without drowning in filth; to take me on board like a released convict, or hang me up over the morass! You joy of my old age! You hangman's noose! ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind
... in Newgate with the hangman's noose about his neck all because of Mary's cruel neglect, I wondered if her beauty would so easily atone for her faults. I may as well tell you that he changed his mind concerning this particular ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... these—the Wood, the Weed, the Wag: The Wood is that that makes the gallows tree; The Weed is that that strings the hangman's bag; The Wag, my pretty knave, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Eliza, Amelia, and Charlotte? and you Frederick, old lad? I didn't see you at work to-day. I thought something was out of joint with you, and I have come on purpose to see. Why what's the matter with your neck? You have it swaddled up as if you were determined to defy the hangman's rope from ever getting a hold ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... you're Conrad, are you? It strikes me the thickness of my skull was lucky for you too. When I look at you I feel it's almost a pity I've enabled you to cheat the hangman." ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... very young (as I hope). Perhaps you may soon grow older (which I pray for you). Let this suffice then. My Benjamin may deserve a hanging. Who knows? We are not God, ma'am, neither you nor I. Therefore I have no mind to be a hangman. And you—why, you are young enough to wait another occasion. And so I give ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... On, on to the gallows the sheriffs are gone, An' the cart an' the sodgers go steadily on; An' at every side swellin' around of the cart, A wild, sorrowful sound, that id open your heart. Now under the gallows the cart takes its stand, An' the hangman gets up with the rope in his hand; An' the priest, havin' blest him, goes down on the ground, An' SHAMUS O'BRIEN throws one last look round. Then the hangman dhrew near, an' the people grew still, Young faces ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... the attitude of the government toward the new Duma was one of contemptuous arrogance. "The Czar's Hangman," Stolypin, lectured the members as though they were naughty children, forbidding them to invite experts to aid them in framing measures, or to communicate with any of the zemstvos or municipal councils upon any questions whatsoever. "The ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... had so done, I was again a little flustered; for in came the coachman with the look of a hangman, I thought, and madamed me up strangely; telling me, he would beg me to get ready to pursue my journey by five in the morning, or else he should be late in. I was quite grieved at this; for I began not to dislike my company, considering ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... vulgar, conveyed at once an expectation of a life to be presently prolonged to the swarthy de Sille, but after a time to be cut suddenly short by the hangman. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... giants grown; Each passer must worship before Nepomuck, Who to die on a bridge chanced to have the ill luck, When once a man with head and ears A saint in people's eyes appears, Or has been sentenced piteously Beneath the hangman's hand to die, He's as a noted person prized, In portrait is immortalized. Engravings, woodcuts, are supplied, And through the world spread far and wide. Upon them all is seen his name, And ev'ry one admits his claim; Even the image ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... some pugilistic encounter. His hair is of a yellowish clay colour, lighter in tint upon the eyebrows. There is none either on his lips or jaws, nor yet upon his thick hog-like throat; which looks as if some day it may need something stiffer than a beard to protect it from the hemp of the hangman. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... "Away, from the hangman," shrieked Griffith, still staring at the horizon. "Stay me not; my hands itch for their throats; my heart thirsts for their blood; but I'll not hang for a priest and a wanton." Then he suddenly turned on Leicester, "Let thou go, or—" and he lifted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Some cried "Kill him!" and some (but they were not near enough) strove to trample him to death. Tug as he would at the old man's wrists, the hangman could not force him to unclinch ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... or pleasurable, to given lines of conduct. The law says, 'Thou shalt not commit murder'; and 'shalt not' means 'if you commit murder you shall be hanged.' Nothing can be simpler or more obviously in accordance with common sense. Abolish the gaoler and the hangman and your criminal law becomes empty words. Moreover, the congeniality of this statement to the individualist point of view is obvious. Consider men as a multitude of independent units, and the problem occurs, How can they be bound into wholes? What must be the principle ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... himself of the girl's safety, and pushing her down the companion, he drew his revolver; and, taking careful aim, executed Billings with the cold calmness of a hangman. ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... cap-a-pie, having men encompassing him with bills and halberds. Then he took up the second, and there he saw the judge that sat upon him; and taking up the last card, he saw Tyburn, the place of his execution, and the hangman, at which he laughed heartily. But many years after, being condemned, he ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... free, I am inspired by the consideration of interests far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted by anything from me must be indeed trifling when compared with the pain with which they read your letter. It is not the hangman, but the criminal, that ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sir, I haue beene an vnlawfull bawd, time out of minde, but yet I will bee content to be a lawfull hangman: I would bee glad to receiue some ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... DENNIS the hangman, one of the ringleaders of the "No Popery Riots;" the other two were Hugh, servant of the Maypole inn, and the half-witted Barnaby Rudge. Dennis was cheerful enough when he "turned off" others, but when he himself ascended the gibbet he showed a most grovelling and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... half a dozen. Your hangman will be there," and Vernon chuckled at the thought of the scene he had witnessed ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... the barkers, will you—quick! Oh, damnation. Dig, y-you know G-Gaunt and his hangman are hard on my heels! Quick, then, and g-get it over and done with—d'you hear, D-Dig?" So saying, Barrymaine crossed to the hearth and stood there, warming his hands at the blaze, but, even so, he must needs turn his head so that he could keep his gloating ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... Dyet of Poland, a poem in which he had made a similar unflattering comparison between England and Poland. A far more substantial case for Defoe's authorship can be made from the existence of the anecdote of John White, Edinburgh's hangman, in both a letter to Harley (18 November 1710) and the Review (for 30 November 1710), as well as in Atalantis ...
— Atalantis Major • Daniel Defoe
... prohibited. It was a criminal act to kiss a woman in the street, even in the way of chaste and honest salute. The heads of households were called to account if the daughters neglected the spinning-wheel. The stocks and the whipping-post were seldom unoccupied by minor offenders, while the hangman was kept busy with criminals of deeper dye. It should be needless to say that there was a good deal of hypocrisy, and that public repentance was often simply a means for escaping from social ostracism and obtaining admission to the pastures of ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... 'Athenaeum,' since Mr. Dilke left it, has grown duller and duller, colder and colder, flatter and flatter. Mr. Dilke was not brilliant, but he was a Brutus in criticism; and though it was his speciality to condemn his most particular friends to the hangman, the survivors thought there was something grand about it on the whole, and nobody could hold him in contempt. Now it is all different. We have not even 'public virtue' to fasten our admiration to. You will ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... the execution, I stood aside to let them pass through the little door. I noticed that one of them seemed to be somewhat under the influence of drink. They passed on into the confines of the jail. I then asked the gatekeeper who those men were. He said, "That one is the hangman." He was the one whom I had noticed. My wish, or my intention rather, to step inside those gates vanished. I thanked the gatekeeper and told him that I would not trouble him to let me through. The little door was then shut, and ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... to regret in that, sir," said Saltwell. "It will save the hangman some work, if he sends them all to ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... dauntless spirit they came to New England to convert its inhabitants, or at any rate to establish the principle that in whatever community it might please them to stay, there they would stay in spite of judge or hangman. At first they came to Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher, sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in 1656, Endicott happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor, Richard Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. He arrested the two women ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... to be gripped by Lawson and lashed fast with rope-yarns. Pawing, clawing, blaspheming, he was conquered and bound, inch by inch, and drawn to where the inexorable shears lay like a pair of gigantic dividers on the snow. Red Bill adjusted the noose, placing the hangman's knot properly under the left ear. Mr. Taylor and Lawson tailed onto the running-guy, ready at the word to elevate the gallows. Bill lingered, contemplating his work ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... as if these blood-hounds were tragic actors of which one could best produce his effects by fire and pathos, and the other by the subtlety of his conception. I call that an unprejudiced judgment. And why should not a man be great even as a murderer? From what hangman's noose did you drag out the neck of one, and from what headsman's block did you rescue the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... only becoming——" He stopped short. He was going to add: "an honest man." But it is scarcely proper to talk about the rope in the hangman's house, and there are certain words which should never be pronounced in the presence of certain people. Chupin knew this, and so he quickly resumed: "When I become rich, when I'm a great banker, and have a host of clerks who spend their time ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Jackson, "I'd save the hangman the job of breaking your neck if His Royal Highness wasn't in ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... succession of charters, various privilege’s and immunities, which tended to the growth and prosperity of the town. Among other powers bestowed upon the Bishop was the right to seize and try felons, and on the south-east of the parish there is a place, still called “Hangman’s Corner,” where criminals were executed by his order. The bishops long had a palace, their chief Residence, in Horncastle, which was situated at the rear of the Black Horse inn and the premises of Mr. ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... accordingly she was condemned to suffer the most cruel death that could be invented, and her sentence was, to be nailed to a cross, and kept alive as long as possible. The sentence was put in execution; when she fainted with the cruel torment, the hangman gave her strong liquors, &c. to revive her; the sixth day she died. Her long sufferings, youth, and good constitution, made her flesh so tender, delicious, and valuable, that the executioner sold it for above eight tallies; for there was such thronging to this inhuman market, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... the dog's eyes. A curious smile, unspeakably tender and sad. It was the idiosyncrasy of the man's face, rarely seen there. He might have looked with it at a criminal, condemning him to death. But he would have condemned him, and, if no hangman could be found, would have put the rope on with his own hands, and then most probably would have sat down pale and trembling, and analyzed his sensations on paper,—being ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... such an insignificant matter as heresy, to corporal punishment, pecuniary fines, confiscation of property, and loss of life, by being burnt at the stake, or,—as occurred to Savonarola, towards the close of the century,—first strangled by the hangman, and then committed to the flames. Only the Nero of the last part of the Annals, or the Tiberius of the first six books of that work, can properly stand forth, in his persecuting spirit, as the counterpart of the Dominican, John de Torquemada, who, in the performance of his duty, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... first explorer know that the criminal clutch of Greed was soon to seize these mighty forests, guard them from the human race with bayonets, hangman's ropes and legal statutes; and use them, robber-baron like, to exact unimaginable tribute from the men and women of the world who need them. Little did the first explorer dream that the day would come when individuals would claim private ownership ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... call in the assistance of Dr. Baxter, the principal medical officer of the island, but this offer Napoleon refused at once, alleging that, although "it was true he looked like an honest man, he was too much attached to that hangman" (Lows), he also persisted in rejecting the aid of medicine, and determined to take no exercise out-of-doors as long as he should be subjected to the challenge of sentinels. To a representation that his determination might convert a curable to a fatal malady, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... he was always selected to do the bloodiest work—the hangman of the enemy, as we ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... religion is always the religion of the prince; the true God is the God, whom the prince desires his people to adore; the will of the priests, who govern the prince, always becomes the will of God. A wit justly observed, that the true religion is always that, on whose side are the prince and the hangman. Emperors and hangmen long supported the gods of Rome against the God of Christians; the latter, having gained to his interest the emperors, their soldiers, and their hangmen, succeeded in destroying the worship of the Roman gods. The God of ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... before the cart was drawn away from him to leave him to hang, he asked pardon of all them he had offended, and even of the Queen, if he had indeed offended her. Then one of the sheriffs called on the hangman to make an end; so Mr. Nelson prayed again in silence, and then begged all Catholics that were there once more to pray that, by the bitter passion of Christ, his soul might be received into everlasting ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... established" in this fashion, the consequences are easy to foresee. Not content with shooting down the "marauders," the faction of "order" will search out the "ringleaders of the mob." They will set up again the law courts and reinstate the hangman. The most ardent revolutionists will be sent to the scaffold. It will be 1793 ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... doctors had given up all hope, was sufficiently marvellous to suggest the idea that a certain power had determined—on the hangman's principle, perhaps—to give him the longest of ropes; but it could in reality be traced to a more terrestrial influence—namely, Lady Bellamy's nursing. Had it not been for this nursing, it is very certain that her patient would ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... pleas advanced by influential relatives of the prisoner, induced the court to delay sentence until the culprit should be ninety-nine years old, but it was ordered that, while released on his own recognizance, in the interim, he should keep a hangman's noose about his neck and show himself before the judges in Catskill once every year, to prove that he wore his badge of infamy and kept his crime in mind. This sentence he obeyed, and there were people living recently who claimed to remember him as he went about with ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... not a heller; my father was hangman of Lucerne, and when he died, his body was seized to pay ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... soul, then," replied the unflinching servant, "if we go down you'll go up; and we have those belongin' to us that will see you kiss the hangman yet. Yerra, now, above all words in the alphabet what could put a gallows into your mouth? Faith, Randal, it's about your neck it'll go, and you'll put out your tongue at the daicent people that will attend your own funeral ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of the place. Rather than remain another hour within the limits of such a dreary old city, I would have taken passage in a tread-mill, and relied upon the force of imagination to carry me to some other place. Nay, a hangman's cart on the way to the gallows would have presented a strong temptation. In saying this I mean nothing disrespectful to Birger Jarl, who founded Stockholm, and made it his place of residence in 1260; nor to Christina Gyllenstierna, who so heroically ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... faint and in a few minutes fell down dead. He had swallowed poison on hearing the verdict from the jury. In this vault, over which Mr. Gladstone peers anxiously, you can see a group of heads, all of 1798 men and there on one of them, is the hangman's crape as it stuck in the wounded neck since the day on which it and its owner parted company. Mr. Gladstone is silent as he sees all this and at last mournfully ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... Dunseveric would consent to let him marry Una; and now, of all times, now, when he was engaged in a dangerous conspiracy, pledged to a fight which he felt already to be hopeless; when he had the hangman's ladder to look forward to, or, at best, the life of a hunted outlaw and exile to some foreign land; what could he expect now to come of his love for Una? His mind refused to dwell on such thoughts for long. It went back to the simple fact, the glorious, ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham |
