"Hangman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was, they agreed, that Hell's Spawn should break trail for his master across the last divide, and the court was adjourned down to the river bank, where a big spruce tree stood by itself. Slackwater Charley put a hangman's knot in the end of a hauling-line, and the noose was slipped over Leclere's head and pulled tight around his neck. His hands were tied behind his back, and he was assisted to the top of a cracker box. Then the running end of the line ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... I said soberly. "Nor can I solve entirely his purpose. He is my brother, and I am the next in line. We are not even on speaking terms; yet he is childless, and may feel some measure of dislike to have the family end in a hangman's knot. I can think of no other reason for his interference. I knew ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... whip, and the cord with the hangman's noose made fast to it, were all ready, it was reported to Sir Robert by Corporal Van Spitter, who stepped up to him with his usual military salute. Sir Robert took off his hat in return. His watch had been held in his hand, from the time that he had passed sentence upon Vanslyperken, who still ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the border to reinforce O'Neil. but the presence of the United States gunboat "Michigan" and several regiments and batteries of American regular troops, prevented the movement. Therefore the Fenians who were marooned in Canada, with visions of a hangman's noose dangling before them, became desperate and despondent. They knew very well that a concentration of the Canadian forces was going on, and that at the first break of day an attack was likely to be made, from which there would be no alternative but to "die in the last ditch" or surrender. ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... many 'M's' in these names—who hath executed his Montrose with as loving a heart and as tender a touch as ever did use old IZAAK towards the gentle that he, and the simple fish, did love so well. Did not the very hangman burst into tears as he thrust the unfortunate nobleman off the step? and did not a universal sob of pity break from the vast crowd assembled to see the last of the noble cavalier, victim to an unfortunate tradition ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... but offer them my regret; I am not 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 brings dishonour ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... get 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... luckily did not turn out so; it wou'd indeed have been a pity for them to have made their exit in that way, as I hope before long we shall have the pleasure of seeing them do it by the hands of the Hangman." ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... not the 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 ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... obsessed with the idea that upon their individual acts rested the burden of deliverance. Bonnot's last words were, "I am a celebrated man." From the gallows in Chicago Fischer declared, "This is the happiest moment of my life."[15] "Call your hangman!" exclaimed August Spies. "Truth crucified in Socrates, in Christ, in Giordano Bruno, in Huss, in Galileo, still lives—they and others whose name is legion have preceded us on this path. We are ready to follow!"[16] ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... Cromwell at that time, invited himself to dine with me, and brought Anthony Pearson and several others along with him to dinner. That their principal discourse all dinner time was only who it was that beheaded the king. One said it was the common hangman; another, Hugh Peters; others were also nominated, but none concluded. Robert Spavin, so soon as dinner was done, took me by the hand, and carried me to the south window. Saith he, 'These are all mistaken; they have ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... feel, nor think, as they used to do, but they are broken into disorder by a stroke of damnation and a lesser stripe of hell; but then if you come to observe a guilty and a base murderer, a condemned traitor, and see him harassed first by an evil conscience, and then pulled in pieces by the hangman's hooks, or broken upon sorrows and the wheel, we may then guess (as well as we can in this life) what the pains of that day shall be to accurst souls. But those we shall consider afterward in their proper scene; ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... I, "there was once a man named Dr. Chovet. He lived in London. A gentleman who turned highwayman was to be hanged. You see," said I, "this was about 1760. Well, his friends bribed the jailer and the hangman. The doctor cut a hole in the man's windpipe, very low down where it could be partly hid by a loose cravat. So, as they hanged him only a little while, and the breath went in and out of the opening below the noose, he was only just insensible when ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... social relationships; but great as these changes were, they were trivial in comparison with the changes in religious thought and the criticism of moral ideals. Hell was the basis of religious thinking in A.D. 1800, and the hangman was at the back of the law; in 1900 both Hell and the hangman seemed on the verge of extinction. The creative impulse was everywhere replacing fear and compulsion in human motives. The opening decade ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... fetch persuader. Constable protests and is persuaded. (Laughter.) Enter ghost—not clear whose ghost, but any ghost in a storm. Punch unnerved. Ghost gibbers. Punch more unnerved. Ghost gibbers again. Punch terrified. Exit ghost and enter hangman, to whom Punch, unstrung by recent encounter with apparition, falls an easy prey. Curtain. You bow from the mouth of the booth. I adjust nose and collect money in diminutive tin ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... the "Note and Query" tribe can tell the story, I hope they will. Where is this monument? I was riding on an English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.—What is that?—I said.—That, —answered the coachman,—is THE HANGMAN'S PILLAR. Then he told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head, and started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, caught him by the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... seen in the morning all right. After a preliminary flurry of ejaculation, he locked the door behind him and began to talk.... Don't ask me what he said, because I didn't hear. When the rope's round your neck, you're apt to miss the subtleties of the hangman's charge. After a time I realised that he was asking me a question. I stared at him dully and shook my head. With a gesture of despair, ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... or war! My word as a gentleman never to say anything of you, never to do anything against you; on your side, a solemn oath to remain neutral with respect to me. If not, I will apply to the chancellor, I will apply to the king, I will apply to the hangman, I will move the courts against you, I will denounce you as branded, I will bring you to trial; and if you are acquitted, well, by the faith of a gentleman, I will kill you at the corner of some wall, as I would ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... I quit the subject, to say a word or two respecting the minister of justice in this country; in plain words, I mean the hangman. It has always appeared to me that, in the mode of inflicting capital punishments with us, there is too much of the ministry of the human hand. The guillotine, as performing its functions more of itself and sparing human ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... there were things you could not explain, like the banshee; or the Naked Hangman, who strides through the valleys on midsummer's eve with his gallows under his arm; or the Death Coach, with its headless horses and its headless driver. There was no use bringing these matters up to Uncle ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Elizabeth's reign, and what the horrors of the Cromwellian wars were to complete - the thorough fusion of Irish and Anglo-Norman Catholics, both transplanted to Connaught, perishing under the sword of the soldier, the rope of the hangman, or dying of starvation in the recesses of their mountains - united forever in the bonds ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Bishop Hall's 'scoganisms,' from Scogan, Edward the Fourth's jester, or his 'aretinisms,' from Aretin; these being probably not intended even by their authors to endure; a Roman cobbler named Pasquin has given us the 'pasquil' or 'pasquinade.' Derrick was the common hangman in the time of Charles II.; he bequeathed his name to the crane used for the lifting and moving of heavy weights. [Footnote: [But derick in the sense of 'gallows' occurs as early as 1606 in Dekker's Seven Deadly Sins of London, ed. Arber, p. 17; see Skeat's Etym. Dict., ed. 2, p. ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... chances were that he would either punish you himself or invoke the law to do it for him; while if you removed him by means of the garrot, the knife or the poisoned glass, no matter how discreetly the deed was done the hangman was pretty sure to get you sooner or later. But the gang—it was as safe as an epidemic! The fact was not lost upon the community. People in almost every station of life appreciated it at its true worth, and, encouraged by the example of the Admiralty, availed ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... past. The dwelling to which the average Anglo-Saxon will most promptly direct his steps, and the only one I have space to mention, is the so-called Maison de Tristan l'Hermite—a gentleman whom the readers of "Quentin Durward" will not have forgotten—the hangman-in-ordinary to that great and prompt chastener Louis XI. Unfortunately the house of Tristan is not the house of Tristan at all; this illusion has been cruelly dispelled. There are no illusions left at all, in the good city of Tours, with regard to Louis ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... rose of the grand portal and the arches of the apse? And what 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 more than a century has not yet caused it to lose its color." He ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... rattled across the little stone bridge, Dick glanced to his left at the Hangman's Oak, the motor-cycle and the two men; saw foolish, innocent grins break through the suspicion on the two bad faces, and, jovially lifting his whip, waved ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... order was become so scandalously common in France, that, to order to suppress it, the hangman was vested with the ensigns of it, which ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... 1908 the total of executions reached the appalling figure of 3629. This is but to translate into criminal statistics the story just quoted; for the years 1905-8 were the years when martial law reigned in Russia, the years of revolution. The Tsar, it is true, wore the black cap, and the hangman's rope was manipulated by the bureaucracy, but the jury who brought in the verdict was a jury of 145 ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... country. One Treasury dignitary, named Wilke (who had "dealt in tall recruits," as a kind of by-trade, and played foul in some slight measure), the King was clear for hanging; his poor Wife galloped to Potsdam, shrieking mercy; upon which Friedrich Wilhelm had him whipt by the hangman, and stuck for life into Spandau. Still more tragical—was poor Hesse's case. Hesse, some domain Rath out at Konigsberg, concerned with moneys, was found with account-books in a state of confusion, and ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... carried to Renfrew, thence to Glasgow, and on the 20th of June was led in triumph into Edinburgh. The order of the council was particular: that he should be led bareheaded in the midst of Graham's guards, with their matches cocked, his hands tied behind his back, and preceded by the common hangman, in which situation, that he might be more exposed to the insults and taunts of the vulgar, it was directed that he should be carried to the castle by a circuitous route. To the equanimity with which he bore these ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... Hangin''s the fit and proper punishment for hoss-stealin', but man-stealin''s so great a crime that I'm not right sure what the punishment is. Now, we don't know much 'bout boats and ropes,—though we can tie a hangman's knot when necessary,—but we do know somethin' 'bout guns and human natur'—here, you, come ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... it be otherwise?' asked the constable. 'Or why was he so terrified at sight o' the singing instrument of the law who sat there?' Here he related the strange behaviour of the third stranger on entering the house during the hangman's song. ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... threats of what he wanted to do. They silenced him by leading him to the wall and adjusting the noose. Once more Rogers besought him to pray and then, when he again burst into oaths, they thrust him off. The fall was as effective as ever hangman devised. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... a marked figure in any company which his ubiquitous presence animated. He knew everybody of note in the fashionable and semifashionable world, and many who belonged to neither, such as the Tichborne Claimant, and Calcraft, the common hangman; and his views of life, from whatever point he looked at it, were expressed with a weighty brilliance or a subcynical humor. One day when lunching at Chelston Cross he was asked by Mrs. William Froude if he was, or had ever been, a Mason. "No," ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... uttered a cry, then plunged through the crowd like a bull, but the lariat loop slipped to his neck and tightened like a hangman's noose. ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... by thy own confession, caitiff," said the king, "and thou knowest upon what terms alone thou canst save thyself from the hangman, and ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... lynchings, more mob murders in India or Turkey or Persia than in some Christian States of the great Republic. Neither will you find more train robbers, more forgers, more thieves in heathen lands than in Christian countries. Here the jails are full, the penitentiaries are crowded, and the hangman is busy. All over Christendom, as many assert, crime is on the increase, going hand in hand with poverty. The truth is, that some of the wisest and best men are filled with apprehension for the future, but I believe in the race and have ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... by resolving that every member should, on pain of expulsion, take the sacrament according to the form prescribed by the old Liturgy, and that the Covenant should be burned by the hangman in Palace Yard. An act was passed, which not only acknowledged the power of the sword to be solely in the King, but declared that in no extremity whatever could the two Houses be justified in withstanding him by force. Another act was passed which required ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... business, that it became a proverb, when a man 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, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... 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 instruction ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... don't know." [He drags Bixiou back into his cabinet, and says in a low voice] "My good fellow, your way of helping people is like that of the hangman who jumps upon a victim's shoulders to break his neck. You got me into a scrape with des Lupeaulx, which my folly in ever trusting you richly deserved. A fine thing indeed, that article on La Billardiere. I sha'n't forget the trick! Why, the very first sentence was ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... months I've been chained up here—after I was committed for trial. When I came out of the hospital after curing me of that wound—for I was hit bad by that black tracker—they gave me some books to read for fear I'd go mad and cheat the hangman. I was always fond of reading, and many a night I've read to poor old mother and Aileen before I left the old place. I was that weak and low, after I took the turn, and I felt glad to get a book to take me away from sitting, staring, ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... "In Hangman's Lane, ma'am, where the gibbet used to stand," replied John, who was bringing in the muffins. "It's no nonsense, my lady. Every word as that man says comes ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... would take such terms?" asked Balian in dismay. "Rather, I think, would she choose to die by her own hand than by that of your hangman, since she ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... King Arthur agreed, "I have found no fancy to act as hangman to him. For knave and villain though he is, yet is he still a king. ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... the war with Holland brought the earl into popular disfavour, and his unpopularity was increased by the sale of Dunkirk to the French. Court intrigues led to the loss of his offices and he retreated to Calais. An apology which he sent to the Lords was ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. For six years, till his death in Rouen, he lived in exile, but he was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey. His private character in a dissolute age was unimpeachable. Anne Hyde, daughter of the earl, became Queen of England, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... known this handsome youngster when he was but a little lad; had taught him how to bend the Indian bow and loose the reed-shaft arrow in those happier days before the tyrant Governor Tryon turned hangman, and the battle of the Great Alamance had left me fatherless. Moreover, I had drunk a cup of wine with him at the Mecklenburg Arms no longer ago than yesterweek—this to a renewal of our early friendship. Hence, I must needs be somewhat taken aback when he drew rein ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... physician grants the husband's prayers, Or gives relief to long-expecting heirs. The sleeping hangman ties the fatal noose, Nor unsuccessful waits for dead ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... band of 'atheists' to which I refer. I have known some of the most pronounced among them not only in life but in death seen them approaching with open eyes the inexorable goal, with no dread of a 'hangman's whip,' with no hope of a heavenly crown, and still as mindful of their duties, and as faithful in the discharge of them, as if their eternal future depended upon their ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... bear to hear a writer talk of excommunicating him, tho they themselves afterward cut his head off. Prynne was summoned to appear before the Star Chamber; his wonderful book, from which Father Lebrun stole his, was sentenced to be burned by the common hangman, and himself to lose his ears.[45] His ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... then as much by the contagion of a general grief as by a sorrow of my own. But there was no general grief on Saturday. Swinburne had written for fifty years, and never once moved the nation, save inimically, when "Poems and Ballads" came near to being burnt publicly by the hangman. (By "the nation," I mean newspaper readers. The real nation, busy with the problem of eating, dying, and being born all in one room, has never heard of either Tennyson or Swinburne or George R. Sims.) There are poems of Tennyson, of Wordsworth, even of the speciously ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... were silver-mines long ago, and here lived Martin of Tours, to whom William the Conqueror granted the manor which to this day bears his name. The neighboring hills grow the best hemp in Devon, and the crags guarding the harbor are known as the Great and Little Hangman, the former, which is the higher, standing behind the other. The local tradition says that once a fellow who had stolen a sheep was carrying the carcase home on his back, having tied the hind legs ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... together with 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 a silken cord knotted at his ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... "Ah, Hangman," said Pierre, putting out his tongue at him, "are the books firm? I thought I felt ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... moment that Sin Sin Wa had checked the woman's murderous and half insane outburst Kerry had been contemplating attack. The sudden change of language on the part of the Chinaman had arrested him in the act; and, realizing that he was listening to a confession which placed the hangman's rope about the neck of Mrs. Sin, he lay ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... be transported. When the ship was full, crowded to her utmost, she sailed away with her living cargo. From Sixteen Hundred Fifty to Seventeen Hundred Fifty, over forty thousand people were sent away for their country's good. The hangman worked overtime, all prisons were crowded, and the walls of Newgate bulged with men and women, old and young, who were believed to be dangerous to the stability and well-being of the superior class—that is, those who had the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... 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, what a throat ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... last great lesson of our motley teacher—the gallows! that accursed tree which has its root in injuries. How clearly PUNCH exposes the fallacy of that dreadful law which authorises the destruction of life! PUNCH sometimes destroys the hangman: and why not? Where is the divine injunction against the shedder of man's blood to rest? None can answer! To us there is but ONE disposer of life. At other times PUNCH hangs the devil: this is as it should be. Destroy the principle of evil by increasing the means of cultivating the good, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... antagonist and shook his red cloth at him. Twice he let him pass under his arm. At the third attempt he thrust his blade up to the hilt into the neck of the beast. For another minute perhaps the bull rages, then he begins to bleed from his mouth, he totters and then collapses. Immediately a kind of hangman's assistant sneaks up from behind and plunges a dagger into the neck of the bull, who ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... vulgar abuse that defiled every page of the precious document. I soon flung it from me, thinking it worthy of the fate of many a better production in the olden times, that of being burned by the common hangman; but, happily, the office of hangman has become obsolete in Canada, and the editors of these refined journals may go on abusing their betters ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... 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 ...
— 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.
... them lying dead at the flat by Murrynebone Creek—Starlight with the half-caste making his wild moan over him; Jim, quiet in death as in life, lying in the grass, looking as if he had slid off his horse in that hot weather to take a banje; and now, no get away, the rope—the hangman! ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... the death of a traitor," said the secular chiefs, "and let his tongue be struck through with the hangman's fiery iron to avenge ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... your hands are life and death! The hangman is your instrument; the judge upon the bench is but your assistant. Seek not to shirk your liability; do not trust to others to shield you. On the way in which you discharge your duty to-day depends the most solemn and awful of all considerations—a human life. If ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... the beginning nor the end of a wail, but something like it. Minute by minute it came more clearly, now growing in volume, now almost dying away, but every instant approaching—the distant hunting call of the wolf-pack! What the hangman's noose is to the murderer, what the leveled rifles are to the condemned spy, that hunt-cry of the wolves is to the wounded ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... are tired of your life, young man! All the more reason have you to live. Anyone can die. A murderer has moral force enough to jeer at his hangman. It is very easy to draw the last breath. It can be accomplished successfully by a child or a warrior. One pang of far less anguish than the toothache, and all is over. There is nothing heroic about it, I assure you! It is as common as going to bed; it is almost prosy. LIFE ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... lass was 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
... quite possible that they served as refuges as well to the Catholics, when the Calvinists had the upper hand; as, indeed, they had for long. Their attempts at proselytising was not with velvet gloves, but with fire-brand, sword, and the hangman's rope. In that horrible period, exceeding far in barbarity that of the routiers in the Hundred Years' War, it is hard to decide on which side the ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of me," interrupted Conniston. "That's the funny part of it, Keith. That's where the humor comes in. I had you all tied up and scheduled for the hangman when—bing!—along comes a cold snap that bites a corner of my lung, and the tables are turned. And instead of doing to me as I was going to do to you, instead of killing me or making your getaway while I was helpless—Keith—old pal—YOU'VE ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... repetition of the previous day—a terribly hard two and a half miles. We all had "hangman's drops" into crevasses. One snow-bridge, ten feet wide, fell in as the meter following the twelve-foot sledge was ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... the prisoner Hulett, witnesses ("not to be admitted upon oath against the king") deposed that the common hangman, Richard Brandon, had frequently confessed (though he had also denied) that he had beheaded the king. One of these depositions, that of William Cox, is so remarkable that I am induced to transcribe it. If it be true, "Matfelonensis" is certainly ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... a heller; my father was hangman of Lucerne, and when he died, his body was seized to pay ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... to miss a word. A great deal of what had been obscure was being cleared up. But so far nothing that Grell had said but could be interpreted as a motive—and a singularly strong one—which might in other circumstances weave a hangman's rope about his ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... as openly as the Ministers. Doctor Quesnay often, in my presence, flew in such a rage about that infamous Minister, as he called him, that he foamed at the mouth. "I would as soon dine with the hangman as with the Postmaster-General," said the Doctor. It must be acknowledged that this was astonishing language to be uttered in the apartments of the King's mistress; yet it went on for twenty years ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 1 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... England," and marked as an 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 ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... pause that ensued the madman bent over his worktable, seized a knife that lay there and dropped on one knee beside the prostrate form. His hand was raised to strike when a calm voice said: "Fie! Cardillac, for shame! Do not belittle yourself. This man here is not worthy of your knife, the hangman will ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... on the 7th of November; and he now came forward, the poor indomitable man, with a speech of vast length and most elaborate composition, in favour of that sovereign whose reign had been to him of all men ruinous and horrible. With his face muffled to hide the scars of his old mutilations by the hangman's knife, he stood up, and, after a touching recitation of all that he had suffered, denounced the Army and its outrages on Parliamentary freedom, expounded his views of Presbyterianism and right constitutional government, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... Nell's caravan; and runs entirely wild in Barnaby Rudge, where, with a corps de drame composed of one idiot, two madmen, a gentleman fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a blackguard, a hangman, a shrivelled virago, and a doll in ribands—carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs the hangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs the gentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes the shop-boy ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... own ship; but that he is in great disgrace, and Trump in better favour; that Bankert's ship is burned, himself hardly escaping with a few men on board De Haes; that fifteen captains are to be tried the seventh of August; and that the hangman was sent from Flushing to assist the Council of Warr. How much of this is true, time will shew. Thence to Westminster Hall and walked an hour with Creed talking of the late fight, and observing the ridiculous management thereof ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the 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
... you to come, for Louis XIV. has proclaimed you to be a converted Catholic, and if you refuse you will be at once subject to all the penalties of heresy." It was certainly very difficult to argue with a priest who had the hangman at his back, or with the King who had his hundred thousand dragoons. And so, perhaps, the threatened Huguenot went to Mass, and pretended to believe all that the priest had said about his ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... roof of the Vatican. In this 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, ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... in politics what they would do in nothing else. Is this the plea? If so, the rejoinder is, that the mighty conspiracy includes the whole circle of Artists of all kinds, and comprehends all degrees of men, down to the worst criminal and the hangman who ends his career. For, all these are intimately known to the London Correspondent of the Tattlesnivel Bleater, and all ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... obey his Stadtholder, the Prince, who reigns in his name. The perjured hangman needs a guardian. Ask ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Coutu, after that they have passed the sallett, att their entering in to the village, and the rencounters that they meet ordinarily in the wayes, as above said. They tie the prisoners to a poast by their hands, their backs tourned towards the hangman, who hath a bourning fire of dry wood and rind of trees, which doth not quench easily. They putt into this fire hattchets, swords, and such like instruments of Iron. They take these and quench them on human flesh. They pluck out their nailes for the most part in this sort. They ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... picked myself slowly up off the floor, I became aware of the gleam of a lantern approaching me, and heard a footstep coming down the hall. It was too dark to see who it was till he was close up; then, with a gasp, I recognised Marwood, the hangman! ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... disguise, in pulling down Lothbury turn-pike, with one Baylis, (reprieved, and transported for 14 years,) was carried to Tyburn, where, having prayed and sung psalms, he was turned off, and being thought dead, was cut down by the hangman as usual, who had procured a hole to be dug at some distance from the gallows, to bury him in; but just as they had put him into his coffin, and were about to fasten him up, he thrust back the lid, and to the astonishment ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... part of the Union. The sailors and shipowners of Portsmouth burned Jay and Grenville in effigy, together with a miniature ship of seventy tons. In Charleston, the flags were put at half-mast and the public hangman burned copies of the treaty in the open street. While remonstrating with a disorderly crowd in Wall Street which was vilifying Jay, Hamilton was stoned and forced to give way with the blood streaming down his face. Personal abuse of the coarsest kind was heaped upon ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... a-staling. This object swives girls enow, and fancies himself a handsome fellow, and is not condemned to the mill as an ass? Whatso girl would touch thee, we think her capable of licking the breech of a leprous hangman. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... (so long after date and so unvouched), so far as family annals were concerned, the remedy would be as bad as the disease. Moreover, he owed his life to me, at great risk of my own; and to pay such a debt with the hangman's rope would scarcely appear quite honorable, even in the ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... bad living with these brothers of mine who are thieves to the very bone. Moreover, you know the rhyme, 'Though the thief may thrive for many a day, he becomes at last the hangman's prey.' So it is my wish and counsel that we separate from them at once and for ever, and go and live at your father's house, where, though we may not be so rich, we shall at any rate be ...
— The Story of Tim • Anonymous
... then, the soul of honour—there he stands Frank as ten years ago when knighted first. What honest man should dare (he said) he durst. Good—but the scene shifts—faugh! what hangman hands Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands Read it. Poor traitor, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... this the fine village? isn't this the exceeding village? The village where there be that many rogues hanged that the people have no want of ropes with all the ropes that they steal from the hangman! ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... of evening coolness, Ben again made preparation for the journey. Neither of the men made reference to the incidents of the day, but on Tom Blair's face there was a new expression, like that of a criminal on his passage from the cell to the hangman's trap. If the younger man saw it, he gave no sign; and as on the night before, they jogged ahead. Before daylight broke, the comparatively smooth bed of Bad River merged into the irregular surface of the Missouri. ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... be 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, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... 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 be betther not to slip ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... my comrades, but was afraid those two would hear. The comrades were also silent. Evidently everybody knew. In the corridors and in the cells everything was as still as death all that evening. They did not tap the wall nor sing. At ten the watchman came again and announced that a hangman had arrived from Moscow. He said it and went away. I began calling him back. Suddenly I hear Rozovsky shouting to me across the corridor: 'What's the matter? Why do you call him?' I answered something about asking him to get me some tobacco, but he seemed to guess, and ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... times he could not hope that proud Lord 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 ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... tracts relating to the civil war, which were given to the British Museum by his late majesty King George III. in 1762, there are three upon this subject. One is entitled, 'The Confession of Richard Brandon the Hangman (upon his death-bed), concerning his beheading his late Majesty. Printed in the year of the hangman's downfall, 1649.' The second is entitled, 'The last Will and Testament of Richard Brandon,' printed in the same year. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... save you, worshipful Sheriff!" said the palmer. "Heaven protect you! What will you give a silly old man to-day to be your hangman?" ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... that she was always early. In every respect she was an energetic woman, using her 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 ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... having successfully stolen a march upon the hangman, was breathing the free air of the French seaport, Miss Blandy, in her cell in Oxford Castle, was preparing for her trial. She had at first entrusted her defence to one Mr. Newell, an attorney of Henley, ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... murder, one for treason. Treason, indeed! What did the poor devil know about his new allegiance? But so it was; and as the jail was overstocked with others awaiting trial, it was deemed expedient to hasten the execution, and the culprits were sentenced to be hung on the following Friday—hangman's day. ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... was Verity, awaiting Bulmer's visit as a criminal awaits a hangman. There was no shred of hope in his mind that his one-time crony would raise a finger to save him from bankruptcy. Some offenses are unforgivable, and high in the list ranks the folly of separating a wealthy old ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... reasons, because there is nobody else. These men's lives being therefore forfeited to society, belong to us; and it does not follow because they were not all killed in the attempt, that therefore they are not now to be brought out for punishment. And as there is no common hangman here, we, of course, must do this duty as well as every other. I have now clearly proved that I am justified in what I am about to do. But the argument does not stop there— self-preservation is the first law of nature, and if we do not get rid of this man, what is the consequence?—that we ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... against him, as they so often do. Some such insane conviction must have been at the root of it. But who can sound the abysses of a lunatic's fancy? Can you imagine the state of mind in which a man dooms himself to death with the object of delivering some one he hates to the hangman?' ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... quickly gliding down a few feet over the edge of the shelf, where he lay so as to put a rock between him and the mouth of the cave. "But, on the whole, I am glad of it; for I had rather see him go by the hand of the hangman than my own." ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... earned more than you'll ever get paid in this life, and there's a tolerably heavy bill against you for the next. It looks to me as if it would be a good thing if you went off there to settle up the account right now. But I'm not going to take upon myself to be your hangman. I'm just going to give you a chance of pegging out, and I sincerely hope you'll take it. I've brought our friend here to be your room mate for the evening. It's just about nightfall now, and you've got to stay with him ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... cries, "God bless his majesty!" loudest. That rails on all men condemned and out of favour, and the first that says "away with the traitors!"—yet struck with much ruth at executions, and for pity to see a man die, could kill the hangman. That comes to London to see it, and the pretty things in it, and, the chief cause of his journey, the bears. That measures the happiness of the kingdom by the cheapness of corn, and conceives no harm ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, has been the aim and the achievement of many recent authors of distinction. How they have succeeded, let the populous state of the public jails attest. The office of 'dubsman' [hangman] has ceased to be a sinecure, and the public and Mr Joseph Hume have the satisfaction of knowing that these useful functionaries have now got something to do for their salaries. The number of their pupils has increased, is ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... the dram; Oh it came of a dainty cask! But, whenever it came to his turn to pull, "Your leave, good sir, I must ask; But I always wipe the brim with my sleeve, When a hangman sups at ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Look out, boys! Clear the track! The witches are here! They've all come back! They hanged them high,—No use! No use! What cares a witch for a hangman's noose? They buried them deep, but they wouldn't lie still, For cats and witches are hard to kill; They swore they shouldn't and wouldn't die,— Books said they did, but they ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... noble 'squire. Just now, it was all idiot, cub, and run me through the guts. Damn YOUR way of fighting, I say. After we take a knock in this part of the country, we kiss and be friends. But if you had run me through the guts, then I should be dead, and you might go kiss the hangman. ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... fellow-creature upon very slight provocation; who had been tried for murder, and acquitted because the crime was sanctioned by the usages of society; and who, moreover, in the estimation of many people, richly deserved the hangman's noose—such language, under the circumstances, was not merely injudicious and unfeeling, but positively revolting. The only conceivable excuse that can be made for it arises from the fact that Jarvis was at the time irritated ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... lad," he said, entering the cell and offering me his hand. "They've not put the hangman's rope round your neck ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... wit and licensed joker. Of course I soon became acquainted with some students, and was entered at the University, and got the card which exempted me from being arrested by any save the University beadles. I believe that we even had our own hangman, but as none of my friends ever had occasion for his services I did not inquire. The same ticket also entitled me to attend the opera at half-price, and if it had only included tobacco and beer gratis, it would have been ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... murder it would have been, to have sent hundreds of men into eternity, without giving them an inch of fair fighting ground. I would not have minded blowing up the British government—that I could have done myself without any more sting of conscience than the hangman feels; but soldiers and seamen fight fairly and openly for their country's honor and rights, as they understand those things, and they should be met in ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... a moment he added: "You've saved the hangman a job, Pat. I don't know anybody Washington County could spare better. There'll ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... wax-work of Nell's caravan; and runs entirely wild in "Barnaby Budge," where, with a corps de drame composed of one idiot, two madmen, a gentleman-fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a blackguard, a hangman, a shriveled virago, and a doll in ribbons—carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs the hangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs the gentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes the shop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be content ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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
... had rather cheat the hangman. I told those doctors yesterday that they were giving themselves and me a great deal of useless trouble. The villains, as I told you, could not believe we should not betray them, and meant to make an end of us all. It's best as it is. My poor ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... speake indifferently, it is the hangman's Budget; and because he thought too much of his labour to set this head upon the bridge, and the legs upon the gates, he flings them into the streete for men to stumble at, but If I get him in my boate, Ile so belabour him in a stretcher, that he had better be stretcht ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... there is no whip near, the village will be quickly lost. A good beating at the proper time is the best antidote for all sorts of poisons; for, in the end, fear guards the vineyard. In punishments, let him show himself a father, not a hangman; and, in case of doubt, let him incline rather to mildness than to severity. Let him hear quarrels and discussions with the alcaldes, but let him not allow them to fleece his sheep. Let him defend his own jurisdiction, but not usurp that of another. Let him not ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... 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 ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... She was woke up a-smelling of smoke, and screeched out, and alarmed the house, and all run out here. Be careful there, Jovial! Don't be afraid of singing your old wool nor breaking your old neck either! because if you did you'd only be saving the hangman and the devil trouble. Go nearer to that window! dash the water full upon ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... French ambassador at Lisbon, who sent some tobacco plants to Catherine de Medicis in 1560. He also compiled the first Old French dictionary. The gallows-shaped contrivance called a derrick perpetuates the name of a famous hangman who officiated in London about 1600. It is a Dutch name, identical with Dietrich, Theodoric, and Dirk (Hatteraick). Conversely the Fr. potence, gallows, meant originally a bracket or support, Lat. potentia, power. The origin of darbies, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... had passed muster; they were clear of her, they were safe away; and the water widened between them and her damning evidences. On the other hand, they were drawing nearer to the ship of war, which might very well prove to be their prison and a hangman's cart to bear them to the gallows—of which they had not yet learned either whence she came or whither she was bound; and the doubt weighed upon their heart ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... chestnut trees west of the road where it tops the hill is pointed out as the gallows tree, although early accounts speak of a rough gallows having been erected. There is a story to the effect that one Hans Anderson, a farmer of the neighborhood, was the hangman, and that he was finally worried into his grave by the ghost of this same spy, who would not leave him in peace; but no mention is made of the tough old General having ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... he's drunk Licksy—hangman won't get him. I heard a man say Jack 'd get off wi' twenty year ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... grant are strange; yet may be true. 10 Who doubts that elephants are found For science and for sense renowned? Borri records their strength of parts, Extent of thought, and skill in arts; How they perform the law's decrees, And save the state the hangman's fees; And how by travel understand The language of another land. Let those, who question this report, To Pliny's ancient page resort; 20 How learn'd was that sagacious breed! Who now (like them) the Greek can read! As one ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... a short interval was placed in a cart, to which a horse was attached, and taken straightway to the gallows. Here a rope was suspended, with a noose, or running knot, at the end, which was placed round the culprit's neck, and after other preliminaries the hangman saw to it that the man's hands were securely handcuffed and the noose carefully adjusted. At a given signal from him the cart was drawn from under the man's feet, leaving him swinging and struggling for breath in the air, where he remained till life was extinct. The judge when passing the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... prosecuted in the Star Chamber, and sentenced to pay a fine to the King of L5,000, to be expelled from the University of Oxford, from the Society of Lincoln's Inn, and from his profession of the law; to stand twice in the pillory, each time losing an ear; to have his book burnt before his face by the hangman; and to suffer perpetual imprisonment: a most barbarous sentence, which Green[71] says, "showed the ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... The hangman then came up, and, tying a halter round the neck of the effigy, dragged it off to a place where a gibbet had been erected, and hanged ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... and plenty to spend, with a seasoning of danger to give it piquancy—a gentleman's life from cock-crow to cock-crow, and not worthy of a passing thought is he who cannot make a good end of it. I'd sooner have the hangman for a bosom friend than a man who is likely to whimper on the day of reckoning. Did I tell you that a reverend bishop offered me fifty guineas for my mare ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... attractive in style, and so clear and popular that a child might understand them, gained immediate attention; but the Jesuits, whose policy and doctrines they attacked, finally induced the parliament of Provence to condemn them to be burned by the common hangman; and the Port Royalists, refusing to renounce their opinions, were driven from their retreat, and the establishment broken up. Pascal's masterpiece is the "Pensees de la Religion;" it consists of fragments of thought, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 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
... been kept complete. Oft has it felt the earthquake shock That made the strongest building rock. And more than once 'gone up' in smoke Till scarce a building sheltered folk. The citizens can point to spots Where people fashioned hangman's knots With nimble fingers, to supply Some hardened rogues a hempen tie, Whom Vigilantes and their friends Saw ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... believe the story, resting assured that if you are taken in the thing shall be a matter for the hangman. ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... thou dost not look horrid enough, Thou hast too good a face to be a hangman: If thou be, do thy office in right form; Fall down upon thy ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... men—like ourselves—who break them. Yet, in our heart of hearts we are antagonistic to most of the laws, and to the Law as a whole (which we regard as an ass), and to the police magistrates and the judges. And we hate lawyers and loathe spies, pimps, and informers of all descriptions and the hangman with all our soul. For the Soul of Man says: Thou shalt not refuse refuge to the outcast, and thou ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... blushed deeper had she guessed who had been witnesses of her first meeting with Contarini, and old Beroviero's temper would have broken out furiously if he could have imagined that the Greek pirate who had somehow miraculously escaped the hangman in Naples had been contemplating with satisfaction the progress of the marriage negotiations, sure that he himself should before long be enjoying the better part of Marietta's rich dowry. If the old man could have had ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... strikes. It is the hour of execution. Dorothea begins to sob, and Gentleman Jim clenches his hands. The back of the stage opens to disclose a street, a crowd, a hangman, and the fatal Tyburn tree. Faint cheers are heard from the wings. The sheriff enters, bearing in his hand a reprieve, written apparently on a window-blind. He is attended by the comic servant, through whose mysterious agency a pardon has been granted, and who ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... might have to undertake the unpleasant office, that they would have given the prospective victim almost anything he liked, on the principle of letting the condemned criminal choose what he prefers for his final meal before that brief interview with the hangman. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... in the likeness of an old man," said the peasant. "His voice is as soft as that of a bridegroom; but his words are the words of a hangman, and his eyes dart fire like those of an evil spirit. Even his own men have nothing good to say of him. His generals call him a selfish old man, who wants to do every thing, and knows nothing. He has not ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... "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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... told what you have done there will be no need of courts, or judges, or lawyers for you. Like a wild beast you will be hunted down; you will be trampled under foot; you will be torn to pieces! Fire, the sword, the hangman's noose, clubs, and crowbars will not be enough to satisfy the vengeance of an outraged people upon a cold-blooded wretch who came to this country solely for the purpose of perpetrating a crime more awful than anything that was ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... sanction to civil morality, is of use for keeping society in order, at least the lower classes, who have not the feeling of Honour in due force; and therefore, as a considerable help to the Constable and Hangman, /ought/ decidedly to be kept up. But such toleration is the fruit only of later days. In those times, there was no question but how to get rid of it, root and branch, the sooner the better. A gleam of zeal, nay we will call ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... discontent, say I; but is the workingman such a fool that his eyes are not opened when a man of Bismarck's way of thinking, when an autocrat like the Emperor have favored state socialism! Does he not see that socialism is the neatest hangman of them all to strangle his discontent! Does he not see the demagogue gradually assuming the features and the powers of the tyrant! Tyranny is not alone the prerogative of an aristocracy. "It is the place of a court to make its ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... Daughter's husband, and to his descendants, or, failing them, to their executors, administrators, and assigns, I solemnly commit the task of seeking out such envious Rogues, and of kicking and firking them on the basest part of their base bodies. The stab I forego; I wish not to cheat the hangman of his due, or the Rev. Mr. Villette of a sermon. But let the knaves discover, to the aching of their scald sides, that even the Ghost of John Dangerous is not to ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... to hear, that he was giving away the meat at cost price and even at a loss to himself. He gave short weight and short change, the cooks saw that, but, deafened by his shouts, did not protest, and only called him a hangman. Brandishing and bringing down his terrible chopper he threw himself into picturesque attitudes, and each time uttered the sound "Geck" with a ferocious expression, and I was afraid he really would chop off ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to infamy resign'd. When frailty leads astray the soul sincere, Let mercy shed the soft and manly tear. When to the grave descends the sensual sot, Unnamed, unnoticed, let his carrion rot. When paltry rogues, by stealth, deceit, or force, Hazard their necks, ambitious of your purse: For such the hangman wreaths his trusty gin, And let the gallows expiate their sin. 140 But when a ruffian, whose portentous crimes, Like plagues and earthquakes terrify the times, Triumphs through life, from legal judgment free, For Hell may hatch what law could ne'er foresee: ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the Restoration (1660) came disaster to the blind Puritan poet, who had written too harshly against Charles I to be forgiven by Charles II. He was forced to hide; his property was confiscated; his works were burned in public by the hangman; had not his fame as a writer raised up powerful friends, he would have gone to the scaffold when Cromwell's bones were taken from the grave and hanged in impotent revenge. He was finally allowed to settle in a modest house, and to be in peace so long as he remained ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... commenced forthwith, and the whole of them were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. Borri's trial proceeded in his absence, and lasted for upwards of two years. He was condemned to death as a heretic and sorcerer in 1661, and was burned in effigy in Rome by the common hangman. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... hangman's whip To hand the wretch in order; But where ye feel your honor grip, Let that aye be your border. 694 BURNS: ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... fly in superstitious fear. She recovers consciousness, and voices from invisible singers, tell her of the selfish inspirations of Osaka, Kyoto, and her blind father; Osaka's desire baffled by fate—such is life! Kyoto's slavery to pleasure and a hangman's reward;—such is life! The blind man's dependence on his child for creature comforts;—such is life! Iris bemoans her fate as death comes gently to her. The sky grows rosy and the light brings momentary life. She stretches out her ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Grecian's doctrine of necessity; but he had it in his heart that night, when he felt himself innocent, and was at the same time assured that all the kind efforts of his friends would not save him from his fate—a hangman's rope and the ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope |
