"Decapitated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... views show the larger of the two comparatively modern and small craters on the broad platform left by the explosion which decapitated the Peak. Prof. Flett measured this crater, and found it 1,600 feet from north to south, and 1,450 feet from east to west. The other, much smaller, adjoins it so closely that their rims touch. Together they form an eminence of 1,000 feet (Crater Peak), at a distance ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... the dilemma to which Noah, by an indiscretion at court, was suddenly reduced; and, but for my prompt interference, he would probably have been simultaneously decapitated at both extremities, in obedience to an etiquette which prescribes that, under the circumstances of a court trial, neither the king's nor the queen's rights shall be entitled to precedence. In defence of my client I urged his ignorance of the usages of the country, and, indeed, of ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... fixes its neck within a forked or Y-shaped stick fixed fast in the ground. With one blow the animal's head is severed from its body. The bleeding head is carried off into the shrine to be laid before the image of the goddess, and become the temple perquisite. The decapitated body is carried off by the offerer to furnish his family with a holiday meal. With his forehead ceremonially marked with a touch of the blood lying thick upon the ground, the offerer leaves the temple, his sacrifice finished. Such is animal ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... brain is not the sole organ of the mind is in a measure substantiated by a wonderful case of a decapitated rooster, reported from Michigan. A stroke of the knife bad severed the larynx and removed the whole mass of the cerebrum, leaving the inner aspect and base of the skull exposed. The cerebrum was partly removed; the external auditory meatus was preserved. Immediately ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... have been executed by the court of justice are not by any means buried in the graves of their ancestors; but there are two graves appointed for them by the court of justice,—one for the stoned and burnt; the other for the decapitated and strangled." Just as the Prophet had, in the preceding verse, said that the Servant of God would die a violent death like a criminal, so he says here, that they had also fixed for Him a grave ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... supposedly solemn Senior, tumbling from the Senior fence and rolling on the campus like a decapitated rooster. "Hip-hip-hooray! Ring the bell, Beef, get the fellows out, have the Band ready, Oh, where is Coach Corridan? Read it, Beef, Theophilus, Phillyloo. Oh, Hicks is coming ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... having seen all the examinations and the entire confessions, ordered that the delinquents should be drawn through the streets at the tails of horses and afterward decapitated. ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... run like a cart horse. No one can be always at the "top of his form." But after making all allowances for human weakness and occasional lapses, when he once reached a definite conclusion he was as abrupt and remorseless as a guillotine. Many a hopeful athlete had been decapitated so swiftly and neatly, that, like the man in the fable, he did not know his head was off until ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... their victim and his attendants, to go to Lower Sandusky, and there execute the sentence which they had pronounced upon him. But what was their surprise and disappointment, when they arrived at the place of encampment, where they found their trusty friends scalped and decapitated, and that their prisoner had made his escape?—Chagrined beyond measure, they immediately separated, and went in every direction in pursuit of their prey; but after having spent a number of days unsuccessfully, they gave up the chase, and returned to their ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... man blowing his head to pieces with a pistol-shot; a supposed corpse coming to life in its coffin; the First Napoleon in the flames of hell, with a multitude of women shaking at him the bloody severed limbs of their sons and husbands; a child burned alive in its cradle; the head of a decapitated criminal, and the visions that filled its brain,—such are some of the ghastly imaginings of this diseased and uneducated nature. Compare such works as these with Dore's crudest conceptions, and the difference between ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... when he saw the enemy within the walls; the rest either perished or were made slaves. Mutila and Faveria were also attacked and levelled with the ground, and quiet reigned in Istria. Livy says that at that time 5,622 persons were sold into slavery, the authors of the war were beaten and then decapitated, and Istria was garrisoned with Roman troops. In 129 B.C. the Istrians rose in revolt when Rome was occupied with the Gepid war. The Consul Caius Sempronius Tuditanus crushed this revolt, and after that colonies were established ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... the great shield or palette found by Mr. Quibell, we see the king coming out, followed by his sandal-bearer, the Hen-neter or "God's Servant,"* to view the dead bodies of the slain Northerners which lie arranged in rows, decapitated, and with their heads between their feet. The king is preceded by a procession ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... because a body that is partially immersed in water is disfigured by an effect of refraction, which a faithful painter would be bound to reproduce; because the image of the body could not be seen transparently through the stormy waters, and therefore the god would have the appearance of being decapitated; because it is indispensable, if you would avoid the impression of a surgical amputation, that some visible portion of hidden limbs should be there to inform us of the existence of the rest.[63] He takes another instance, where a description ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Italian possessions to Charles of Anjou, the brother of that King Louis of France who became famous as Saint Louis. This led to more warfare. Conrad V, the son of Conrad IV, and the last of the Hohenstaufens, tried to regain the kingdom, and was defeated and decapitated at Naples. But twenty years later, the French who had made themselves thoroughly unpopular in Sicily were all murdered during the so-called Sicilian Vespers, and ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... end of the eighteenth century, a bent was taken in the organisation of this machine, and a wrong bent. For three centuries and more the public power had unceasingly violated and discredited spontaneous bodies. At one time it had mutilated them and decapitated them. For example, it had suppressed provincial governments (etats) over three-quarters of the territory in all the electoral districts; nothing remained of the old province but its name and an administrative circumscription. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... when touched by the fluttering drapery of some worshipper to be the decapitated bodies of goats and bullocks lying in their blood, and from which would rise the millions of ever-moving flies which had given them a semblance of life ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... point to a test that never fails!' Here I gave him one of those pats on the shoulder so impressive, and pulled out a double-headed cent, like unto those so much in use in General Jackson's time, when shaving decapitated the deposits he found himself mounted on the back of a brass jackass. 'Here!' I continued—'Heads, I win; tails, you lose.' To come the sharp over him in a more square sort of way, I gave him an unmoved look straight in the eye, as I ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... is travelling with her husband and brother. The party meets brigands, and the two men are decapitated. Their heads are restored to them by the woman through the help of a magic herb revealed to her by a mouse. However, she gets her husband's head on her brother's body. Q.—Which man is the right husband? A.—The ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... was known. If any members of the family went to fight at sea, they collected some sea-weed to take with them. If in pursuit of a canoe, they threw out some of it to hinder the progress of the enemy, and make the chase successful in obtaining a decapitated head or two. If the enemy tried to pick up any of this deified sea-weed it immediately sank, but rose again and floated on the surface if one of its friends ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... ordered the messenger to behead the inflexible monk, and bring the head before the throne, in case he should disobey the order for the fourth time. As Tao Sin was told of the order of the Emperor, he stretched out his neck ready to be decapitated. The Emperor, learning from the messenger what had happened, admired all the more the imperturbable patriarch, and bestowed rich gifts upon him. This example of his was followed by later Zen masters, who would not condescend to bend their knees before temporal power, ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... sight of these ladders, and Gorgo could perceive by the trembling of the curtain near which she and Apuleius were standing, how deeply the physician was agitated. It was as though the axe had been displayed with which a king was about to be decapitated. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... blossomed and gone to seed till the harvest of flowers in their season was past gathering, and any child in the neighborhood was at liberty to pluck them by handfuls, while the wicked ones played at "chicken fighting" and littered the ground with decapitated bodies. There is no heartsease nowadays, only the magnificent pansy of which it was the modest forerunner. But one little cluster of dark, spicy blooms like those I used to gather in that old garden would be more to me than the most splendid pansy ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... made pets, like Miss Tabitha's snake or toad, Selwyn would have fondled a hangman. He loved the noble art of execution, and was a connoisseur of the execution of the art. In childhood he must have decapitated his rocking-horse, hanged his doll in a miniature gallows, and burnt his baubles at mimic stakes. The man whose calm eye was watched for the quiet sparkle that announced—and only that ever did announce it—the flashing wit within the mind, by a gay crowd of loungers ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... occupied by families with blood or social ties between them, and several such localities within a few hours' travel of one another form a friendly group. Outside of this group all other Ilongot as well as all other peoples are blood enemies, to be hunted, murdered and decapitated ...
— The Negrito and Allied Types in the Philippines and The Ilongot or Ibilao of Luzon • David P. Barrows
... poetry. But though you are tired and footsore, you are ready to æstheticise till the café closes; for you the homeless ones are waiting: there they are, some three or four, and you will take them to your strange room, furnished with the American organ, the fountain, and the decapitated Venus, and you will give them a crust each and cover them with what clothes you have; and, when clothes are lacking, with plaster casts, and though you will take but a glass of milk yourself, you ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... door and out into the yard. Then, after a little maneuvering, he caught a chicken, and going to the block, seized the ax, and soon decapitated it. ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the old oaks of hoary tyranny; his hymn was the Marseillaise of the spirit; he made a revolution and not with {716} rose-leaves, either, but with a certain, "divine brutality." He gave his people language, Kant gave them thought; Luther deposed the pope; Robespierre decapitated the king; Kant disposed of God: it was all one insurrection of Man against the same tyrant under ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... office door from the hall opened about a foot, a fat head in a gaunt bonnet protruded through the crevice, having rather a decapitated look, and ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... man who has been half decapitated," said he. "I do not know whether the execution is to be arrested and my wound healed, or whether it is to go on and my head roll ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... faded into silence. The men of the Yellows, so suddenly made leaderless and faced by enemies so many and determined, could not fuse into concerted action. They hesitated, looked foolishly at one another, and lost whatever chance they had of success. Messer Simone's body, almost decapitated from the stroke of Griffo, was fished up from underneath the hooves of his rearing charger, laid upon a dismounted door, covered with a cloak, and hurriedly conveyed away to his house. Madonna Vittoria, snatched just in time from the clutch of those cruel fingers, drew her breath in and out ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to the watchers that Miss Gillespie's head was thrust out through the tent opening, the canvas held together below her chin. Against the pale background, it was like the vision of a decapitated head hung on a ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... presume, an offering to the Evil Spirit; this is done in the following manner. A stake is driven into the ground close to the water's edge, to this the poor wretch is fastened, the head being pulled as high as possible to stretch the neck for the sword, by which he is to be decapitated, and after the deed is accomplished they carry the head through the ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... of her form; if I cast mine eyes upon the fire in the kitchen-grate, the coals will glow and cool until I see her face; nay, but yesterday, the shoulder of mutton upon the spit gyrated until it at last assumed the decapitated head of Mary. 'Think of her faults and magnify them'—nay, that were unjust and unchristian. Let me rather correct mine own. I fear me that when Ovid wrote his picture he intended it for the use of young men, ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... gallows:'—Or much rather by decapitation. Accordingly, we read of a Ming (i. e., native Chinese) emperor, who (upon finding himself in a dreadfully small minority) retired into his garden with his daughter, and there hanged both himself and the lady. On no account would he have decapitated either; since in that case the corpses, being headless, would in Chinese ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... platform over the finely sculptured porch, rich in foliage like the Folgoet, placed between the two towers, is the equestrian statue of King Gradlon, to whom is attributed the introduction of the vine into Brittany. The statue was decapitated in 1793, but restored ten years back. On St. Cecilia's day companies of musicians used to mount on the platform. While they sang a hymn in praise of King Gradlon, one of the choristers, provided with a flagon of wine, a napkin, and golden hanap, mounted on the ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... to the front veranda for a mild cigar after the mulberry just as she brought her scythe round with an admirable sweep and decapitated a whole ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... chief constable of the fleet, who was sent to do this by Ferdinand Magellan in a boat with certain men. The said three ships having thus been recovered, five days later Ferdinand Magellan ordered Gaspar de Quexixada to be decapitated and quartered; he was captain of one of the ships and was one ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... wrecked everything like vandals. Everything has been searched. Outside, throughout the country, the spectacle of the inhabitants who have been shot defies any description. They have been shot at such short range that they are almost decapitated. Every house has been ransacked to the furthest corners, and the inhabitants dragged from their hiding places. The men shot; the women and children locked into a convent, from which shots were fired. And, for this ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... animal is suddenly decapitated while in this hibernating condition, the action of the heart is not affected for some time, a second life seeming to outlive the one taken. An experiment has been made in which the brain of the sleeper was removed, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... broadsword in a flash, I dealt it such a blow upon the neck as quite to sever the head from the body. There was a gush of red blood; and those who have seen the antics of a decapitated chicken, may correspondingly multiply the corpse and imagine the confusion ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... breeze agitating the foliage, and by another to the sound emitted by the breaking of a harp-string. All agreed upon one point, the duration of the apparition, which they stated to have lasted about ten minutes. The black drapery, the decapitated victim, the stream of blood which had inundated the platform, all had disappeared with the phantoms; every trace had vanished except a crimson spot, which still stained the slipper of Charles, and which alone would have sufficed to remind him of the horrid vision, had it been possible ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... the New York Agricultural Experiment Station, the operation is very successfully performed on old vines as follows: Preparatory to grafting, the earth is removed from around the stock to a depth of two or three inches. The vines are then decapitated at the surface of the ground and at right angles with the axis of the stock. If the grain is straight, the cleft can be made by splitting with a chisel, but more often it will have to be done with a thin-bladed saw through the center of the stock for at least two inches. The cion ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... the gratitude of my always hungry brother officers, when, through an open door, I caught sight of fowls in a backyard. I promptly jumped off my horse, and entered into negotiations with the owners of the chicken run, which speedily resulted in the decapitated corpses of three plump fowls being slung from my saddle. Amid the envy of the column, I proudly rode down to the transport of my unit with my spoil, the result being that in a short time not a fowl remained alive in the village; ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... have succeeded in convincing intelligent people, who were ready to study my work in good faith, I have nevertheless not succeeded in establishing legal proof that Gurn is Fantomas. Deibler and the Public Prosecutor, and people generally, think that it is merely Gurn who is going to be decapitated now. I may have secured this man's condemnation, but none the less he has beaten me and deprived me of the satisfaction of having brought him, Fantomas, to the scaffold! I have only consigned Gurn to the scaffold, ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... still there, and certain dark stains were pointed out to us by means of the candle carried by the guide, which told their own story. In the centre of this dreary vault was a well whose water was level with the river, into which it opened some twenty feet from the surface, and into which the decapitated bodies of the criminals were cast and left to float away with the ebb and flow of the Jumna's tide. The bed of the river showed that at certain seasons it must be at least half a mile in width, but it was a meagre ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Christian in it. Like the whole congregation, of course, he had to stand during the prayers—the first of which averaged half an hour in length. If he stood erect his head and shoulders vanished beneath funereal trappings, when he seemed decapitated, and if he stretched his neck the pulpit tottered. He looked like the pillar on which it rested, or he balanced it on his head like a baker's tray. Sometimes he leaned forward as reverently as he could, and then, with his long, lean arms dangling over the side of his ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... new-comer, and his Whitechapel was as perfect as his Montmatre. He was looking at the decapitated telephone. "This ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... The patent of divinity was in the genuflections of a nation. At once he had a temple, priests and flamens. Inexhaustible Greece was sacked again. The statues of her gods, disembarked at Rome, were decapitated, and on them the head ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... which diminished the violence of the shock, that it did not bound beyond the basket to the pavement. Terrible incident, which often occurred at executions during the Terror. Nowadays assassins and poisoners are decapitated more decently. Many improvements in the guillotine have ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... She turned around and shot at him with a revolver. The horse-soldier was furious, and struck her down with one stroke of his sabre. I did not have the time to interfere. I dismounted from my horse to take the woman up. She was dead, and almost decapitated. I uttered not one word of reproach to the Turkish soldier, who smiled fiercely, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... Boy's head is again seen rising above the level of the window-sill, and another and another follows, till the three, as if decapitated, heads ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Cibot the Great. A Chouan implicated in the Breton insurrection of 1799. Decapitated by his cousin Cibot, alias Pille-Miche, and by Marche-a-Terre for having unthinkingly betrayed the brigand position to the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... with the blade of an axe in the centre of it, and the edge uppermost. No one knew how it came there, and, had I shot out as young gentlemen usually do on such occasions, I should, if I had not been quite decapitated, at least have died by the axe. Not being asleep when the descent took place, I grappled with my neighbour, the old fat assistant-surgeon, and he with the next, and the three came down on deck with a lunge that actually started the marine officer—who, everybody knows, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... me," all the boys took a header into the river, only their faces and hair-covered heads appearing above the surface; they treaded water, or swayed around on the bottom. As "Al-f-u-r-d" looked back on them they seemed like so many decapitated heads floating in space, a sight that dwelt in ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... Constantinople till now. The Pasha tells me in confidence that he is enormously wealthy. His fortune was made by brigandage in Greece, from which he retired a few years ago, shocked by the sudden death of his brother, who was decapitated at Corinth with five others. The Bey is a nice, gentle-mannered, simple-hearted old man, kind to the poor, and eminently hospitable. He has invited me down to Prevesa for the pig-shooting. If I have your permission ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... so tawdry, so impossible! All day he had sat and played and played, while people ate and chattered and danced. No, that did not describe what people did; they gorged and shrieked and gyrated like decapitated fowls, accomplishing everything with a furious energy, primitive, abandoned, disgusting. He wondered if he would ever again see people eat quietly and simply, like ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Englishman visiting France boasts of the political liberty enjoyed in his country. As an offset to this the French reproach the English for having decapitated Charles I., and "glory in having always maintained an inviolable attachment to their own king; a fidelity, a respect which no excess or severity on his part has ever shaken." ("A Comparative View of the French and of the English Nation," by John ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... sometimes I have seen it eight feet long. Before now, I have seen a couple dining near the corner of a room, with their roll of bread thrown like a cane against the wall, and as often as they wanted a fresh slice, the roll was very coolly brought over and decapitated. The Frenchman eats little meat, but enormously of the staff of life. The chocolate and coffee which are to be had in the French cafes, are very delicious, and though after a fair and long trial I never could like French ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... Countess had worked hard all her life, and her hands were red and big-jointed. There was no pleasure in watching their clever manipulation of the little, steel hook. If it had been the Little Doctor's hands, now—Chip turned again to the decapitated, pale blue vine with its pink flowers and no leaves. The Countess counted off "chain 'leven" and began in a constrained tone, such as some well-meaning people employ against ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... that nothing could save me from the hands of these demoniacal whitewashed executioners, and in a few moments I, a slave purchased like an ox for the slaughter, would be borne down over the bowl and decapitated. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... escaped his attention. His important discovery of the diastaltic nervous system, by which his name will long be known amongst scientific men, originated in an exceedingly simple circumstance. When investigating the pneumonic circulation in the Triton, the decapitated object lay upon the table; and on separating the tail and accidentally pricking the external integument, he observed that it moved with energy, and became contorted into various forms. He had not touched a muscle ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... to death at him," said Trix. "I know he has a large cupboard at home with the heads of all the wives he has decapitated hanging up in a row by ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... but juncture of arms not indicated; the sculptors of Trajan's time included the juncture of the arms, and of Hadrian's and the Antonines, part of the upper arm. Later, the bust developed to a half-length figure. It is necessary of course to exclude decapitated busts subsequently restored or fitted with heads of ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... press had taken up my affair, and kept me for a week or two careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a political dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human being all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bevelled off at an angle of 60 degrees, and are laid with their ends touching. Two semi-circles of 24 and 22 inch radius are drawn on the boards to indicate the positions of the rails, and short decapitated brass nails are driven in on each side of a rail, about an inch apart, as it is laid along one of these lines. (See Fig. 44. A.) The inside nails must not project sufficiently to catch the wheel flanges. The spring of the brass will ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... the Mississippi to press east and the Army of the Potomac to press south. It may take a time, but if we keep a stiff upper lip we're bound to have the rebels whipped. I reckon they're whipped already in spite of Lee. I've heard of a turtle that an old nigger man decapitated. Next day he was amusing himself poking sticks at it and the turtle was snapping back. His master comes along and says to him, 'Why, Pomp, I thought that turtle was dead.' 'Well, he am dead, massa,' ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... was sealed on the site of the Church of the English Martyrs. On the 5th of January, 1715, we are told that sixteen rebels "were hanged upon Gallows Hill, for high treason and conspiracy." In the following year "42 condemned prisoners of all religions were hanged and decapitated at Preston;" and amongst them were five belonging Preston and the neighbourhood. They were "Richard Shuttleworth, of Preston, Esq.; Roger Moncaster, of Garstang, attorney; Thomas Cowpe, of Walton-le-Dale; ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... been the subject of the legends of neighbouring peasants, woe (according to their account) to the luckless wight, who should venture to cross it alone on horseback during the night, for no soon will he have entered its darksome precincts, than a horrible decapitated spectre in the shape of a former squire Paulett, disregarding all prayers or menaces, leaps behind him on his good steed, and accompanies the affrighted traveller to the opposite boundaries.—The celebrated St. Leonard also, through ...
— The History and Antiquities of Horsham • Howard Dudley
... midway between the Highland and Alexandria pikes, on the farm of James Lock, and near the fence which acts as a boundary line for Mr. Lock's farm, was found by James Hewling, a young man, on Saturday morning, Feb. 1., 1896, the decapitated body of a young woman of venus-like form, the headless body lying with the neck in a ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... garrulous nobleman expressed the hidden thoughts of the greater part of the bourgeoisie, that to surrender Petrograd to the Germans did not mean to lose it. Under the peace treaty it would be restored, but restored ravaged by German militarism. By that time the revolution would be decapitated, and it would be easier to manage. Kerensky's government did not think of seriously defending the capital. On the contrary, public opinion was being prepared for its possible surrender. Public institutions were being removed from Petrograd to ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... her mother's neck and for one awful moment it looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent had been Mrs. Brewster's ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... and with weapons of their own they started out to terrorize. Among their targets were the village notaries, in whom was vested the administrative authority. At Old Moldava, on the Danube, they decapitated the notary, a man called Kungel, and threw his head into the river. At a village near Anina they buried the notary except for his head, which they proceeded to kick until he died. Nor did they spare the notaries of Roumanian origin, which made it seem as if this outbreak of lawlessness—directed ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... for a decapitated frog, as results previously discussed show, is approximately 50[sigma]; and every time the four-cell stimulus is given this kind of a reaction results. There is a slight twitch of the legs, immediately after which the animal jumps. Now for all these series the thread ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... were awaiting them, seated on a large mat in the ceremonial ground, while the women grouped themselves in the background. As the procession of men approached bearing the skull, the mourners shot arrows over their heads as a sign of anger at them for having decapitated their relation. But this was a mere pretence, probably intended to soothe and flatter the angry ghost: the arrows flew over the men without hurting them.[293] Similarly in ancient Egypt the man who cut open a corpse for embalmment had no sooner done his office than he fled precipitately, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... endeavouring to act on instructions, received a sounding kick in the ribs that disposed of him for a moment, and Mr. Wadgers, seeing the decapitated stranger had rolled over and got the upper side of Jaffers, retreated towards the door, knife in hand, and so collided with Mr. Huxter and the Sidderbridge carter coming to the rescue of law and order. At the same moment down came three or four bottles from the chiffonnier and shot a web of ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... quality of their acts? How do circumstances affect the kind of act that will be successful? During the Chinese revolution of 1912 in Peking and Nanking, looting leaders of mobs and plundering soldiers when captured were promptly decapitated without trial. Was such an act right? Was it necessary? What conditions would justify such an act in the United States? Would the same act tend equally to preserve the ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... receptive apparatus and a motor apparatus in such close union that the will and intelligence play no part. Thus if one puts his finger on a hot stove he withdraws it immediately, and such responses are present even in the decapitated frog and human for a short time. So if light streams in on the wide-open pupil of the eye, it contracts, grows smaller, without any effort of the will, and in fact entirely without the consciousness of the individual. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... members of the Lao-tsze sect inhabiting prisons under the jurisdiction of the Principal Bonze were decapitated, and the P.B. laid his own head upon his pillow with some approach to peace of mind, trusting that the knowledge of the Elixir of ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... leader and political "boss." The minister of the reformed faith became God's mouthpiece upon earth and inculcated an unbending puritanism in daily life. "No more festivals, no more jovial reunions, no more theaters or society; the rigid monotony of an austere rule weighed upon life. A poet was decapitated because of his verses; Calvin wished adultery to be punished by death like heresy, and he had Michael Servetus [Footnote: A celebrated Spanish reformer.] burned for not entertaining the same opinions as himself upon ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... shallow part of the creek were a party of sixty or seventy savages, all armed with spears and clubs. Four of them who were leading were carrying on poles from their shoulders the naked and headless bodies of our two unfortunate sailors, and the decapitated heads were in either hand of an enormously fat man, who from his many shell armlets and other adornments was evidently the leader. So close were they—less than fifty yards—that we easily recognised one of the bodies by its light yellow ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... should be avoided as much as possible in the entire costume. A glove that ends exactly at the wrist bone, or a boot at the ankle joint, with a straight line, is always ugly; so are dresses when they are cut in a circle close to the juncture of the neck with the shoulder, giving the neck a decapitated appearance. The line of contrast should always be softened with an edge of lace, or a necklace, and only round, pretty throats should ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... effect." Some of the bracelets are furnished with studs set with agate or coral. Some gold-plated ornaments have been found, among them a "bracelet formed by a double-headed snake grasping between its jaws a decapitated human head and a snake about four inches long." Ling Roth, commenting upon the workmanship of these smaller objects, says that generally speaking it is good, but "it is not as a rule equal to that of the large Benin metal workings; this is no doubt due to the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... his wasteful debris to watch his toil's result, first was heard a rustle of leaves, as if a passing whirlwind had alighted there; next came the crack of bursting sinews; then the groan of a great riving spasm, and the tree, decapitated at its foot, crashed to earth, with a vain attempt to clutch for support at the stiff, unpitying arms of its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... all past accumulations beyond a defined amount, would individuals be morally bound to submit to such a decree if they could contrive to evade it, any more than sexquipedalians would be bound to lay their heads on the block in obedience to a law directing everybody six feet high to be decapitated. All such partial legislation would be tyrannical, and circumstances must be very peculiar indeed to make submission to tyranny a duty. But of all conceivable legislation, none could possibly be more partial, or therefore more tyrannical, than such as should give to society a general power ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... bent stems of the flowers. Then there was a quick jerk, and one violet was decapitated. "One ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... for, as the doll's basin of real water was cast forth by the cruel charmer, poor Chan expired in such strong convulsions that his head rolled down among the audience. Miss Ki Hi peeped to see what had become of her victim, and the shutter decapitated her likewise, to the great delight of the children, who passed around the heads, pronouncing a ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... bill, however, by the words "for the purpose of new scientific discovery and for no other purpose," absolutely prohibits any kind of demonstration. It would debar me from showing the circulation in the web of a frog's foot or from exhibiting the pulsations of the heart in a decapitated frog. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... had to be raised by placing a billet of wood underneath it; all this time the poor woman, suffering even more from shame than from fear, was kept in suspense; at length, when she was properly adjusted, the executioner touched the spring, the knife fell, and the decapitated head, falling on the platform of the scaffold, bounded two or three times in the air, to the general horror; the executioner then seized it, showed it to the multitude, and wrapping it in black taffetas, placed it with the body on a bier at the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... mutilated forms of men and of broken weapons. When Xerxes came at last to the body of Leonidas, and was told that that was the man who had been the leader of the band, he gloried over it in great exaltation and triumph. At length he ordered the body to be decapitated, and the headless trunk to be nailed to ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... pools of water, which were hard to steer through in the darkness. The fire was now quite out, and they were beginning to move the furniture in again, but the place had been entirely dismantled, and looked eerie and forlorn. On the staircase was a decapitated statue, and broken and crushed plants were strewn about. Erica's room was quite bare of furniture, nor could she find any of the things she wanted. The pen with which she had been writing lay on the floor, and also a Japanese fan soaked ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... have passed by the place a hundred times, and scarcely noticed the little church, except for the marble high relief over the door, showing the grizzly head of the Baptist in the charger, and for the iron cage close by, in which were formerly exposed the heads of criminals; the decapitated, or, as they call him here, decollated, John the Baptist, being apparently the patron of axe ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... happiness of the vast majority in Old Japan. Theirs was the happiness of ignorance and simple, undeveloped lives. Accustomed to tyranny, they did not think of rebellion against it. Familiar with brutality and suffering, they felt nothing of its shame and inhumanity. The sight of decapitated bodies, the torture of criminals, the despotism of husbands, the cringing obedience of the ruled, the haughtiness of the rulers, the life of hard toil and narrow outlook, were all so usual that no thought of escape from such an order ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... reputation, greatly stimulated by the regular pay which Gordon always insisted upon. Towards the close of the year, the siege of Soochow ended in a capitulation on terms which Gordon understood to include a pardon for the eight T'ai-p'ing "princes" engaged in its defence. These eight were hurriedly decapitated by order of Li Hung-chang, and Gordon immediately resigned, after having searched that same night, so the story goes, revolver in hand, for Li Hung-chang, whose brains he had determined to blow out on the spot. The Emperor sent him a medal and a present of about L3,000, ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... degradation, greed, brutality, cruelty, selfishness, and all infuriate and debased passion—that damnable magazine of disease physical and moral. It is undeniable that there were many there whose faces were passport to the Court of Lucifer—murderers, and dire malefactors; but better to have decapitated them than to have committed them to the slow torture of this citadel of woe. There were inmates who had been immured for years—inmates for debt whose hair had whitened in the fetid imprisonment, whose laugh had in it a harsh hollow-sounding jangle, and whose brows had fixed themselves into the puckers ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... was a perfect furnace; the door was burned, the floor was burned, the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed upon his feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen; then it stopped,—a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of the neighborhood. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... is said, is stronger than death! Taken literally, never has an aphorism received a more striking confirmation. Here was a creature decapitated, amputated as far as the middle of the thorax; a corpse which still struggled to give life. It would not relax its hold until the abdomen itself, the seat of the organs of ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... architraves of the arch, is, both in its design and execution, curious. The knotted serpents, terminating at either end in heads of devils; the two men tugging at rings, attached to a chain twisted round the neck of a decapitated demon, whom, two dogs are baying; and the structure of the chain itself, are all peculiar; and scarcely less so is the medallion below.[197]—The church ends at the east with a large circular arch, which is now closed, ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... was one of the two daughters of that brave and unfortunate Count de Montmorency Bouteville, who, the victim of a false point of honour and of an outrageous passion for duelling, was decapitated on the Place de Greve, on the 21st of June, 1627. She was sister of Francois de Montmorency, Count de Bouteville, better known as the illustrious Marshal de Luxembourg. Born in 1626, she had been married in 1645 to the last of the Colignys, the Duke de Chatillon, one of the heroes of Lens, ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... our knowledge; we learn of their existence only by study, as we learn of facts in outward nature. If you tickle the foot of a person asleep, and the foot is withdrawn by simple reflex action, the sleeper is unconscious alike of the irritation and of the movement, even as the decapitated frog is unconscious when a drop of nitric acid falls on his back and he lifts up a leg and rubs the place. In like manner the reflex movements which make up the life of the lowest animals are doubtless quite unconscious, even when in their general character they simulate ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... opportunity offered. With the idea of paying a high compliment to Troubridge, who had so splendidly protected the Royalists, fought the French, and subdued the revolutionists, they made him the recipient of a decapitated head which had proudly sat on the shoulders of a revolutionist. This trophy was actually sent to him with his basket of breakfast grapes. In making the present the gallant fisherman conveyed his compliments ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... Henry and a disgraced and decapitated Queen, wore the crown of England. If heredity had been as much talked of then as now, England might have feared the child of a faithless wife, and a remorseless, bloodthirsty King. But while Mary, daughter of Katharine, the most pious and best of mothers, had left only a great blood-spot ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... keep it quiet, he would not be answerable for the consequences. His warnings having no effect, he flew upstairs one day, when she was temporarily absent, and, snatching up the bread knife from the table, decapitated the infant. He then stuffed both its head and body into a grandfather's clock which stood in one corner of the room, and, retiring to his own quarters, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... his forty followers rode into camp with their prisoner there was a jubilant outcry, and the demand was made that the foreign dog be instantly decapitated, but the Emir smiled and, holding ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... following our old trail to the lake, Hubbard decapitated a duck with a rifle bullet, and we went into camp with high hopes of more food in the way of fish. Hubbard's rod was hopelessly broken, so he took mine, now much wound with linen thread, but, still ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... so long defended St. Elmo, cut the Maltese cross on the bodies of the slain, and, tying them to planks, let them drift with the receding tide into the other branch of the harbour still defended by the Christians. The Grand-Master, in resentment of this cruelty, caused his Turkish prisoners to be decapitated and their heads thrown from mortars into ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... the days when the British public were intense believers in bear's grease as the producer of hair, and no one troubled himself or herself to investigate the precise configuration of the exhibited animal and compare it when hung up, decapitated, and shorn of its feet, with the ordinary well-fatted domestic pig, albeit the illusion was kept up by its being possible to see through the gratings outside the shop-window Ramball's black bear still "all alive-o," parading and snuffling up and ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... for the Count of Poictesme, and explained to him as between old friends how the matter stood, and that afternoon the high Count was confessed and decapitated. Poictesme being now a vacant fief, King Ferdinand ennobled Manuel, and made him Count ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... who were thus seized were taken up to the king and there 1 decapitated. The first of these, Clearchus, was a thorough soldier, and a true lover of fighting. This is the testimony of all who knew him intimately. As long as the war between the Lacedaemonians and Athenians lasted, he could find occupation at home; but after the peace, he persuaded his ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... we captured a savage possessed of a surfuria, or native cooking pot. Memba Sasa scrubbed this with sand. First we made tea in it, and drank turn about, from its wide edge. This warmed us up somewhat. Then we dumped in our few potatoes and a single guinea fowl that F. had decapitated earlier in the day. We ate; and passed the ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Brantome, in his account of Mary Queen of Scots, quotes this story. After mentioning that the headsman remained alone with the Queen's decapitated corpse, he adds: "He then took off her shoes and handled her as he pleased. It is suspected that he treated her in the same way as that miserable muleteer, in the Hundred Stories of the Queen of Navarre, treated the poor woman he killed. Stranger temptations than this come to men. After he ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... which had been despatched against the decapitating King of the North, and which now returned heavily laden with his rescued subjects. The other was the force which had flown to the preservation of the body of the decapitated King of the South, and which now brought back his Majesty embalmed, some Princes of the ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... well-bred man—in short, it would look so like—But, in fact, I am driven to the wall, and I must defend myself as well as I can against this nephew of mine—I know it will look like the most horrible thing upon earth, like what I would rather be decapitated than do—I know it will look, absolutely, as if I came here to ask you to marry my daughter,—which, you know, is a thing no gentleman could have the most remotely in his contemplation; but, since I am so pressed, I must ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... miracle. In the usual garbled manner of the sensational type of newspaper (not missing, alas! even in India), the reporter's version was slightly exaggerated: it indicated that the SADHU had been almost decapitated! ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... a picture of the guillotine, calling up thoughts of severed heads from memory's cloisters. On the left you see a ghastly head; on the right the decapitated trunk. By the victim stand the bloody actors in the tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen! When I review the awful guilt of Marat and Robespierre, humbly do I give thanks that I have been kept from yielding, like them, to fierce ambition and lust of power, and that ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... burgomaster, expelled from the city October 14, 1527, impassionate in his writings against the "old and new Papists," i.e., Luther and others who adhered to the real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper, decapitated May 12, 1528, at Weissenburg; Christian Entfelder, 1527 leader of the Brethren at Eisenschuetz Moravia, and later on counselor of Duke Albrecht of Prussia; Hans Schlaffer, a former priest, active as Anabaptistic preacher and author, executed 1528; Joerg Haug, pastor in Bibra; Wolfgang ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... provide everything the heart of man could desire; when, however, the traveller was safely cornered for the rest of the day, the menu invariably dwindled down to the elementary and universal 'sudden death,' which meant a wretchedly thin chicken, caught, decapitated, grilled, and served up within twenty minutes of the meal being ordered. At dinner a variety was made by the chicken being curried, accompanied by an unlimited supply ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... and experience may have taught Mr. Collings many things, he probably retains more of the old Radical Adam than does Mr. Chamberlain. At one time he was regarded by some of his opponents as a political fire-eater—a democratic despot who would have decapitated kings and queens without a tinge of remorse, and slain wicked Tories with the sword. He was, however, never the ungenial, self-seeking, aggressive person some of his foes may have fancied him. He was always an affable, pleasant, agreeable man, who could be civil and even polite to his adversaries, ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... Armenian convent; standing in the midst of gardens, it has a most cheerful appearance. It is asserted to be built on the site where St. James was decapitated, an event commemorated by numerous pictures in the church; but most of the pictures, both here and in the remaining churches, are bad beyond conception. Like the Greeks, the Armenian priests enjoy the reputation of thoroughly understanding how to make a harvest out of their visitors, whom they ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... one frightful sweep of his blade he disemboweled a sofa cushion; the second blow clove his typewriting machine clean to the tattoo marks upon its breast; the third decapitated a ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... appear, and this time they had their arms with them and were determined to have blood. So they killed the Japanese brutally while he shielded himself with his small hands. They hacked off all his limbs, barbarians that they are, decapitated him, then mutilated his body. It now lies half-buried where it was smitten down. The carter who drove him was eloquent as only Orientals can be when tragedy flings their customary reserve aside: "May my tongue be torn out ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... like many adventurers, the pair came to grief. They took David into the parlor and the cat wriggled from its owner's arms, jumped upon the table, knocked the case containing the chessmen to the floor, and not only broke the glass but decapitated ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the ground, and the enormous body, writhing in a thousand terrific convolutions, churned the blue waters of the basin into diamond-tinted spray. For full ten minutes the amazed trio stood gazing in breathless astonishment at the amazing twistings and writhings of the decapitated body, and then George, taking advantage of a momentary cessation of movement, dashed into the shallow water, seized the creature with both hands by its quivering tail, and drew it ashore. Then, impaling the severed and still gasping head upon his sword ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... and dismissed the praetorian cohorts. Thence marching against his Syrian rival, Niger, who had formerly been his friend, and who was not wanting in military skill, he overthrew him in three great battles. Niger fled to Antioch, the seat of his late government, and was there decapitated. Meantime Albinus, the British commander-in-chief, had already been won over by the title of Caesar, or adopted heir to the new Augustus. But the hollowness of this bribe soon became apparent, and the two competitors met to decide their pretensions at Lyons. In the great battle which followed, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... had been eaten as well by the "bad fella boys too much" that stopped along the bush. He could see him, as he had last seen him, stripped of the shot-gun and all the naturalist's gear of his master, lying on the narrow trail where he had been decapitated barely the moment before. Yes, within a minute the thing had happened. Within a minute, looking back, Bassett had seen him trudging patiently along under his burdens. Then Bassett's own trouble had come upon ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... these things, and more, thou wouldst do for me, despite my own quaint thimble, fashioned from the ivory tusk of a whale? Nay; could I even wrest from thy willful hands my very shirt, when once thou hadst it steaming in an unsavory pickle in thy capacious vat, a decapitated cask? Full well thou knowest, Jarl, that these things are true; and I am bound to say it, to disclaim any lurking desire to reap advantage from thy great ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the first, had been chief for only six days; Laporte, the second, for only about two months. Again Baville supposed the pacification of the Cevennes to be complete. He imagined that Poul, in cutting off Laporte's head, had decapitated the insurrection. But the Camisard ranks had never been so full as now, swelled as they were by the persecutions of the Royalists, who, by demolishing the homes of the peasantry, had in a measure forced them into the arms of the insurgents. Nor were they ever better supplied with leaders, ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... that of his neighbor; this occasioned a dispute as to the right of possession. The matter was at length referred to the decision of Cardinal Spada, who, like the wise man of old, ordered the Statue to be decapitated, and division made according to position—the trunk to one claimant, and the head to the other. The object of the wily Cardinal was not so much justice, as to get possession of the Statue himself, which he afterwards did, at a tithe of what it would otherwise ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... inappropriate to mention here the callous and brutalized nature of those gang-robbers, of whom it is recorded that, when one of their gang was suddenly arrested, they at once decapitated him, and carried off the head, lest the whole gang should ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... criminal's shoulders, another cuts it off with a wooden knife, a basket receives it below, then one of them takes it out, and, holding it aloft shouts 'Behold the head of a traitor!' It seems that four criminals had been safely decapitated, and Dolly was being led to the fatal block, when she slipped her foot and fell to the ground, overturning Harry and a chair in her descent. That ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... burned up. Acting after this fashion, with plenipotentiary authority, Ramiro soon froze the whole province into comparative tranquillity. But it did not suit Cesare to incur the odium which the man's cruelty brought on his administration. Accordingly he had him decapitated one night and exposed to public view, together with the block and bloody hatchet, in the square at Cesena. Of the art with which Cesare first reduced Romagna to order by the cruelty of his agent, and then avoided the odium of this ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... orders to be quiet or to leave the country, continued to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the ears of the prince himself. Things took their natural course. Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard of soldiers was sent, and the saint and his little band were decapitated. The scene of the execution was a wood, and the heads and trunks were left lying there for the wolves and ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... VII. a decade after. Not long since five hundred skulls supposed to have been those of English prisoners were unearthed here; as they were all found massed together, the theory is that the entire number had surrendered and been summarily decapitated, methods of warfare that have apparently found advocates in our ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... hunting and enjoying the sport. He is with his aunt, whom he admires." She calmed her fears and returned to the charming gayety of Florence. She had seen casually, at the Offices, a picture that Dechartre liked. It was a decapitated head of the Medusa, a work wherein Leonardo, the sculptor said, had expressed the minute profundity and tragic refinement of his genius. She wished to see it again, regretting that she had not seen it better at first. She extinguished her lamp ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... there were some surer sign of that," said Jurgen. "I would have preferred that the pavilion and the decapitated Troll King had vanished with a peal of thunder and an earthquake and such other phenomena as are customary. Instead, nothing is changed except that the woman who was talking to me a moment since now lies at ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... Honorable the Lord-Mayor's toast; then, if I mistake not, there was another prodigious flourish of trumpets and twanging of stringed instruments; and finally the doomed individual, waiting all this while to be decapitated, got up and proceeded to make a fool of himself. A bashful young earl tried his maiden oratory on the good citizens of London, and having evidently got every word by heart, (even including, however he managed it, the most seemingly casual improvisations of the moment,) he really spoke like a book, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... similar circumstances, but escaped to Ferney. A few years later, two youths of seventeen were convicted at Abbeville for making some profane jokes. Both were condemned to have their tongues torn out and to be decapitated; one managed to escape, the other was executed. That such things could happen in eighteenth-century France seems incredible; but happen they did, and who knows how many more of a like atrocity? The fact that these three came to light ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the plague of the northern seas; until at the beginning of the fifteenth century they were subdued, and many of them captured by the Dutch, who nailed them up in barrels, leaving an aperture for the head, at top, and then decapitated them. The best account of them is found in "Raumer's Historical Note-book," vol. ii. p. 19. And if any one wishes to see the result of communist teaching, they have only to study here the horrible ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... loved you all the more, and I worked hard to please you, and I gave up billiards and everything you didn't like, and waited and never complained, for I hoped you'd love me, though I'm not half good enough..." Here there was a choke that couldn't be controlled, so he decapitated buttercups while he cleared his ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... dainty slipper scurrying about like a little red mouse.... What was he to do?... Reply to these looks, this touch?... Yes... but an amorous intrigue in this part of the world can have terrible consequences. In his imagination Tartarin already saw himself seized by eunuchs, decapitated or even worse, sewn into a sack and tossed into the sea with his ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... line, and in the windows the same symbol with its attendant falcon was repeatedly and conspicuously emblazoned. From Edmund of Langley it descended to his son Edward duke of York, slain in the field of Agincourt, and next to the son of his unfortunate brother the decapitated earl of Cambridge; to that Richard who fell at Wakefield in the attempt to assert his title to the crown, which the victorious arms of his son Edward IV. afterwards vindicated ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... me, and among them was the thought that if "Fruitfulness" were not presented to the public in an English dress, M. Zola's new series would remain incomplete, decapitated so far as British and American readers were concerned. After all, the criticisms dealing with the French original were solely directed against matters of form, the mould in which some part of the work was cast. Its high moral purpose was distinctly recognized by several even of its most ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... with all his might an old decapitated cock's head, which lay in the gutter, with the heel of his boot, until it was as ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... a sure augury that I shall, in discharge of my duty, one day cut off your head with the weapon which has just now spontaneously unsheathed itself.' The nobleman lost no time in leaving his place of refuge; but, engaging in some of the plots of the period, was shortly after decapitated by that very man ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... be. Mad with the joy of victory and religious frenzy, they rushed upon him and, while he disdained even to fire his revolver, stabbed him in many places. The body fell down the steps and lay—a twisted heap—at the foot. There it was decapitated. The head was carried to the Mahdi. The trunk was stabbed again and again by the infuriated creatures, till nothing but a shapeless bundle of torn flesh and bloody rags remained of what had been a great and famous man and the envoy of her Britannic Majesty. The blood ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... another priest-led fanatic As with his own people, keeping no back-door open At a blow decapitated France Conclusive victory for the allies seemed as predestined Epernon, the true murderer of Henry Father Cotton, who was only too ready to betray the secrets Great war of religion and politics was postponed ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... Christopher decapitated a thistle and explained briefly, "Caesar adopted me straight out of a workhouse. My mother and I were tramping from London to Southampton, and she got ill at Whitmansworth, the other side of Winchester, and died there. ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... Manfred than he began (February 25, 1817) to lay the foundation of another tragedy. Venice was new to him, and, on visiting the Doge's Palace, the veiled space intended for the portrait of Marin Falier, and the "Giants' Staircase," where, as he believed, "he was once crowned and afterwards decapitated," had laid hold of his imagination, while the legend of the Congiura, "an old man jealous and conspiring against the state of which he was ... Chief," promised a subject which the "devil himself" might have dramatized ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron |
