"Jack Ketch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... replied Turpin; "but I advise you not to become too intimate with Jack Ketch. He may prove your best friend, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell is just now coming out upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end to-morrow, I should just say, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... chiefs of the phratries, and also magistrates charged with the duty of maintaining order and enforcing the decrees of the council in their respective quarters. The "chief of the eagle and cactus" was chief executioner,—Jack Ketch. He was not eligible for the office of "chief-of-men;" the three other phratry-captains were eligible. Then there was a member of the priesthood entitled "man of the dark house." This person, with the three eligible captains, made a quartette, and one of this privileged four must ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... in getting his pupil heartily sick of the idea of grim-visaged war as a business. He hated the thought of doing things on order, especially killing men when told. "The soldier's profession is only one remove from the business of Jack Ketch, who hangs men and then salves his conscience with the plea that some one told him to do it," said Whistler. If he remained at West Point he would become an army officer and Uncle Sam or the Czar would own him and order him to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... myself, after letting the scoundrels go. One scarcely knows what to do in such a case, as one does not like to be the means of getting a fellow-creature hanged, or of letting a rogue escape. A pirate, of all scoundrels, deserves no mercy, and yet Jack does not relish the idea of being a sort of Jack Ketch, neither. If the thing were to be done over again, I think I should hold on to ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Lord and Lady Albemarle, and Lord Gosford; rather dull. A discussion about who was the man in a mask who cut Charles I.'s head off; Mackintosh believed he knew. What a literary puerility! The man in a mask was Jack Ketch (whatever his name was); who can doubt it? Where was the man, Roundhead or Puritan, who as an amateur would have mounted the scaffold to perform this office? But the executioner, though only discharging the duties of his office, probably thought in those excited ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville |
