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More "Pew" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will mind some friends of Miss Avies sitting with you in your pew to-morrow evening. She has especially asked—two of them ... ladies, I believe. But it seems that there will be something of a crowd, and as your pew is always half empty— He would not have asked except ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the midst of such an army, he could not lack abundant opportunity for the exercise of his peculiar powers of argumentation. At Amersham, he had a sort of pitched battle with the contumacious soldiers. "When the public talking day came," says he, "I took the reading-pew, and Pitchford's cornet and troopers took the gallery. There did the leader of the Chesham men begin, and afterwards Pitchford's soldiers set in; and I alone disputed with them from morning until almost night; for I knew their trick, that if I had gone out first, they would ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... station with a large pew in their front, the two ghosts uncovered their heads, which by the help of the phosphorus exhibited a pale and lambent flame, extremely dismal and ghastly to the view; then Ferret in a squeaking tone, exclaimed, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... at the recollection of those costumes in the Manor House pew, which appeared so lovely in her eyes while she played the Magnificat. Dreams of dainty dresses are dear to her heart as the occasional thoughts of love which steal over her at times. "If the two could be combined," she thinks, ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... the Knights of the Southern Cross; they were met by the Bishop and the whole body of the clergy, and conducted with great pomp to a throne erected at the right side of the altar, which the Emperor ascended, while his consort took her place in a pew on the left. After the service, performed by a good choir to excellent music, the Bishop came forward and delivered a very long discourse, descriptive of the various virtues of the Emperor, comparing him to Peter the Great of Russia, and pointing out how he ought to administer ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... churches generally were hostile to the movement and methods of the anti-slavery agitation. There was an intense prejudice against the blacks. The only negro in town was a servant girl, who used to sit solitary and alone in the colored people's pew in the gallery. When three families of black folks moved into a deserted house in Boscawen, near Beaver Dam Brook, and their children made their appearance in Corser Hill school, a great commotion at once ensued in the ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... illustrated magazine a long article about the late Czar of Russia, then just come to the throne or about to come to it. After that, lying in the hammock on the front porch on summer evenings, or sitting through a long sermon in the family pew, she amused herself by trying to make up her mind whether she would or would not be the Czar's mistress when she played in his Capital. Now Edna had met this fascinating word only in the novels of Ouida,—her hard-worked little mother kept a long ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... occurred on similar occasions in previous years, and I beg you to remember that you are in God's house," &c. &c. The grave injunction was listened to in silence, and when it ended, the Vicar, a worthy but not very popular man, walked towards the vestry. To do so, he passed the pew where I sat under the left arm of my companion, and he stopped before him, for Billy had long been a notorious ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... her the clerkship, forgave her even her undoubted success in making money, on account of Mrs. Greymer. It had watched Therese grow from a slim girl, with black braids hanging down her white neck as she sat in the "minister's pew" of the old brick church, into a beautiful pale woman in a widow's bonnet. Therese went now every Sunday to the same church where her father used to preach. The countess accompanied her most decorously. She was a pagan at heart, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... reigns in galled eyes of weeping souls,— Thy womb let loose to chase us to our graves.— O upright, just, and true-disposing God, How do I thank Thee that this carnal cur Preys on the issue of his mother's body, And makes her pew-fellow with ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... warm. Here was another silly notion: I was afraid of hotels, but not of the church. I reasoned vaguely that it was a dark day, and darker in the church, and so I went in at the Church Alley entrance and sat near the north door. No one noticed me. I sat still in a high-backed pew, well hid, and wondering what was the matter with me. It was curious that a doctor, and a man of my intelligence, should have been long in guessing a ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... the Priory, and conveyed to Isfield, his manorial estate. At the expense of Dr., afterwards Sir William, Burrell, it was removed from its obscure station, and placed upon a suitable shrine, in the vestry-pew of Southover Church, that being the nearest convenient spot to its original station. The stone is of black marble, sculptured in very high relief. The lower end had been broken off before its discovery at Isfield. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... know she was there, in his old room? He did not know it; he was only coming to put his rifle in its accustomed place, and on seeing the chamber filled with the various paraphernalia of a woman's toilet, he started, with the exclamation, "What the deuce! I reckon I've got into the wrong pew," and was going away, when Mabel called him back. "Meb, you here?" said he. "You in this little tucked-up hole, that I always thought too small for me and my traps! What ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... Memphis, was the speaker for the day. Miss Minerva rarely missed a service in her own church. She was always on hand at the Love Feast and the Missionary Rally and gave liberally of her means to every cause. She was sitting in her own pew between Billy and Jimmy, Mr. and Mrs. Garner having remained at home. Across the aisle from her sat Frances Black, between her father and mother; two pews in front of her were Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton, with Lina on the outside next the aisle. The good ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... obduracy of the people. Ishmael had a quick movement of withdrawal as his mother led him in through the prosaic yellow-grained doors, but it availed him nothing. Another moment and he was being propelled into a pew. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... tell everybody that they were a county family, and they didn't look like it. They were too large and coarse, and took up far too much room. There they sat, six big creatures in one pew, all restless, all with big chins, hard eyes, jutting eyebrows, and a dreadful look as if they were buccaneering. As a matter of fact they all felt rather timid and flat, and meant to behave beautifully, though Sir Peter needn't have blown his ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... colorless little woman who retained only the dim outline of her girlhood's beauty, sat gracelessly in her pew, but her stepdaughter, Maud, by her side, was carrying to early maturity a dainty grace united with something strong and fine drawn from her father. She had his ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... Little Dorrit with keen enjoyment. There is a great deal of poor stuff in it, but there is more that is first-rate than I thought. I had quite forgotten Flora's enumeration of the number of times Mr. F. proposed to her—"seven times, once in a hackney coach, once in a boat, once in a pew, once on a donkey at Tunbridge Wells, and the rest on his knees." But ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... warmth of another's soul. What more tempting than to give up private prayer for the easier worship of the liturgy or of the church? What, in short, more natural than for the independent, free-moving, growing Sacculina to degenerate into the listless, useless, pampered parasite of the pew? The very means he takes to nurse his personal religion often come in time to wean him from it. Hanging admiringly, or even enthusiastically, on the lips of eloquence, his senses now stirred by ceremony, now soothed by music, the parasite of ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... besides by the white people present in classes. We had a pleasant chat with Miss W. and Miss Towne and the gentlemen, most of whom do not meet at all except once a week at church, and then the people were collected again, and when they were seated, Mr. Pierce summoned us, the four ladies, to an empty pew with himself. The church is painted white inside, very plain, with galleries, and filled full of black people,—doors, windows and aisles. Dr. French had come over from "Biffert," as they call it, and conducted the services. He read a hymn through, "Am I a soldier of the Cross?" etc., ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... convey the most secret intelligence, which a lady would be ready to burst with, if she could not find vent for it by this kind of auricular confession. A piece of scandal transpires in this manner from one pew to another, then presently whizes along the channel, from whence it crawls up to the galleries, till at last the ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Aunt Wess', who presented themselves at the church in advance of the others, found the interior cool, dark, and damp. They sat down in a front pew, talking in whispers, looking about them. Druggeting shrouded the reader's stand, the baptismal font, and bishop's chair. Every footfall and every minute sound echoed noisily from the dark vaulting ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... treated to a singular surprise on the Sunday morning following, when Miss Philura Rice, newly returned from her annual visit to Boston, walked down the aisle to her accustomed place in the singers' seat. Whispered comment and surmise flew from pew to pew, sandwiched irreverently between hymn, prayer and sermon. Indeed, the last-mentioned portion of the service, being of unusual length and dullness, was utilized by the female members of the congregation in making a minute inventory of ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... that one of the brothers, who is sixty years of age, and a model Christian, and a good provider, rose during the first prayer, and, waving his plug hat in the air, gave a wild and blood-curdling whoop, jumped over the back of his pew, and lit out. While this is in a measure true, it is not accurate. He did do some wild and startling jumping, but he did not jump over the pew. He tried to, but failed. He ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the one church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy, and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... betook himself to prayer, when the sound of his voice was nearly drowned by the people weeping, and he came down from the pulpit and passed up and down through the church, exhorting and directing them, as many as three and four persons being in an agony of spirit in every pew. Even after the service closed, the cries and groans of anxious persons could be heard at a considerable distance up and down the harbour. At Harbor Grace, Port a Grave, Bay Roberts and other places, similar scenes were witnessed, of deep conviction for sin, and many rejoicing in the knowledge ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... the saddest funeral it has ever been my lot to attend, Mrs. Martindale appeared for the first time in church. I did not see her face, for she kept her heavy black veil closely drawn. On the following Sunday she was in the family pew again, but still kept her face hidden. From friends who visited her (I did not call again after my first denial) I learned that she had become calm ...
— The Son of My Friend - New Temperance Tales No. 1 • T. S. Arthur
... strange and unaccountable fortune to befall one man! How has this happened? What fiend has followed Mr. Collier through the later years of his life, putting manuscripts under his pillow and folios into his pew, and so luring him on to moral suicide? Alas! there is probably but one man now living that can tell us, and he will not. But this protracted controversy, which has left so much unsettled, has greatly served the cause of literature, in showing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... whitewashed walls; thick round pillars between the nave and aisles; deep-sunken windows dim with fragmentary pieces of colored glass, and all more or less out of the perpendicular; a worm-eaten oak-screen separating the chancel and a solemn enclosure, erst a chapel, now the Fairfax pew; a loft where the choir sat in front for divine service, with fiddle and bassoon, and the school-children sat behind, all under the eye of the parson and his clerk, who was also ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... swiftly and cautiously for my lantern. I found it close to me, on the pew seat, and with a sudden, jerky movement, I switched on the light. I flashed it up the aisle, to and fro across the chancel, but I could see nothing to frighten me. I turned quickly, and sent the jet of light darting across and across the rear end of the Chapel; then ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... Washington had no library, which accounted for his originality. He was a vestryman in the Episcopal Church; and to see his tall and graceful form as he moved about from pew to pew collecting pence for Home ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... PEW. Large Octavo. Decorative text pages, printed in two colors. Illustrations by Alice ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... something from the servant who interrupted and pestered at his shoulder, and he said, shortly and emphatically, "Pew!" ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... listened to it in perfect silence. He sat still even when she had done speaking,—still, and lost in thought. It was a very awkward matter for him to have a hand in. Old Sophy was his parishioner, but the Venners had a pew in the Reverend Mr. Fairweather's meeting-house. It would seem that he, Mr. Fairweather, was the natural adviser of the parties most interested. Had he sense and spirit enough to deal with such people? Was there enough capital of humanity in his somewhat limited nature to furnish sympathy and unshrinking ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... this is second childhood," quoth the venerable Jacob Sasportas, chief Rabbi of the English Jews, as he sat in the presidential pew, an honored visitor at Hamburg. "Surely ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... sometimes erotic. A devoted country clergyman doing his simple duty—trying to lift his congregation to better views of life, partaking their joys and alleviating their sorrows, often a martyr to meddlesome deacons or to pompous trustees, and his wife a prey to the whimsical wives of opinionated pew-owners—such a man I deeply revere; but the longer I live the more I am convinced that the professional revivalist and the sensation preacher are necessarily and normally foes both ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... On reaching the pew to which Lois led him he sat down awkwardly, looking for a place in which to bestow his top-hat without ruffling its gloss. Lois herself fell on her knees in prayer. The act took him by surprise. It was new to him. He was aware that she said prayers in private, and had a ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... down in the West, Mr O'Joscelyn," said the other parson. "There are usually two or three in the Kelly's Court pew. The vicarage pew musters pretty well, for Mrs Armstrong and five of the children are always there. Then there are usually two policemen, and the clerk; though, by the bye, he doesn't belong to the parish. I borrowed ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... just, toward his clerks. He established a free reading-room in Bellemore, saw that every employee had his regular vacation each summer or whenever he preferred it, encouraged them to be frugal and moral, gave them good advice, forbade coarseness of language or profanity, and hired a pew in each of the two leading churches, which were always at the disposal of his young men without ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... composed almost exclusively of women. The men stayed at home and nursed their wrath. And it was good for them that they did, for the women had things all their own way generally, and Warren Holbrook, ill-favored and formed, was their idol. The pew rents ran up, however, and the contributions of a Sunday increased nearly double. Indeed, the Chapmans felt that they were now on the road to fortune, and Mrs. Chapman's ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... do you want with me'!"-"My money," said the man, as loud as ever he could bawl, before all the servants. He bade him come the next morning, and then would not see him. The next Sunday the man followed him to church, and got into the next pew: he leaned over, and said, , "My money; give me my money!" My lord went to the end of the pew; the man too: "Give me my money!" The sermon was on avarice, and the text, "Cursed are they that heap up riches." The man groaned ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... poor Paterfamilias, sitting in the family pew, is not so enamoured of that idea of accomplishing those threescore years and ten which the young parson, fresh from Cambridge, is describing as such a lucky number in life's lottery. The attempt to paint it so is well-meaning, ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... the Protestants; and among the latter the Lutherans or the Calvinists; and so descending to all the several denominations of churches, see who has less of the Devil in them, and who more; and whether less or more the Devil has not a seat in every synagogue, a pew in every church, a place in every pulpit, and a vote in every synod; even from the Sanhedrim of the Jews, to our friends at the Bull and Mouth, &c. from ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... north side of the altar, over the grated window that lights the crypt, is an ancient pew, or gallery, to which there is an ascent by a flight of narrow stairs, of solid blocks of oak. The exterior of this gallery is very neat, and it is certainly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... the Presbyterian church in New Utrecht used as a prison by the British, he had for companions, Daniel Duryee, William Furman, William Creed, and two others, all put into one pew. Baylis asked them to get the Bible out of the pulpit and read it to him. They feared to do this, but consented to lead the blind man to the pulpit steps. As he returned with the Bible in his hands a British guard met him, beat him violently and took away the ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... altar, and go to the right and to the left. At the altar the groom receives the bride from her father's hand. The latter steps back a few paces, but remains near enough to "give away the bride." When this point in the ceremony has been passed, the father quietly joins the mother in the front pew. ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... churchyard Lord Reggie and Tommy went round to the vestry, and the rest of the party made their way to a front pew, amid the suppressed excitement of the rest of the congregation. Mr. Amarinth especially created a sensation; but he always expected to do that. Ever since he had made a name for himself by declaring that he was pleased with ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... a satchelful of negotiable securities and then, after the papers were through ragging the police for their inefficiency, you would drive up to the bank in a taxi, walk in and return the money, saying you had found it in the old family pew at Trinity when you went in to say your prayers! Here would be an opportunity to break the force of habit ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... came to pass that the village bored the new-comer; bored her to death. She became restless and quarrelsome, had a coolness with the vicarage regarding a pew, with Mrs. Tremenheere at the Park about a housemaid, and actually cut Mrs. General Finch "dead" in the village post office, owing to a mislaid visiting-card. At the end of three years Lucilla Shafto had embroiled herself with almost everyone ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... are slackers in the pulpit, In the elder's cushioned pew, And all through the congregation There are slackers not a few. There are slackers in the workshop, There are slackers on the farm, And slackers down in Parliament Whose ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... was quite a feature of the Communion Service to see the state and ceremony with which the Holy Eucharist was carried down the aisle to the Bray's family pew, where the old lady sat, huddled and alone in one of the corners, like a dead body covered clumsily with a black pall. One of the parishioners, who had not that good fortune of being personally acquainted with Lady ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... you not heard of a man having a fortune left him for merely opening the pew-door of a ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... after the stranger's settlement at Brudenell Hall the Baymouth Church was crowded to excess. But those of the congregation who went there with other motives than to worship their Creator were sadly disappointed. The crimson-lined Brudenell pew remained vacant, as it ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... "Fourteen Miles 'round," going up one side of the island above the city and coming down the other. Sometimes of an evening he attended a performance at the little John Street Theatre. Always on Sunday he and all his family went to St. Paul's Chapel. And the pew in which they sat you can sit in if you go to that old chapel, for it has ...
— The Story of Manhattan • Charles Hemstreet
... instructed My intrepid aviators to reserve a pew for Me intact among the ruins of Notre Dame de ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various
... of the ceremony, "Who giveth this woman away?" or, "To be married to this man?" her father advances and places her right hand in that of the clergyman, who places it in the groom's right hand. After this her father retires to his seat in the pew with his family. ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... liberally supplied with churches of all denominations. I went one Sunday to a Presbyterian church, and was much struck on my entry at seeing all the congregation reading newspapers. Seating myself in my pew, I found a paper lying alongside of me, and, taking it up, I discovered it was a religious paper, full of anecdotes and experiences, &c., and was supplied gratis to the congregation. There were much shorter ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... belt of southwestern Missouri, I was to speak to a meeting of men. There were probably five or six hundred gathered in a Methodist Church. They were strangers to me. I was in doubt what best to say to them. One dislikes to fire ammunition at people that are absent. So stepping down to a front pew where several ministers were seated, I asked one of them to run his eye over the house and tell me what sort of a congregation it was, so far as he knew them. He did so, and presently replied: "I think fully two-thirds of these men are members ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... meetin' house—can you tell Just where it stood before it fell Prey of the vandal foe,— Our dear old temple, loved so well, By ruthless hands laid low? Where, tell me, was the Deacon's pew? Whose hair was braided in a queue? (For there were pig-tails not a few,)— That's what I'd like ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... being her practice to verify every word the clergyman read, and no small satisfaction to catch him tripping. "Do, Mrs. Ketchum, speak to Ethel and get her to take off those machines and put on something stylish," said Bijou. "I am really ashamed to take her into our pew; people will stare so. She is a perfect fright. The idea of a girl making herself look ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... you to stop looking at me and to take a good look at the wood out of which the pew ahead of you is made. [If necessary, revise the following sentences to meet your immediate conditions.] You will notice that the pew is made up of a good many pieces of oak fastened together so nicely that you can hardly tell where they are ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... could be mentioned—if there was anything to mention—they arrived at the porch of the church, passed under it without speaking, walked up the aisle and took their places in the family pew, Maria occupying the comfortable corner ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... by an assent to questions regarding one's personal faith, or by being baptized, the fact of membership in the Church, the partaking of the Lord's supper, serving as an official of the Church in pulpit or pew, faithful attendance, liberal ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... sat in the Braeside pew with Mrs. Forester and Blanche. Again the preacher's theme was love—"the greatest thing in the world"—love to the Creator, and, through it, love to all His creatures great and small. The old man told how love can smooth rough places, ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... of a Church nineteen centuries old,—and adapted to the needs of the timid sinner who has that day first entered its porch, or of the remorseful publican who has only recently become sensible of his call to a pew. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... babe could surely comprehend, than she would find that the elusive subject had slipped from her grasp, and her whole mind would be fixed upon the problem of how long it would take a fly to crawl all the way across the expansive back of Mrs. Graham, who sat in the pew in front. ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... said she wished they might form the choir at the church. Indeed, the glad spirit of Spring was abroad, and it found its way into our hearts. We soon learned that it entered largely also into Dr. Lyman's sermon. We were not treated as strangers and intruders, but welcomed and shown to a pew in a way that made us feel at home. I discovered that I, too, should be kept awake and given much to think about. We remained until Sunday-school, which followed the service, was over, and then went home, feeling that life both here and hereafter was something to be thankful for. After dinner, ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... minutes by studying the face of a girl in the pew across: a sensitive unhappy girl whose longing poured out with intimidating self-revelation as she worshiped Mr. Zitterel. Carol wondered who the girl was. She had seen her at church suppers. She considered how ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... fraction of an instant, but he somehow managed to make it plain that the information was superfluous. He turned without a word and marched majestically up the aisle before her to the fourth pew from the front on the right. There he faced about and laid a protesting hand on the carved walnut, as though absolving himself in the sight of his God and his fellow-citizens. Honora fell ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fell asleep dreaming of young Gordon. She had never seen him except Sundays in church, but now she dreamed he came into her pew and offered her a hymn-book of ivory and silver; and she dreamed they sang from it together until the church thrilled with their united voices. But the song they sang seemed to pain her, and her voice hurt ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... In the short time she had been observing the comings and goings of the boys and girls of their neighbourhood one young man had begun to stand out from the rest. Elizabeth was nearly sixteen, and when she saw him now in a pew a few seats ahead of her she made ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... used to go to such a dear old church, in the Isle of Wight," said Betty. "You could look out of the open door by our pew and see the old churchyard, and look away over the green downs and the blue sea. You could see the red poppies in the fields, and hear ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... situation, station; fundament, buttocks, bottom, breech; chair, sofa, tete-a-tete, divan, settee; banquette, dickey, rumble; bench, form; pew. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... experience—were attributed by Mr. Sarrazin to the exhilarating influence of his happy domestic circumstances and his successful professional career. His essentially English wife; his essentially English children; his whiskers, his politics, his umbrella, his pew at church, his plum pudding, his Times newspaper, all answered for him (he was accustomed to say) as an inbred member of the glorious nation that rejoices in hunting the fox, and believes ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... tendency to choke and sneeze is always enhanced by the circumstance that one's life may depend on keeping still, just as yawning becomes irresistible where to yawn would be social ruin, and just as one is sure to sleep in church, if one sits in a conspicuous pew. At other times, some unguarded motion would create a splashing which seemed, in the tension of my senses, to be loud enough to be heard at Richmond, although it really mattered not, since there are fishes in those rivers which make as much noise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... with her week's work, in her pew in the church on Sunday, and thought of Livingstone's call to Africa, she saw visions of far-off places of which she heard from the pulpit and read in her magazines—visions of a steaming river on the West Coast of Africa where the alligators slid from the mud banks into the water; ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... Finney was directly concerned in the restoration of only one of them. Of this he gives an account in his memoirs. "There were two very striking cases of instantaneous recovery from insanity during this revival. As I went into meeting in the afternoon of one Sabbath, I saw several ladies sitting in a pew, with a woman dressed in black who seemed to be in great distress of mind; and they were partly holding her, and preventing her from going out. As I came in, one of the ladies came to me and told me she was an insane woman.... I said a few words to ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... ground had risen with the dust of generations, so that the walls were low; and heavy galleries having been erected in parts, the place was filled with shadowy recesses and haunted with glooms. From a window in the square pew where he sat, so small and low that he had to bend his head to look out of it, the schoolmaster could see a rivulet of sunshine, streaming through between two upright gravestones, and glorifying the long grass of a neglected mound that lay close to the wall under the wintry drip from the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... affair was with a bright, fair-haired, fat-faced boy, who sat near her pew Sundays. They looked at each other once during service, and she felt a glad glow in her chest spread over her, dwelt on his image, smiled, and even the next day felt a new desire to please. She watched for him to pass from school. When he appeared, "had a most delightful thrill shoot through her." ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... After breakfast Frank went with the family to church, as was usual; and there, as usual, he saw Mary in Dr Thorne's pew. She, as she looked at him, could not but wonder why he had not answered the letter which was still at Silverbridge; and he endeavoured to read in her face whether it was true, as his mother had told him, that she was quite ready to give him up. ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... overlooking Havre. I liked to see the stout red-cheeked choristers perspiring with their work, and singing with a rough stentoriousness, just as I had seen them in the village church of Sanvic. And there was the organist playing away at his raised seat in the body of the church, as if in a pew, visible to the naked eye of all; while two cantors in copes clapped pieces of wood together as a signal for the congregation to kneel or rise. Most quaint of all were the surpliced instrumentalists ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... enough to pay interest on twenty-five thousand francs for which I have no use. All that I can do for you is to place that sum, in my name, with the notary Dupuis. He is a religious man; you can see him every Sunday in the warden's pew in our church. Notaries, you know, never give receipts, therefore I could not give you one myself; I can only promise to leave among my papers, in case of death, a memorandum which will secure the restitution of the ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... totally without tower, or belfry. The interior was of unpainted cherry, and through a want of skill in the mechanics, had a cold and raw look, little suited to the objects of the structure. Still, the small altar, the desk and the pulpit, and the large, square, curtained pew of the captain, the only one the house contained, were all well ornamented with hangings, or cloth, and gave the place somewhat of an air of clerical comfort and propriety. The rest of the congregation sat on benches, with kneeling-boards ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... service we sat in a pew in the rear of the church, and at one point in the service when it was usual in that part of the country for the congregation to sit down, one gentleman only remained standing. We could scarcely believe our own eyes when we recognised in this solitary figure ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... column-like straight up to a lucent green canopy, always twinkling and shifting in the wind and the sunlight. Below grew a thin screen of underbrush, through which we had no difficulty at all in pushing, but which threw about us face-high a tender green partition. The effect was that of a pew in an old-fashioned church, so that, though we shared the upper stillnesses, a certain delightful privacy of our own seemed assured us. This privacy we knew to be assured also to many creatures besides ourselves. On the other side ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... and on the death of Bubi, Sechele and his people indicated a strong wish that a missionary should reside among them. On leaving Mabotsa, Livingstone transferred his services to this tribe. The name of the pew station was Chonuane; it was situated some forty miles from Mabotsa, and in 1846 it became the centre of Livingstone's operations among the Bakwains and ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... satisfaction that the Almighty contented Himself in merely counting noses in the pews. For even though it was my brother who got into trouble, I shall never forget the harangue on impiety that awaited us when a most unchristian sexton reported to our father that the pew in front of ours had been found chalked on the back, so as to make its occupants the object of undisguised attention from the rest of the congregation. As circumstantial evidence also against us, he offered some tell-tale squares of silver paper, on which we had been cooking chocolates on the ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... pew and slipped to a position which allowed her an unobstructed view of Doctor Sherman, and which allowed Doctor Sherman an equally unobstructed view of her. Worshippers who stared her way noticed that she seemed never to take her gaze from the ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... incomplete villain who did not carry a cane. Imaginative literature is rich in canes. Who ever heard of a fairy godmother without a cane? Who with any feeling for terror has not been startled by the tap, tap of the cane of old Pew in "Treasure Island"? There is an awe and a pathos in canes, too, for they are the light to blind men. And the romance of canes is further illustrated in this: they, with rags and the wallet, have been among the ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... responded he a second time; his teeth chattered louder; his cheeks became clammy and death-like. "My brethren!" stammered he a third time emphatically, and his knees fell together. A deep groan echoed from his mother's pew. His wildness increased. "My mother!" exclaimed the preacher. They were the last words he ever uttered in a pulpit. The shaking and the agony began in his heart, and his body caught the contagion. He covered his face with his hands, fell back, and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... droning of the lay brother is most happily expressed. Accompanied by her child and mother, the unfortunate victim of his seduction is here again introduced, endeavouring to enter the church, and forbid the banns. The opposition made by an old pew-opener, with her bunch of keys, gave the artist a good opportunity for indulging his taste in the burlesque, and he has ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... impressive by the Auld Lichts themselves. Here sinful women were grimly taken to task by the minister, who, having thundered for a time against adultery in general, called upon one sinner in particular to stand forth. She had to step forward into a pew near the pulpit, where, alone and friendless, and stared at by the congregation, she cowered in tears beneath his denunciations. In that seat she had to remain during the forenoon service. She returned home alone, and had to come back alone to her ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... your faith is so pure and childlike, and as I observe that the light from the yellow panes usually falls across your pew, I would advise that you cymbalize your faith (wouldn't that be noisy in church?) by binding your prayer-book in pale blue; the color of skim-milk, dear Mrs. Potiphar, which is so full of ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum, Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine, To the mass kneeling or the puritan's prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew, Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me, Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land, Belonging to the winders of the ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... flattered by beholding her admirer (for that everybody admires who sees her is a point which she never can for a moment doubt) in the next pew to her at St. James's Church last Sunday; and the manner in which he appeared to go to sleep during the sermon—though from under his fringed eyelids it was evident he was casting glances of respectful ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... down often. Maybe this is the way to go when it rains! It don't rain much here, does it? My, but that's an idea—to go underground to church. I wonder how ever you get used to it." And then irrelevantly she added, "All these beautiful churches over here in Yurrup, not a pew in one of 'em." ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... of mine I'll always remember as a day of smells, the smell of the pew-cushions in the empty church, the smell of the lilies-of-the-valley, that dear, sweet, scatter-brained Fanny-Rain-In-The-Face (she rushed to town an hour after getting my wire) insisted on carrying, the smell of the leather in the damp taxi, the tobaccoy smell of Dinky-Dunk's ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... Uncle Eb. 'Here's a good-lookin' couple. We've got a chicken pie an' a Baptis' minister fer dinner an' both good. Take yer pew nex' t' the minister,' he added as he ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... not appear to notice that a place was being shown him, and walked past the pew and up the little steps that led to the stalls on the cantoris side. Directly behind the singing-men were five stalls, which had canopies richer and more elaborate than those of the others, with heraldic escutcheons painted on the backs. From these seats ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... he gazed at the friendly faces round him, and reflected sadly that he was about to leave for ever the little world in which he had been so happy. General Bramble was standing gravely at attention, and singing as solemnly as if he were in his pew in church: ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... but given to gesticulation, and Mrs. Jere Burbank, the president of the Dorcas Society, who sat in a front pew, said she couldn't bear to see a preacher scramble round ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... family kept for actual use and suitable to their condition, and the trunks or other receptacles necessary to contain the same; one musket or rifle and shot-gun; all private libraries, family bibles, portraits, pictures, musical instruments, and paintings, not kept for the purpose of sale; a seat or pew occupied by the debtor or his family in any house of public worship; an interest in a public or private burying ground, not exceeding one acre for any defendant; two cows and calf; one horse, unless a horse is exempt as hereinafter provided; fifty sheep and the wool therefrom and the materials manufactured ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... ghastly cheer. I petted and patted them all round and cast an agitated eye over the set. A grimy young stagehand made a minor change for me with a languid, not unkind contempt. "What's the big idea?" he wanted to know. "Goner slip 'em some high-brow stuff? Say, this is the wrong pew, sister. They won't stand for nothing like that here. Up in the Bronx, maybe—" I turned and basely fled. I went out in front and found my place. The orchestra rollicked through the overture and people poured in and ushers slid down the aisles and snapped ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... pessimists of the pews. They are the guyers of the groom and the banterers of the bride. They come to laugh at your marriage, and should you escape from Hymen's tower on the back of death's pale steed they will come to the funeral and sit in the same pew and cry over ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... saw the troops moving as directed. How we gritted our teeth as we heard the bullets whiz by that brave boy. I have the feeling yet. We thought his goodness saved him. His was goodness! Not that kind that will stare a preacher full in the face from a cushioned pew on Sunday, and gouge you over the counter on Monday, but the genuine article. His ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... invented John Silver, that terribly smooth-spoken mariner. Nothing but genius could have drawn that simple yokel on the island, with his craving for cheese as a Christian dainty. The blustering Billy Bones is a little masterpiece: the blind Pew, with his tapping stick (there are three such blind tappers in Mr. Stevenson's books), strikes terror into the boldest. Then, the treasure is thoroughly satisfactory in kind, and there is plenty of it. The landscape, as in the feverish, fog-smothered flat, ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... potato happens to fall. The pews of this meeting-house were the usual oblong ones, where people sit close together, with a ledge before them to support their hymn-books, liable only to occasional contact with the back of the next pew's heads or bonnets, and a place running under the seat of that pew where hats could be deposited,—always at the risk of the owner, in case of ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... blood-horses, bulls, cows, and sheep, one not versed in such matters might be tempted to think that men, especially the poorer sort, were made for beasts, and not beasts for men. And yet, mirabile dictu! at these great social gatherings of man-and-animal kind, there has not been even "a negro- pew" for the donkey. A genuine, raw, Guinea negro might have as well entered the Prince of Wales' Ball in New York bare-footed, and offered to play a voluntary on his banjo for the dancers, as this despised quadruped have hoped to obtain the entree to these grand and ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... Miss Pew, in that awful voice of hers, at which the class-room trembled, as at unexpected thunder. A murmur ran along the desks, from girl to girl, and then some one, near that end of the long room which was sacred to Miss Pew and her lieutenants, said ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... sat they, The estranged two, Thrust in one pew By chance that day; Placed so, breath-nigh, Each comer unwitting Who was to be ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... instep. The younger bore himself very erect and haughty, yet I saw the two were fashioned in one mould. On up the steps and into the church they went, Mr. Fontaine before and we after them. They took their seats in the great pew with the curious carving on the back, which I had never ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... it is splendid. My husband is in the churchwarden's pew; he left before me; he is becoming a fanatic—he speaks of ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... had finished his after-breakfast pipe, the chiming of the bells announced that it was time to prepare for church. The Rectory pew was situated close to the pulpit, at right angles to the body of the church, and Diana and Joan took their places one at either end of it. As the former was wont to remark: "It's such a comfort when there's no competition ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... inferior order of creation. At hotels and places of public resort they were refused entertainment. On railroads and steamboats they were herded off by themselves in mean and uncomfortable cars. If welcomed in churches at all, they were carefully restricted to the negro pew. As in the Southern States to-day, no distinction was made among them in these respects by virtue of dress or manners or culture or means; but all were alike discriminated against because of their dark skins. Some of Douglass's abolition friends, ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... defunct style about him. He had quite a fierce bristle of moustache, and a nervous briskness of carriage, yet there was something that was unmistakably conciliatory and subservient in his bearing toward Mrs. Jameson. He stood aside for her to enter the pew, with the attitude of vassalage; he seemed to respond with an echo of deference to every rustle of her silken skirts and every heave of her wide shoulders. Mrs. Jameson was an Episcopalian, and our church is Congregational. Mrs. Jameson did not attempt to kneel when she entered, ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... twenty we fancied the blest Middle Ages A spirited cross of romantic and grand, All templars and minstrels and ladies and pages, And love and adventure in Outre-Mer land; But, ah, where the youth dreamed of building a minster, The man takes a pew and sits reckoning his pelf, And the Graces wear fronts, the Muse thins to a spinster, When Middle-Age stares ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that although Theodore had been for years a member of the same Sabbath-school with this young lady, and had seen her sitting in the Hastings' pew in church on every Sabbath day, still this was the first time that he had met her face to face, near enough to speak to her, since that evening so long ago when they conversed together on a momentous ...
— Three People • Pansy
... against a tomb deep graven with a coat of arms and much stately Latin, until the singing clave the air, when he entered the building, and passed down the aisle to his own pew, the chiefest in the place. He was aware of the flutter and whisper on either hand,—perhaps he did not find it unpleasing. Diogenes may have carried his lantern not merely to find a man, but to show one as well, and a philosopher ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... Bascom, took to wife Hepsey, given away by Mrs. Betty, with Virginia as a kind of maid of honor, hovering near. It was well for Donald Maxwell that his memory served him faithfully in conducting the service, for his eyes were in misty conflict with his bright smile. Nickey from the front pew, watched his mother with awestruck eyes, and with son-like amazement at her self-possessed carriage under the blaze ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... happened; the evening and the night followed, placidly and uneventfully. Monday came, a cloudless, lovely day; Monday confirmed the captain's assertion that the marriage was a certainty. Toward ten o'clock, the clerk, ascending the church steps quoted the old proverb to the pew-opener, meeting him under the porch: "Happy the bride on whom ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... of you to stop looking at me and to take a good look at the wood out of which the pew ahead of you is made. [If necessary, revise the following sentences to meet your immediate conditions.] You will notice that the pew is made up of a good many pieces of oak fastened together so nicely ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... manner to the morning and evening service in the one church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—-could ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... for half a second. Eight men, all of them under thirty-five, in top physical condition. He was fifteen years older than the oldest and had confined his exercise, in the words of Chauncey de Pew, to "acting as pallbearer for my friends who take exercise." Not that he was really in poor shape, but he certainly couldn't have argued with eight men ...
— A World by the Tale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... whole train went to church, where Mr. Benjamin Allen fell fast asleep; while Mr. Bob Sawyer abstracted his thoughts from worldly matters, by the ingenious process of carving his name on the seat of the pew, in corpulent letters ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... pavement too was damp and mossy; and there were green patches down the white walls where the rains had got in. So the handful of people that came to church were glad enough to get the other side of the screen in the chancel, where at least the pew floors were boarded over, and the panelling of ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... for how could a minister's dog form a suitable judgment of any new procedure if he was repressed from the use of his own leading faculty? So, Spring went round the church conscientiously, smelling at pew doors, smelling of the greens, smelling at the heels of gentlemen and ladies, till he came near the door of the church, when he suddenly smelt something which called for immediate attention, and he made a side dart into the thicket where Dolly was sleeping, ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... seen, though, how his face an' argymunce an' figgers Drawed tears o' real conviction from a lot o' pen'tent niggers! It warn't like Wilbur's meetin', where you're shet up in a pew, Your dickeys sorrin' off your ears, an' bilin' to be thru; Ther' wuz a tent clost by thet hed a kag o' sunthin' in it, Where you could go, ef you wuz dry, an' damp ye in a minute; Au' ef you did dror off ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... saw a few persons entering, and he joined them. The interior of the church was far more gorgeous than the plain village meeting-house which he had been accustomed to attend with his mother. He gazed about him with a feeling of awe, and sank quietly into a back pew. As it was a week-day evening, and nothing of unusual interest was anticipated, there were but few present, here and there one, ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... his pew, the first one on the right, close to the choir, and Madame Tellier sat there with her sister-in-law, Fernande and Raphaele, Rosa the Jade, and the two pumps occupied the second seat, in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... traveller, for underneath this pew Lies fast asleep that merry man Andrew: When the last day's great sun shall gild the skies, Then he shall from his tomb get up and rise. Be merry while thou canst: for surely thou Shalt shortly be as sad as he ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... her up in the great hayloft of the convent, where she could actually hear the chants in the chapel, and distinguish the chatter of the lay-sisters in the yard. Another time, in conjunction with the sacristan, he bestowed her in the great seigneurial tribune (or squire's pew) in the village church, a tall carved box, where she was completely hidden; and the only time when she had failed to obtain warning beforehand, she stood kneading bread at a tub in Martin's cottage, while the hunt passed by, and a man-at-arms looked in and questioned ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... saw Donald and Elsie in the courts of Zion, and great peace was upon their brows. When I ascended the pulpit stairs, they were already in their ancestral pew, now the property of Hector Campbell, who had abandoned it with joy, only asking that he be given one in the gallery from which he might ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... he left me, about to visit other cities, his words fixed themselves in my memory. I had expressed to him my growing conviction that the worship in the churches had lost its primitive simplicity; that the pew-rent system was pernicious; that fixed salaries for ministers of the gospel were unscriptural; that the church of God should be administered only by men full of the Holy Ghost, and that the duty of Christians to the non-church-going masses was grossly neglected, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... he said laughing, "the family pew held me in solitary state this morning. Time was when I never minded, but this last year has spoiled me. I was booked for lunch but I came as soon as I could. Nobody ill, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... alderman standing with his back to the fire and his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat—and Mrs Clinton expressed her complete self, exhibiting every trait and attribute, on Sunday in church, when she sat in the front pew self-reliantly singing the hymns in the wrong key. It was then that she seemed more than ever the personification of a full stop. Her morals were above suspicion, ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... and I could hear my mother blessing him over the top of the pew behind our backs; but just as he finished, no less than three bees, who had been hovering over the heads of the workhouse boys opposite, all settled down together on ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... an alarm clock on the way home, and she and Julia went to early mass on the very next morning. Julia found this first experience an ordeal; she and Miss Toland were in a side pew before the big gong struck, and Julia did not raise her eyes from her book as the girls filed in. The steady rustle of frocks and shuffle of feet made her feel cold ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... to pray as to fight, attended church in a little meeting-house at Cairo. The clergyman did not appear on time; and the congregation waited, until many, growing weary, were leaving the church. Then the bluff old sailor rose in his pew, and, marching to the pulpit, delivered a stirring sermon, offering thanks for the victories of the Union arms, and imploring divine aid in the coming struggles. The next day he was on his way to hurl shot and shell at the men in ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... glory, Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? "Done things" just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story, Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders? (You'll never hear it in the family pew.) The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things— Then listen ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... church," said she, "as most of you did last night, to see the burying, and, being very weary, I sat me down in Mr. Johns's pew, and fell fast asleep. At eleven of the clock I awoke; which I believe was in some measure occasioned by the clock's striking, for I heard it. I started up, and could not at first tell where I was; but after some time I recollected the funeral, ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... to Bolingbroke every Sunday morning, and took me with her. Oh how long the miles were! how weary I was, with my back aching and trying to find a comfortable corner in the carriage; how I wanted to lie down on the soft cushions in the pew and go to sleep during the service. And when the miles home were finished, it seemed to me that so was I. Then I used to pray to have strength in the evening to read with the people. And I always had it; or at least I always did it. I never failed; ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... questions into their county antiquities, and obliged to own themselves unaware of a Roman milestone propping their bailiff's pigstye, or of the spur of a champion of one of the Roses being hung over their family pew. But when Mr. Henderson and the Raymonds reported pleasantly of her, and when once or twice she had been seen cantering down the lanes, or shopping in Elverslope, and had exchanged a bow with a familiar face, the gentlemen took to ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... monument of Edward Shirley, Esq., by whose father probably it was preserved at the demolition of the Priory, and conveyed to Isfield, his manorial estate. At the expense of Dr., afterwards Sir William, Burrell, it was removed from its obscure station, and placed upon a suitable shrine, in the vestry-pew of Southover Church, that being the nearest convenient spot to its original station. The stone is of black marble, sculptured in very high relief. The lower end had been broken off before its discovery at Isfield. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... way, for you know best where to go." She gave her vase to Amy, and led him into a side seat near her father's pew—one that she had noted as unoccupied of late. "It's early yet Do you mind sitting here ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... and Queen, was required from the parishioner as a qualification for attending divine service, or for receiving the Eucharist. Not one in fifty, therefore, of those laymen who disapproved of the Revolution thought himself bound to quit his pew in the old church, where the old liturgy was still read, and where the old vestments were still worn, and to follow the ejected priest to a conventicle, a conventicle, too, which was not protected by the Toleration ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... religious rites in groves, and knew nothing of church mortgages and the season-ticket system of pew rents. They were, in short, heathens and—as they were once complacently catalogued by a distinguished prelate of the Church ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... occur; they are likewise to be met with in Salisbury and other cathedrals; also in some of our ancient parish churches, as in the south aisle of Kidlington Church, Oxfordshire. Seats for the use of the congregation are noticed in the synod of Exeter, held A. D. 1287. Open wooden benches or pew-work are rarely, if at all, met with of an earlier era than the fifteenth century, when the practice of pewing the body of the church with open wooden seats, if not then introduced, began to prevail. In 1458 we meet with a testamentary bequest of money "to make seats called puying," ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... again for more than fifty years, and Whittier was never aware of this exception. In middle life, when the poet was editing the "Pennsylvania Freeman," and Miss Bray was engaged with Catherine Beecher in educational work, they once happened to sit side by side in the pew of a Philadelphia church, but he left without recognizing her, and she was too shy to speak to him. I had the story from a lady who as a little girl sat in the pew with them, and knew them both. Miss Bray married an Englishman named Downey, and in a romantic way[5] Mr. ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... accommodation. The preacher was solemn, majestic (notwithstanding the squint), and impressive; carrying all the appearance of devoted earnestness. My father had on a certain occasion, when I was still a small Eton boy, taken time by the forelock, and secured the use of a convenient pew in the first rank of the gallery. From this elevated situation we surveyed at ease and leisure the struggling crowds below. The crush was everywhere great, but greatest of all in the centre aisle. Here ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... better for him, and especially for his studies, if he had never seen her. Suddenly the aisle seemed to lighten up; she was gliding along it, beautiful as May, and modesty itself in dress and carriage. She went into a pew and kneeled a minute, then seated herself and looked out the lessons for the day. Alfred gazed at her face: devoured it. But her eyes never roved. She seemed to have put off feminine curiosity, and the world, at the church door. Indeed he wished she was not ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Albert slowly, and mentally contrasting it with many Sunday services when he had occupied a pew with the Nasons at their fashionable church in Boston, "it has been an experience I shall not soon forget. In one way it has been a pleasure, for it has taken me back to my young days." Then he added a little sadly, ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... of the olden time are preserved in these apartments. The ancient chapel is entered by an arched doorway from the court, and consists of a nave, chancel, and side aisle, with an antique Norman font and a large high-back pew used by the family. After passing the court, the banquet-hall is entered, thirty-five by twenty-five feet, and rising to the full height of the building. In one of the doorways is a bracket to which an iron ring is attached, which was used, as we are told, "to enforce the laws ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... throne, making too much of their petitions, in the presence of the gentry. Here and there sobs were to be heard. Lady Anstruthers followed the service timorously and with tears. But Betty, kneeling at her side, by the round table in the centre of the great square Stornham pew, which was like a room, bowed her head upon her folded arms, and prayed her own ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... those words were only inserted in the hope that by them "foreign powers might be humbugged into a concurrence with the abolition," and wound up his harangue by a declaration that, though he should "see the Presbyterian and the prelate, the Methodist and pew-preacher, the Jacobin and the murderer, unite in support of it, he would still raise his voice against it." It must have been more painful to the minister to be opposed by so distinguished an officer as Lord St. Vincent, who resisted the bill chiefly on the ground that ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... wasnt a soul in the church when we were married except the pew opener and the curate who did ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... say, then, that there are a great many reasonably good boys and girls, reasonably thoughtful, also, who find the confinement of a pew oppressive, merely because they do not know the best way to get the advantage of a service, which is really of profit to children as it is to grown-up people,—and which never has its full value as it ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... she could not let him preach without being near him, and she made Catherine go with her to St. John's. They took their seats, not in her own pew but in a corner, where no one should notice them under their veils. The experiment was full of peril, though Esther did not know it. This new excitement, coming so swiftly after a fortnight of exhaustion, threw her back into a state of extreme nervousness. ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... brain no doubt were dreams of a feudal domain, of a seigniorial chateau looking out across the great river, of respectful tenants paying annual dues to their lord in labour, kind, and money, of a parish church in which over the seigniorial pew should be displayed his coat of arms. But if these pictures inspired his fancy and cheered his spirit, they were never to become realities. In 1687 he was, apparently, in need of money, and he resolved to sell two-thirds of his interest in the seigniory of Malbaie. ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... and her daughter rustle into their pew at church—placed next in honour to that of the proprietor of the soil—all eyes are turned upon them. The old-fashioned farmer's wife, who until her years pressed heavily upon her made the cheese and butter in her husband's dairy, is not so old but that her ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... stray into a church while a revival meeting was in progress. To be truthful, this individual was not entirely sober, and with that instinct which seems to impel all men in his condition to assume a prominent part in proceedings, he walked up the aisle to the very front pew. ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... sat with her daughter in the family seat, in which were also Fanny and Madeleine. Dean Sparre, with his wife and daughter Barbara, were in the front row of the pew which belonged to them; while behind were Pastor Martens with the other Miss Sparres; and behind, again, Mrs. Rasmussen, the ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... wiped her eyes with his own handkerchief and led her in to the service. Their own pew was already full. He had to take her back into Dr. ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... common to the dwellers in rural England. Long before the hour of service the chapel-yard was thronged, and from within came the sounds of stringed instruments as they were tuned to pitch by the musicians, who had already taken their place in the singing-pew beneath the pulpit, which stood square and high, canopied with its old-fashioned sounding-board and cornice of plain deal. There was 'owd Joel Boothman,' who had played the double bass for half a century, resining his bow with a trembling hand; and Joe and Robert Hargreaves ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... Abbey, he sent me a very kind invitation to come on the next Sabbath to the Deanery before the service, and on account of my deafness Lady Augusta would take me into a seat close to his pulpit. Accordingly she stowed me in a small box-pew, which was close against the pulpit, and within arms' length of the Dean. His sermon was a beautiful essay on Solomon and great men, and in the course of it he said: "Such was the greatness of our ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... that she was one of those who are destined, by a mysterious decree, never to receive the light of the glorious gospel of Christ. Hence, while her husband was a deacon of the church, she, for years, had sat in her pew while the sacramental elements were distributed, a mournful spectator. Punctilious in every duty, exact, reverential, she still regarded herself as a child of wrath, an enemy to God, and an heir of perdition; nor could she see any hope of remedy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... replied, saying, "They had done right to guillotine Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and all the family." The indignation increased, and the men from Bois-de-Chenes, and especially their wives, wanted to get into the pew to knock him down, but just then Sirou came up, crying "Room! room!" and old Koekli in his red gown threw himself before the man, who escaped into the sacristy, raising his hands to heaven and declaring that he was converted, and that he renounced the devil and ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... which a man's duties to both, may be accommodated and adjusted. How the carriages rattle up, and deposit their richly- dressed burdens beneath the lofty portico! The powdered footmen glide along the aisle, place the richly-bound prayer-books on the pew desks, slam the doors, and hurry away, leaving the fashionable members of the congregation to inspect each other through their glasses, and to dazzle and glitter in the eyes of the few shabby people in the free seats. The organ ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... said she earnestly, "let us go! We belong nowhere. We have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. Poor and forsaken as we are, some pew-door will ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... right hand gallery, the other into the left, exceptions being however made in behalf of the owners of the square pews, who enjoyed the privilege of having their families with them in the house of God. Across the middle of the end gallery Dr. Partridge's square pew extended, so that by no means might the occupants of the two side galleries come within ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... yellow dun which belongs to Georgian and early Victorian aesthetics. But the value of the church is that it is untouched. No restorer has laid a hand on the mouldering baize which lines the pews; no one has knocked down the hideous galleries; nobody has broken into the gallery pew in which, warmed by a fireplace and chimney in winter, the little Princess Victoria of Kent used to sit when she was allowed to visit Claremont. You may see at Esher, better than in any other Surrey church, the surroundings ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... in a dark place gleamed the bright head of Rose Macleod in the farthest corner of the family pew. A vagrant sunbeam, like a golden arrow, pierced the gloom about her, but to the disappointment of one interested observer, it failed to reach the rich coils, so nearly resembling it in colour. This observer presently reminded himself that he had come there to worship the ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... church, Or rather say non-members in the church, Whom we all have to think of nowadays, I would have changed the Creed a very little? Not that she ever had to ask me not to; It never got so far as that; but the bare thought Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew, And of her half asleep was too much for me. Why, I might wake her up and startle her. It was the words 'descended into Hades' That seemed too pagan to our liberal youth. You know they suffered from a general onslaught. And well, if they ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... the License and the Ring with you.—The fee to a clergyman is according to the rank and fortune of the bridegroom; the clerk if there be one, expects five shillings, and a trifle should be given to the pew opener, and other officials of the church. There is a fixed scale of fees at every church, to which the parties married ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... intently to all he heard. There was something strangely impressive to him in this simple worship out in what to him was a vast wilderness. He felt more of the true spirit of worship than he had ever felt at home sitting in the handsomely upholstered pew beside his mother and sister while the choir-boys chanted the processional and the light filtered through costly windows of many colors over the large and cultivated congregation. There was something about the words of these people that went straight to the heart more than all the intonings of the ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... horses. Old Brick-Dusty climbed down to see a man in the tavern, and the Michigan contingent and Colonel Littlejourneys slid down the other side and went into Wythburn Church. There isn't another church in England so peculiar and so interesting. A pew is marked sacred to Wordsworth, and one also to Harriet Martineau, who I did not know before ever went to church. The silver service was the gift of Southey, and is inscribed with his name and crest. Southey ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... you know. Olive was stopping with some friends in Dublin, and I met her early one morning and took her to St. Patrick's. You will find it all right in the register—Matthew Robert O'Brien and Olive Carrick. There were only two witnesses: an old pew-opener, and a friend of mine, Edgar Boyle. Boyle is dead now, poor chap! but you will find his name ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... nothing else, sire; only M. Fouquet pays me one thousand two hundred livres a year for his pew ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Charles Dickens[1] arrived in the town of Boston, he found his room flooded with offers of a pew at Sunday morning church. This fashion in America has apparently passed, though I was taken on sightseeing expeditions to various cathedrals whose architecture seemed to me to be execrable (largely European copies—nothing natively American). It was never suggested that I attend divine ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... clerkship, forgave her even her undoubted success in making money, on account of Mrs. Greymer. It had watched Therese grow from a slim girl, with black braids hanging down her white neck as she sat in the "minister's pew" of the old brick church, into a beautiful pale woman in a widow's bonnet. Therese went now every Sunday to the same church where her father used to preach. The countess accompanied her most decorously. She was a pagan at heart, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... in Wall Street and skip with a satchelful of negotiable securities and then, after the papers were through ragging the police for their inefficiency, you would drive up to the bank in a taxi, walk in and return the money, saying you had found it in the old family pew at Trinity when you went in to say your prayers! Here would be an opportunity to break the force of habit and awaken ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... was his great delight to create as much noise and confusion as possible, that on his entrance the respectable yeomen and humble parishioners might be dazzled with his glory, and whisper one to another, "That be Sir Guy," as he marched to the front of his family pew in a blaze of wondrous apparel. It was natural that he should create a sensation with his red face and gaudy-coloured clothes, and huge, dyed whiskers, and the eternal flower in his mouth, which was always on ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... streets from all the churches round, while the great bell beat out its summons from the Norman tower. The church was filled from end to end as they came in, meeting Dr. Carrington at the door, and they all passed up together to the pew reserved for the churchwarden, close beneath ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... Edwin. Emma had met him frequently in the woods, and down by the brook where he went to fish. They had thus become pretty well acquainted, and from him Emma had learned the name of the pretty girl who sat in the pew in front of their own at church—the little girl who wore a black ribbon upon her bonnet, and whose manner in the house of prayer was both quiet and devout. Edwin had told her that the name of this ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... was tied under her chin with a green ribbon, and she had a little feathery green wreath around her face inside the rim. Her wide silk skirt was shot with green and blue, and rustled as she walked up the aisle to her pew. People stared after her without knowing why. There was no tangible change in her appearance. She had worn that same green shot silk many Sabbaths; her bonnet was three summers old; the curls drooping on her cheeks were an innovation, but the people did not recognize ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... some time ago, and now the organ was sending forth deep, heavy chords that made the air thrill and vibrate. The pew in which Nina sat quite shook with the sounds, and she shrank away from the wooden back, and cuddled down upon the cushion in the seat, feeling very mysterious and awestruck, but withal quite warm and ...
— Dreamland • Julie M. Lippmann
... his discomfiture than ever, Dr. Fairfax had seated the strange pair directly across the aisle from him in the pew with Esther. ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... In a pew near to the altar Victor sat weeping like a child, and when the last Amen was uttered, he sprang to ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... and went; and, after taking his seat, he leaned his head forwards on the pew to repeat over to himself a short ejaculatory prayer, as had always been his custom on entering the house of God. When he had done, he lifted his eye naturally towards that point on his right hand where the fierce apparition ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... heard of a man having a fortune left him for merely opening the pew door of a church, to an ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... these verses intimate less decidedly, the transient idea of Miss Cecilia Stubbs passed from Captain Waverley's heart amid the turmoil which his new destinies excited. She appeared, indeed, in full splendour in her father's pew upon the Sunday when he attended service for the last time at the old parish church, upon which occasion, at the request of his uncle and Aunt Rachel, he was induced (nothing loth, if the truth must be told) to present himself in ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... to say, in all relations of life not pertaining to eating—Mr. Port was very much what was to be expected of him from his birth and from his environment. Every Sunday, with an exemplary piety, he sat solitary in the great square pew in St. Peter's which had been occupied by successive generations of Ports ever since the year 1761, when the existing church was completed. Every other day of the week, from his late breakfast-time for some ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... many of the colonists who did not attend at the meeting-house on the Sabbath, not because they were irreligious or vicious, but either because they lived far from the rendezvous, or because they did not find it a matter of private conscience with them to sit in a pew and listen to a sermon. Moreover, it was the rule among Calvinists that no one could join in the Communion service who had not "experienced religion"; and many excellent persons might entertain conscientious doubts whether this mysterious subjective phenomenon had taken place in them. Pending ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... elicited the fact that it was the 25th. (You can imagine the chorus "A month to Christmas!" and Sunday.) Sunday, and you probably in your frock coat and patent boots, luxuriously reclining in an upholstered pew, listening to promises of peace and rest, or standing up half thinking of the good meal to ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... suddenly the drift of the sermon dawned upon him, and then bowed his head with shame. His wife looked straight in front of her, two flaming spots upon her pale cheeks. Mary, in the next pew, dared not move, hardly dared breathe; her heart sank with dismay, and she ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... beclouded vision, but she saw that it was a genuine certificate of marriage between Archibald-Alexander-John Scott, Marquis of Arondelle, and, Rose Cameron, signed by James Smith, Rector of St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, and witnessed by John Thomas Price, Sexton, and Ann Gray, Pew-opener. ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... the order of rank, employments, and rate of pay. The rows of seats were all marked with the class of employers that were expected to sit in them. Labourers were near the door. The others were in successive rows forward, until the pew of the "Admiral Superintendent," next the Altar rails, was reached. I took my seat among the "artificers," being of that order. On coming out of church the master-attendant, next in dignity to the admiral-superintendent, came up to ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... would have utterly disappeared. He was rather small for his age;-and I don't think had ever been seen with a clean face. Even at church, though the immediate front turned to the minister might be passable, the people in the next pew had always an uninterrupted view of the black rim where washing operations ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... (continues Fosbroke) were of a similar D form. Two lofty arched doorways entered into the pit. In front of the stage, which was very shallow, was a pew-like orchestra. The proscenium was very narrow, and instead of a drop scene was the elisium, a house, narrow, with a kind of bow window front in the centre, and a door on each side: for Pollux says that a house ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... read, 'Like people, like priest.' In Isaiah we read, 'As with the people, so with the priest.' There is a great deal of harmony between the pulpit and the pew. Everything goes along in an orderly manner. All services must be short or the people can not stand them—short prayers, short sermons, short everything. Oftentimes the service is gone through with, and nothing in it but an out-and-out performance; no life, ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... the attention he had expected. His entrance into the pew was attended by no hilarious uprising en masse. He found his place in the gallery, between Pebble Stone and Duke Straus, who sleepily asked his name and went off for a supplementary nap on the shoulder of D. Tanner. Stone evidently had heard nothing of his disgrace, or else ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... corner of a pew, squeezed between a pillar and her mother, Elsa knelt and prayed. Those who watched her—and there were many—declared that not only did she never stop crying for a moment during Mass, but that her eyes were swollen and her cheeks puffy from having cried all the night ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... wives both childless, after he had gained so much by manganese and things, turning up when nobody expected it?—and why was there a Lowick parish church, and the Waules and Powderells all sit ting in the same pew for generations, and the Featherstone pew next to them, if, the Sunday after her brother Peter's death, everybody was to know that the property was gone out of the family? The human mind has at no period accepted a moral chaos; and so preposterous a result was not strictly conceivable. But ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... with brief mention sundry inexplicable wonders, such as those wherewith the spiritualistic papers are frequently full, only stating that I was one of those who investigated the case of the Rev. Mr. Vaughan's pew-opener, at St. James's, Brighton, whose daughter was thought to be "bewitched." Certainly, strange knockings accompanied her when she came in at my call, much like those I heard many years ago at Rochester, U.S.; ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... light rustle of expectancy was already running from pew to pew as Calvin Oke brought down his open palm with a whack! knocking the sufferer out of his seat, and driving his nose smartly against the back-rail ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... shout our girls, Responsive from their pew; "You say there are too many, but We know ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 25, 1892 • Various
... scream, not that screaming would have done me any good in that horrible place of thick walls. The butler produced a key, and unlocked a small, private door at the side of the chapel which led from the apartments of his lordship to the family pew. Then taking my husband by feet and shoulders, Lord Rantremly and the butler carried him out, locking the door, and leaving the clergyman and me prisoners in the chapel. The reverend old gentleman took no notice of me. He seemed to be dazed, and when at last I found my voice and addressed ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... table of the Lord; pyx; baptistery, font; piscina^, stoup; aumbry^; sedile^; reredos; rood loft, rood screen. [parts of a church: list] chancel, quire, choir, nave, aisle, transept, vestry, crypt, golgotha, calvary, Easter sepulcher; stall, pew; pulpit, ambo^, lectern, reading desk, confessional, prothesis^, credence, baldachin, baldacchino^; apse, belfry; chapter house; presbytery; anxious-bench, anxious-seat; diaconicum [Lat.], jube^; mourner's bench, mourner's seat. [exterior adjacent to a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... nodded vigorously, and again Estra closed his eyes in that odd, hesitating way. Immediately every one in the place, with the exception of a single person in the lowest row, took flight in his or her little glass pew. In a moment the great vault overhead was fairly swarming with people; and in less than a minute the last of them had floated out through one of the arches ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... Pringle never stirred beyond his parlour, and was invisible to every one, except his housekeeper and doctor, but his tall, square, curtained pew was jealously locked up, and was a grievance to the vicar, who having been foiled in several attempts, was meditating a fresh one, if, as he told his wife, he could bring his churchwarden up to the scratch, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the belfry at the boy's elbow. He wore his surplice, and held his prayer-book, with a finger between the pages. Glancing down toward the nave, he saw Humility sitting in the big vicarage pew—no other ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... an Old Man in a pew, Whose waistcoat was spotted with blue; But he tore it in pieces, To give to his nieces,— That cheerful ...
— Book of Nonsense • Edward Lear
... pews of an old-fashioned shape, which run down the sides of the walls. The organ, presented by Major Ingram in 1691-92, is in a gallery at the west end, and immediately beneath the gallery on the right-hand side is the Governor's pew. ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... friends miserable by a succession of hysterical tears. By no means. She made an effort to be serene, and the effort was successful—as such efforts usually are. On the morning of Christmas-day they duly attended church, and Lady Mason was seen by all Hamworth sitting in The Cleeve pew. In no way could the baronet's friendship have been shown more plainly than in this, nor could a more significant mark of intimacy have been given;—all which Sir Peregrine well understood. The people of Hamworth had chosen to talk scandal ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... would be the Benedicite, which he had never minded. There was also the Litany, which drove him into the air again, much to Mrs. Failing's delight. She enjoyed this sort of thing. It amused her when her Protege left the pew, looking bored, athletic, and dishevelled, and groping most obviously for his pipe. She liked to keep a thoroughbred pagan to shock people. "He's gone to worship Nature," she whispered. Rickie did not look up. "Don't you think he's ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... to Timpson on his return home, "I've secured a good pupil for your son-in-law." Timpson had a large family of daughters; Mr. Riley felt for him; besides, Louisa Timpson's face, with its light curls, had been a familiar object to him over the pew wainscot on a Sunday for nearly fifteen years; it was natural her husband should be a commendable tutor. Moreover, Mr. Riley knew of no other schoolmaster whom he had any ground for recommending in preference; why, then, should be not recommend ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... him with quick intelligence. "That's just what we'll have to do," she said. "The Cure this morning at mass scolded the people about the Rebellion, and said that Nic and you had brought all this trouble upon Bonaventure; and everybody looked at our pew and snickered. Oh, how I hate them all! ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... I used to go to such a dear old church, in the Isle of Wight," said Betty. "You could look out of the open door by our pew and see the old churchyard, and look away over the green downs and the blue sea. You could see the red poppies in the fields, ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... of the soul-stirring evening discourse of Mr. Slope. Not only is she sent adrift, but she is so sent with a character which leaves her little hope of a decent place. Woe betide the six-foot hero who escorts Mrs. Proudie to her pew in red plush breeches, if he slips away to the neighbouring beer-shop, instead of falling into the back seat appropriated to his use. Mrs. Proudie has the eyes of Argus for such offenders. Occasional drunkenness in the week may be overlooked, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... is sometimes sarcastically referred to as "the social stepping-stone." It is a fact that the newly made rich and the vulgar often choose a church attended by the people of fashion whose acquaintance they most desire, rent a high-priced pew, and become prominent through their benefactions and their services in church work. They are "taken up," after a time, in a fashion, and unless too socially impossible through lack of good breeding, may, from "fringers," ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... vegetables named, but to show how hard it is to go contrary to the expectations of society. Society expects every man to have certain things in his garden. Not to raise cabbage is as if one had no pew in church. Perhaps we shall come some day to free churches and free gardens; when I can show my neighbor through my tired garden, at the end of the season, when skies are overcast, and brown leaves ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... seemed to know about parochial charges and livings and stipends and glebes, and Maria Edgeworth was rather helpful; but Brian and Sitric glared at each other and brandished their hymn-books threateningly, while Ossian refused to sit in the same pew with Mickey Free, who behaved in an odious manner, and interrupted each of the speakers in turn. Incidentally a group of persons huddled together in a far corner rose out of the dim light, and flapping huge wings, flew over my head and out of the window ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to occupy an inferior position,—in steamers, compelled to take my fare on the deck; in hotels, to take my meals in the kitchen; in coaches, to ride on the outside; in railways, to ride in the "negro car;" and in churches, to sit in the "negro pew." But no sooner was I on British soil, than I was recognised as a man, and an equal. The very dogs in the streets appeared conscious of my manhood. Such is the difference, and such is the change that is brought about by a trip of nine days in ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... boys behaved—that was the point. What boys wouldn't when their heart's desire was conveyed to them at the beginning of the sermon by a secret-service-under-the-pew process wholly delightful to the young human male? Who wouldn't be quiet for the sake of the peppermints, a keen three-bladed knife, or a few gelatine fishes that squirmed on his warm moist palm in as lively a manner as if just landed on the lake shore? Their father ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... affected Mrs. Stowe can be anticipated. "To me," she says, "it is incredible, amazing, mournful. I feel as if I should be willing to sink with it, were all this sin and misery to sink in the sea.... I sobbed, aloud in one pew and ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... innocent of any trouble near at hand. From his place in a side pew he kept a watchful eye upon Melvina, and perhaps wondered a little at all the attention lavished on the little ...
— A Little Maid of Old Maine • Alice Turner Curtis
... on Sundays Lucy would sit with anxious, eager expectation till she saw the Sidney pew filled; if Mr Sidney was present it was an hour or two of bliss; if, as was frequently the case, his place was empty, she would bow her head to hide the tears of vexation and disappointment which started ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... on the Sabbath, and sat, not in the minister's pew, but in the very seat where Allison used to sit with her father and her mother and Willie before trouble came. And when the silence was broken by the minister's voice saying: "Oh! Thou who art mighty to save!" did not her heart respond joyfully to the words? The tears rose as she bowed her ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... Pen's rooms; as in the pursuit of our own business in life through the Strand, at the Club, nay at Church itself, we can not help peeping at the shops on the way, or at our neighbor's dinner, or at the faces under the bonnets in the next pew. ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... evening that the Mayor's office of Glendale had reeked of brimstone, for hours, and the next Sunday Aunt Augusta sat in their pew at church, militantly alone, while he occupied a seat in the farthest limits of the amen ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... their emotions upon her till she was ready to laugh and cry with mingled amusement and vexation. Charlie winked rapturously at her behind his mother's fan; Mac openly pointed to the tall figure beside her; Jamie stared fixedly over the back of his pew, till Rose thought his round eyes would drop out of his head; George fell over a stool and dropped three books in his excitement; Will drew sailors and Chinamen on his clean cuffs, and displayed them, to Rose's great tribulation; Steve nearly ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... go; it's because I want to go so much—for the wrong reasons! Ever so many times during the last few days I have caught myself thinking about it, and imagining the scene— everybody staring at us, while we sit in the squire's pew trying to look unconscious, but really enjoying it all the time, and building castles in the air about the future, when we may have a right to be there. We should be thinking most of all of ourselves, and that's not a right spirit in which to go ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... no dukedoms to the few, We hold like rights and shall;— Equal on Sunday in the pew, On Monday in the mall. For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... failed her. The church was but a few yards from her own gate, and she walked there without any attendant. She had, however, sent word to the sexton to say that she would be there, and the old man was ready to show her into the family pew. She wore a thick veil, and was dressed, of course, in all the deep ceremonious woe of widowhood. As she walked up the centre of the church she thought of her dress, and told herself that all there would know how it had been between ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... was president of the official board. In fact, he was as truly a part of the Church as was the pulpit on the platform or the bell in the steeple. No meeting was complete without him. He was an indispensable part of the service. He always sat in the same pew, and none coming into the Church previously to Deacon Gramps ever dared sit in his pew any more than they dared to monopolize the preacher's chair in the pulpit. He always enjoyed the double pleasure of chewing ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... the altar. Madame and Aunt Matilda sat down together in a front pew; there was a moment's solemn hush, then the ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... be the smiling faces, and voices soft and sweet, Seen in thy father's dwelling, heard in the pleasant street? Where be the youths whose glances, the summer Sabbath through, Turned tenderly and timidly unto thy father's pew? ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... which bore almost undecipherable inscriptions, she wondered if those they covered had led happy, contented lives, or if they were afflicted with unquiet thoughts, unsatisfied longings, and dull despair, as she was. The church was empty and cool; she walked inside, to sit in the first pew she chanced upon. It was the first time that she had sat all alone in the church; its venerable appearance now cried aloud for recognition and appreciation. As if to accentuate its antiquity, some of the aisles and walls bore the disfiguring evidences ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... nominated by him. The legislature was in some form or other elected by the free citizens. The mode of election and the franchise varied from colony to colony—Massachusetts at one time based hers upon pew rents—but it was generally in harmony with the feeling and traditions of the colonists. It was seldom that any friction occurred between the King's representative and the burgesses, as they were generally called. While the relations between the colonies ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... disinterred in Greece. She was sorry for him, sorrier than she was for herself, for she could always find him in her thoughts.... She wondered if he could find her as vividly in his thoughts as she settled herself (the next day was Sunday) in the corner of her pew, resolved from the beginning not to hear a word of the sermon, but to think of Owen the whole time. She wanted to hear why he had left England so suddenly, and why he had returned so suddenly. She was sure that ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Bellemore, saw that every employee had his regular vacation each summer or whenever he preferred it, encouraged them to be frugal and moral, gave them good advice, forbade coarseness of language or profanity, and hired a pew in each of the two leading churches, which were always at the disposal of his young men without any ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... the devil, there's the devil! true, he thought it Sactity enough, if he had killed a man, so tad been done in a Pew, or undone his Neighbour, so ta'd been near enough to th' Preacher. Oh,—a Sermon's a fine short cloak of an hour long, and will hide the upper-part of a dissembler.—Church! Aye, he seemed all Church, and his conscience was ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... young people, primly hatted, their prayer-books in their hands, walked to the neighbouring church. There Laura sat once more between the boys, Marina and Georgy stationed like sentinels at the ends of the pew, ready to pounce down on their brothers if necessary, to confiscate animals and eatables, or to rap impish knuckles with a Bible. It was a spacious church; the pew was in a side aisle; one could see neither reading-desk nor pulpit; and the words of the sermon seemed to come from ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... he was only coming to put his rifle in its accustomed place, and on seeing the chamber filled with the various paraphernalia of a woman's toilet, he started, with the exclamation, "What the deuce! I reckon I've got into the wrong pew," and was going away, when Mabel called him back. "Meb, you here?" said he. "You in this little tucked-up hole, that I always thought too small for me and my ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... pay interest on twenty-five thousand francs for which I have no use. All that I can do for you is to place that sum, in my name, with the notary Dupuis. He is a religious man; you can see him every Sunday in the warden's pew in our church. Notaries, you know, never give receipts, therefore I could not give you one myself; I can only promise to leave among my papers, in case of death, a memorandum which will secure the restitution of the money into your ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... for whenever I'd raise my eyes there was Phil Gillis smiling at me from the judge's pew, and opposite were Dave and Aggie Stebbins, staring as though they had never seen the like of me before, and every now and then old Deacon Pettengil, who sits in front of us, would turn and peer at me through his green spectacles so funny that ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... What in your heart do you think of that fellow staggering along the dock? Do you not give him a wide berth, shun him, and account him but little above the brutes that perish? Will you throw open your parlors to him; invite him to dinner? or give him a season ticket to your pew in church?—No. You will do no such thing; but at a distance, you will perhaps subscribe a dollar or two for the building of a hospital, to accommodate sailors already broken down; or for the distribution of excellent books among tars who can not read. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... settled it. He, Davy Keith, would do it too, if it killed him. The same consideration induced him to submit meekly to the other details of his toilet, and he was really a handsome little lad when all was done. Anne felt an almost maternal pride in him as she led him into the old Cuthbert pew. ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Blackmore's pleasant ghost frequents the shadowy church at Porlock where he married Lorna and John Ridd, or roams the Valley of the Rocks to see the studious pilgrims at his pages. Stevenson haunts the gloomy inlet where the Admiral Benbow stood and where old Pew came tapping in the night. In the flesh I shall join their revels as an equal comrade. Clovelly, however, although its lilt was pleasant to the ear, ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... again the church bell rang out, and once more the melody of the Wedding March fell upon the ears of the Professor's auditors, while to their astonishment Ezekiel and his wife seated themselves quietly in the front bridal pew. Again every eye was turned, every neck was craned, and Samuel Hill and Tilly James walked down the centre aisle and took their places before the clergyman. Again the solemn words were spoken, and this time the spectators felt sure that the double couple would ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... and to the left. At the altar the groom receives the bride from her father's hand. The latter steps back a few paces, but remains near enough to "give away the bride." When this point in the ceremony has been passed, the father quietly joins the mother in the front pew. ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... got the greatest respect for you as a man, and I would favor you in all ways possible if 'twas so 'st I could; but if I was to testify the way you want me to I would go against conscience. I wouldn't feel that I could go on paying my pew tax. These people here want to know the truth and I am going to give it to them.' Yes, sir, I saw the light as plain as plain, and I pointed it out to Fred, but the devil and Tom Walker couldn't have prevented them ships from walking ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... suddenly a counter object of attention for the gay worshippers in the side pew. A little woman in black came hurrying up the aisle and entered the seat before them. She put down on the narrow shelf her prayer-book and a tumbled red handkerchief, and then bowed her head. Suddenly, in the midst ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... chapels were not so empty that parsons had to go forth beating up congregations. A pew was a privilege. And those who did not frequent the means of grace had at any rate the grace to be ashamed of not doing so. And, further, strolling players, in spite of John Wesley's exhortations, were not considered salvable. The notion of ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... picture. In his "Illustrations of the Author of Waverley" (1825) Mr. Robert Chambers records the changes in facts made by Scott. In the first place, Wilson did not attack his guard, and enable Robertson to escape, after the sermon, but as soon as the criminals took their seats in the pew. When fleeing out, Robertson tripped over "the plate," set on a stand to receive alms and oblations, whereby he hurt himself, and was seen to stagger and fall in running down the stairs leading to the Cowgate. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... recall to mind, The Church and every pew; William and Mary's royal arms Hung up in ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... fresh from Oxford, and curate to the Vicar of Chiswick, the Reverend Mr. Flowerdew, fell in love with Miss Sharp; being shot dead by a glance of her eyes which was fired all the way across Chiswick Church from the school-pew to the reading-desk. This infatuated young man used sometimes to take tea with Miss Pinkerton, to whom he had been presented by his mamma, and actually proposed something like marriage in an intercepted note, which the one-eyed apple-woman was charged to deliver. Mrs. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you might have expected of him—he's a thorough nigger-hater—keeps a pew behind the organ of his church for coloured people, and will not permit them to receive the sacrament until all the white members of his congregation are served. Why, I don't see what on earth induced you to ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... aftherward Flaherty begun makin' up to Mrs. O'Grady; an' ivry wan in th' parish seen it, an' was glad iv it, an' said it was scandalous. How it iver got out to O'Grady's pew in th' burryin' ground, I'll niver tell ye, an' th' Lord knows; but wan evenin' th' ghost iv O'Grady come back. Flaherty was settin' in th' parlor, smokin' a seegar, with O'Grady's slippers on his feet, whin th' spook come in in th' mos' natural way in the wurruld, kickin' th' ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... classes in the church were discussing the lesson for the day, Mrs. Martin's class in the pew in the rear were settling the great question ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... tower, or belfry. The interior was of unpainted cherry, and through a want of skill in the mechanics, had a cold and raw look, little suited to the objects of the structure. Still, the small altar, the desk and the pulpit, and the large, square, curtained pew of the captain, the only one the house contained, were all well ornamented with hangings, or cloth, and gave the place somewhat of an air of clerical comfort and propriety. The rest of the congregation sat on benches, with kneeling-boards before them. The ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... administration of justice provided for on the voluntary principle, then, and not till then, would he apply it to the church. He also objected to a distinctive tax on the members of the established church, to the raising of a fund from pew-rents, and to a graduated impost on the benefices of the clergy. He further objected to the proposition brought forward by Lord Althorp; namely, that a sum of L250,000 should be voted by parliament, for the purpose of maintaining ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... on his best suit and his steeple-crown, and formally went through his task. He attended the Episcopal worship every Sunday and great holiday, wearing inevitably the ancient tile, which often of itself drew audience more than the sermon. He gave a very small sum of money and took a cheap pew, and read from his prayer-book many admonitions he ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... class by himself, a class apart from the great leaders of the world. He is not yet received into the spiritual circles of the race. He goes about the world, sits on boards and committees, fills directorships and trusteeships, pays pew-rent, and runs towns. But when the spiritual conclaves of the world take place, when the things of life and death are inquired into, when words are said of the higher conduct of the life of man, if he draw near inquiringly ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... better. I occupied a seat in his 'eligible pew' last Sunday. The lath and plaster walls pretended to be Caen stone. The cheap deal was all 'make-believe' oak. The brick pillars were 'blocked off,' and unblushingly claimed to be granite. As I entered, I ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Sir John's wedding, Maurice did yield at last to his brother's pressing request, and came up from Somersetshire to Kynaston. Last Sunday he had suddenly appeared in the Kynaston pew in Sutton Church by Sir John's side, and had shaken hands with Vera and her relations on coming out of church, and had walked across the vicarage garden by the side of Mrs. Daintree, Vera having gone on in front with Tommy and Minnie. ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... up in the pew, and repeated the responses very audibly; evincing that kind of ceremonious devotion punctually observed by a gentleman of the old school, and a man of old family connections. I observed, too, that he turned over the leaves of a folio prayer-book with ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... vaguely dissatisfied, as always happened to him on those rare occasions when she missed the appointment; but he had thought little of the circumstance. Nor had he been disturbed on Sunday at seeing the Slocum pew vacant during both services. The heavy snow-storm which had begun the night before accounted for ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... lay dying at Jungbunzlau, there was rising to fame among the Brethren the most brilliant and powerful leader they had ever known. Again we turn to the old Thein Church; again the preacher is denouncing the priests; and again in the pew is an eager listener with soul aflame with zeal. His name was John Augusta. He was born, in 1500, at Prague. His father was a hatter, and in all probability he learned the trade himself. He was brought up ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... these words, he looked hard at my pew, and soon made me understand by his egordium how interesting his discourse would be to me. Written with rare grace of style, it was merely a piece of satire from beginning to end,—of satire so audacious that it was ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... took the responsibility of telling husbands how they ought to treat their wives—and, though I noticed that some of the men squirmed a little in their pew, they endured it well—I now take the responsibility of telling how wives ought to treat their husbands. I hope your domestic alliance was so happily formed that while married life may have revealed ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... get a preacher here and try to start things up, on their own responsibility. But we feel it—we sure do. I don't like to look at the old meeting-house, going by, I declare I don't. It looks lonesome to me. And there's where every one of you children grew up, too, sitting there in the old family pew, with your legs dangling. It's ...
— On Christmas Day In The Evening • Grace Louise Smith Richmond
... I blundered painfully over the commonest tasks. While I frequently repeated the Sunday hymn, at dinner, I was too often unable to give the least report of the sermon. Withdrawn into my corner of the pew, I gave myself up, after the enunciation of the text, to a complete abstraction, which took no note of time or place. Fixing my eyes upon a knot in one of the panels under the pulpit, I sat moveless during the hour and a half which our worthy old clergyman required for the expounding ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... by a removal of a few slight obstacles, we passed, by a long avenue, into the chapel. Then he left us, whilst he went out alone to reconnoitre his ground. Agnes was now in so pitiable a condition of weakness, as we stood on the very brink of our final effort, that we placed her in a pew, where she could rest as upon a sofa. Previously we had stood upon graves, and with monuments more or less conspicuous all around us: some raised by friends to the memory of friends—some by subscriptions in the prison—some by children, who had risen into prosperity, to the memory of a father, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... elevating thought. Few persons visit them, and you are likely to find yourself comparatively alone, in rambles of this kind. I went one morning into St. Martin's,—once "in-the-fields," now at the busy center of the city,—and found there only a pew-opener, preparing for the service, and an organist, practising music. It is a beautiful structure, with graceful spire and with columns of weather-beaten, gray stone, curiously stained with streaks of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... chapel—Mrs Jehu Tomkin's father—comes to my shop with his daughter, Mrs Jehu as is now, and spoke to me about the minister. Well, I heard the old gentleman was very rich and pious, and I went the next Sabbath-day as was, with his family, into his pew. I never went any where else after that. He seemed to hit the nail just on the head, and I was convinced—oh, quite wonderful!—all on a sudden. I was married to Mrs Jehu before that day twelvemonth. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Chapel, at the corner of Tremont and School streets, is a most interesting landmark, which was completed in 1753. Entering, you find a decidedly old-fashioned atmosphere in the high-backed, square pews and handsome decorations. George Washington's pew will ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... church in New Utrecht used as a prison by the British, he had for companions, Daniel Duryee, William Furman, William Creed, and two others, all put into one pew. Baylis asked them to get the Bible out of the pulpit and read it to him. They feared to do this, but consented to lead the blind man to the pulpit steps. As he returned with the Bible in his hands a British guard met him, beat him violently and took away the ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... were being read when the little door leading into our large family-pew was opened, and Rickson softly came in and whispered to my father, who in his turn leant over and whispered to me. A message had come from the house, he said, and he must go back at once; he knew I could ...
— The Story of the White-Rock Cove • Anonymous
... when we changed our minds and determined to seek a high-backed pew in old Merchants' Hope Church, it was evening by the time we got under way. And in this case, changing our minds did not work well. We should have come just as near getting to a church and should have saved ourselves trouble, if we ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... said to the waiter. 'It will remind me of my childhood days, when we had 'em baked in conjunction with pork every Sunday mornin, and then all went up to the village church, and had a refreshin nap in the fam'ly pew.' ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... to plead guilty to forgery, who had robbed a poor woman of every farthing she possessed, who was to pass years, perhaps, in prison, really her father? Who had been sometimes so affectionate to them all, always so loving and indulgent to her; who had sat in the square family pew with them all on the Sunday morning, and said grace every day at meals; who had often told them funny tales, shouting with laughter over his own jokes; who had banged the tambourine and joined in Sir Roger de Coverley only a few ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... it's realism they want I'm still waiting to see something more realistic than Pew or Long John Silver. Realism may depend as truly on a blind man's tap with his stick upon the ground as on any ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... said the doctor, lowering his tone in imitation of Eleanor's—"I shall be happy to be your instructor. I have been that, in some sort, ever since you were five years old—a little tot down in your mother's pew, sitting under my ministrations. What is it, ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... with you this afternoon. With all my heart, said my master. I was sorry for it; but was resolved my duty should not be made second to bashfulness, or any other consideration; and when divine service began, I withdrew to the farther end of the pew, and left the gentlemen in the front, and they behaved quite suitably, both of them, to the occasion. I mention this the rather, because Mr. Martin was not very noted for coming to church, or attention ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... Lisbeth or the lassie's staying at home with him, and though Lisbeth was unselfish in a general way, she could not resist the delight of going to church. She had nine children besides the baby, and being but a woman, it was the pride of her life to march them into the T'nowhead pew, so well watched that they dared not disbehave, and so tightly packed that they could not fall. The congregation looked at that pew, the mothers enviously, when ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... spoke nor moved. He could not. Deep floods were surging through him. For one brief moment he saw in vision a little ivy-coloured church in its environment of quiet country lanes in far-away England, and in the church, the family pew, where sat a man stern and strong, a woman beside him and two little boys, one, the younger, holding her hand as they sat. Then with swift change of scene he saw a queer, rude, wooden church in the raw frontier town in ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... parish; and an omen of the dule that ensued, was in a sacrilegious theft that a daft woman, Jenny Gaffaw, and her idiot daughter, did in the kirk, by tearing off and stealing the green serge lining of my lord's pew, to make, as they said, a hap for their shoulders in the cold weather—saving, however, the sin, we paid no attention at the time to the mischief and tribulation that so unheard-of a trespass boded to us all. It took place about Yule, when the weather was cold and frosty, and poor Jenny was ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... everybody that they were a county family, and they didn't look like it. They were too large and coarse, and took up far too much room. There they sat, six big creatures in one pew, all restless, all with big chins, hard eyes, jutting eyebrows, and a dreadful look as if they were buccaneering. As a matter of fact they all felt rather timid and flat, and meant to behave beautifully, though Sir Peter needn't have blown his nose like a trumpet ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... who passed, and as quickly pricked a mark against his name on the chapel lists. As the freshman went by, they made a careful study of his person, and took mental daguerreotypes of his features. Seeing no beadle, or pew-opener (or, for the matter of that, any pews), or any one to direct him to a place, Mr. Verdant Green quietly took a seat in the first place that he found empty, which happened to be the stall ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... adorned with white ribbons, a straw hat with many flowers and feathers, and to finish off her costume, her gloves and shoes and sunshade were white. As these cool colours rather toned down the extreme red of her healthy complexion, she really looked very well; and when Gabriel saw her seated in a pew near the pulpit, behaving as demurely as a cat that is after cream, he could not but think how pretty and pious she was. It was probably the first time that piety had ever been associated with Bell's ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... of the ruin, two rafters had fallen crosswise, and protected a clear space no larger than a pew in church. Into this the lads silently lowered themselves. There they were perfectly concealed, and through an arrow loophole commanded a view upon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He had no time for such trivialities. Fox-hunting, horse-breeding, and kennel lore were his vocation. He rode straight, lived hard, exercised such creative faculties as he had on his work, and found it very good. Three times a year he stated in the Undern pew at Wolfbatch that he intended to continue leading a godly, righteous, and sober life. At these times, with amber lights from the windows playing over his well-shaped head, his rather heavy face looked, as the Miss Clombers ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... the pastor's pew, And prayed for self-forgetfulness With deep humility, she knew She gave her figure and her dress To careful eyes ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... years—or a thousand for that matter—count as one day, it is that throughout his life he detested stained-glass. Through this very window, indeed, now obscured ad majorem gloriam Dei et in memoriam Johannis Unonii medicinae doctoris, he loved—for it faced his pew—to watch during sermon-time the blue sky, the clouds, the rooks at their business in the churchyard elms. He has even recorded (in an essay on 'Visions' read before the Tregantick Literary and Scientific Society ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... to the kirk on the Sabbath, and sat, not in the minister's pew, but in the very seat where Allison used to sit with her father and her mother and Willie before trouble came. And when the silence was broken by the minister's voice saying: "Oh! Thou who art mighty to save!" did not her heart respond joyfully to the words? ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... assembled and met together, five-and- twenty strong, was not that Her voice that shot like light into the darkest places, thrilling the walls and pillars as though they were pieces of his heart! What time, too, Madame Dor in a corner of the high pew, turning her back upon everybody and everything, could not fail to be Ritualistically right at some moment of the service; like the man whom the doctors recommended to get drunk once a month, and who, that he might not overlook it, ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... life have I conceived what might have been, if I had had the skill to paint it, an immortal picture. It was thus. I was attending a Christmas morning service in a big parish church. I was in a pew facing east; close to me, in a transept, in a pew facing sideways, there sat a little old woman, who had hurried in just before the service began. She was a widow, living, I afterwards learnt, in an almshouse hard by. She was old and feeble, very poor, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... drop of this luetin be introduced beneath the skin of a child who has inherited the disease, or of a person who has suffered from its obscurer symptoms, there may be produced a "reaction." This may take the form of "a large, indurated, reddish papule" which in a pew days become of a dark, bluish-red colour; or the inflammation may be of a severer type, resulting in a "pustule." A positive result is more frequently obtained when the disease is of long standing, or comparatively inactive. But may not this "reaction" occur in every case, whether or ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... vargueno, vitrine. chamber, apartment, room, cabin; office, court, hall, atrium; suite of rooms, apartment [U.S.], flat, story; saloon, salon, parlor; by-room, cubicle; presence chamber; sitting room, best room, keeping room, drawing room, reception room, state room; gallery, cabinet, closet; pew, box; boudoir; adytum, sanctum; bedroom, dormitory; refectory, dining room, salle-a-manger; nursery, schoolroom; library, study; studio; billiard room, smoking room; den; stateroom, tablinum, tenement. [room for defecation and urination] bath room, bathroom, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... deal of free inquiry at Homerton Academy, which, however, Mr. Fox assured me, gradually subsided into the right amount of orthodoxy as the time came for the student to exchange his sure and safe retreat for the fiery ordeal of the deacon and the pew. My father and Johnson Fox had been fellow-students, and for some time corresponded together. The correspondence in due time, however, naturally ceased, as it was chiefly controversial, and nothing can be more irksome than for two people who have ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... subject, and a few minutes later he was following her rustling skirts up the broad centre aisle to the pew four rows back from the pulpit. He wished it had not been so far forward, because the worshippers interested him, if only by reason of their sameness of type. You could see they were all people of position, with regular incomes and ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... hair and sky-blue eyes, and a doll's face? Does she sit in the pew under the reading-desk with three other dolls?" ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... of the piece was endangered. This reminds one of Mr. A. Ward's account of a high-handed outrage at "Utiky," where a young gentleman of good family stove in the wax head of "Jewdas Iscarrit," characterizing him at the same time as a "pew-serlanimous cuss." ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... to put his rifle in its accustomed place, and on seeing the chamber filled with the various paraphernalia of a woman's toilet, he started, with the exclamation, "What the deuce! I reckon I've got into the wrong pew," and was going away, when Mabel called him back. "Meb, you here?" said he. "You in this little tucked-up hole, that I always thought too small for me and my ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... curl outside her bonnet on each side of her face. Her bonnet was tied under her chin with a green ribbon, and she had a little feathery green wreath around her face inside the rim. Her wide silk skirt was shot with green and blue, and rustled as she walked up the aisle to her pew. People stared after her without knowing why. There was no tangible change in her appearance. She had worn that same green shot silk many Sabbaths; her bonnet was three summers old; the curls drooping on her cheeks were ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... found that the unfortunate recollection of the Pew-Opener had awakened in his young pupil a melancholy train of reflections, seemed now to compassionate the sadness which hitherto he had reproved, and walking silently by her side till she came to Soho-Square, said in accents of kindness, "Peace light ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... mother, as her husband brushed his thin gray hair in front of his chiffonier, while the merry sound of their children's voices came floating down to them through open doors, "thank the dear Lord for me in my stead when you sit in the pew to-day. I'll be with you in my thoughts. It's such a blessed thing that our little middle girl is at home ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... and his family were in their pew and the minister was speaking. Prescott paused a few moments at the entrance to the aisle. No one paid any attention to him; soldiers were too common a sight to be noticed. He felt in the inside pocket ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... his mother was at church, but the matter was so urgent that he went straight to the pew and brought her out, which caused even the minister to pause in his sermon and made all the congregation look surprised. Kit took her home, packed her box and bundled her into the coach which the Stranger brought, and away they went ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... he had not withstood the eye-attack and he surrendered at discretion, compromising on a receipt for the pew-rent. Thus the small matter of business was concluded; but Miss Margery was not yet ready to go. From St. John's and its affairs official she passed deftly to the junior warden of St. John's and his affairs personal. Was ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... one feels himself so abundantly at home, we enter the church. From the depths of this thicket of lights, the good priest murmurs the great infinite speech to us, blesses us, embraces us severally and altogether, like father and mother both. In the manorial pew, the foremost of all, one glimpses the Marquis of Monthyon, who has the air of an officer, and his mother-in-law, Baroness Grille, who is ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... little fussy about his hat in church, and so it was that Malcolm and Mrs. Godfrey were still in their places when the Jacobis passed their pew. Malcolm seized his opportunity and looked well at Miss Jacobi, but she did not ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Lady Roehampton never absent on a Sunday, and their carriages, it was whispered, were often suspiciously near to St. Rosicrucius on week-days. Mr. Sidney Wilton too was frequently in Lady Roehampton's pew, and one day, absolutely my lord himself, who unfortunately was rarely seen at church—but then, as is well known, critical despatches always arrive on a Sunday morning—was successfully landed in her pew by Lady Roehampton, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... at last. The minister had listened to it in perfect silence. He sat still even when she had done speaking,—still, and lost in thought. It was a very awkward matter for him to have a hand in. Old Sophy was his parishioner, but the Venners had a pew in the Reverend Mr. Fairweather's meeting-house. It would seem that he, Mr. Fairweather, was the natural adviser of the parties most interested. Had he sense and spirit enough to deal with such people? Was there enough capital of humanity in his somewhat limited nature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... to the Duke. And first calling upon Mr. Coventry at his chamber, I went to the Duke's bed-side, who had sat up late last night, and lay long this morning. This being done, I went to chapel, and sat in Mr. Blagrave's pew, and there did sing my part along with another before the King, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... recollection of his first appearance there. He did not accompany the Deckers, nor did he go into their pew, but came in as the service commenced, and took a seat quietly in one of the back-pews. By some mysterious instinct, his presence became presently known to the congregation, some of whom so far forgot themselves, in their ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... exhibit themselves in becoming costume. If a bazaar were held, their ready-money was always forthcoming. At flower shows, galas, croquet parties, they challenged comparison with all who were not confessedly of the Dunfield elite. They regularly adorned their pew in the parish church, were liberal at offertories, exerted themselves, not without expense, in the Sunday school feast, and the like. How—cried all Dunfield—how in the name of wonder was ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... coat and great peruke, to see that my tenants' cottages be sound and wholesome, to pat the touzled heads o' the children, bless 'em! And to have word with every soul i' the village. To snooze i' my great pew o' Sundays and, dying at last, snug abed, to leave behind me a kindly memory. And what for you, Martin? What see you ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... to church that night, after they had had their supper. It was a big, comfortable, and roomy church, and the lads were shown into a corner pew under the gallery, where they were not conspicuous. The music of choir and organ was soothing and comforting. One of the tunes sung was "Dundee," and each boy thought of their singing the song of "The Kansas Emigrants," as the warbling measures drifted down to them from the organ-loft, lifting ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... their lace ruffles, and their high crook'd canes, preceded by their aged servant, Samuel; who, after he had wheeled his mistress to church in her Bath-chair, carried the prayer-books up the aisle, and opened and shut the pew! There too was the portly Dr. Griffiths, of the Monthly Review, with his literary wife in her neat and elevated wire-winged cap! And oft-times the vivacious and angelic Duchess of Devonshire, whose bloom had not then suffered from the canker-worm of pecuniary distress, created by the luxury ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... observed, 'this wealthy young man will take an entire pew.' (The annual auction of rented pews was soon to come off, and Mr. Myrtle liked marvellously to see strong competition. It ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... any private affairs; he's a public character. There!" she laughed, as she poured the coffee, "I mustn't discourage you. But don't you see that every mother's son—and, for that matter, every daughter and children's child unto the third and fourth generation—feel that, so long as they pay pew rent or put a cent in the collection, they own a share in you. And we always keep a watch on our investments down this way. That's the Yankee shrewdness you read so much about, ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... been into the church before, and was struck with the fine windows, and the monuments of the Guiscards, and the famous tomb of the Crusader in the wall of the chancel pew where they sat; and all through the service she gazed at his carven face, so exactly like Tristram's, with ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... corners like an old-fashioned four-posted bed. Sometimes two feet above the top of the woodwork there were brass rods on which slender curtains ran, and were usually drawn during sermon time in order that the attention of the occupants of the pew might not be distracted from devout meditations on the preacher's discourse—or was it to woo slumber? A Berkshire dame rather admired these old-fashioned pews, wherein, as she naively expressed it, "a body might sleep comfortable without all ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... heard him breathlessly; they loved his simple, Irish common sense. He held them in the hollow of his hands. The half hour allotted had been reached, and his story was told, and yet, not fully told. For a moment he paused, while his eyes sought a happy face in the nearest pew. Belle gently drew her watch. Mindful of their careful plan, he stopped at the signal, raised his hands, and said, "Let us pray." With one great sigh, the congregation kneeled before him, and with ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... festoons of evergreens, conjuring him the while not to disappoint our hopes, but to take Richmond. Alas! you may know, by this time, that he can't; but in lack of news since a week ago, I can but hope for the best. I've taken a pew and we contrive to squeeze into it in this wise: first a child, then a mother, then a child, then an Annie, then a child, the little ones being stowed in the cracks left between us big ones. Mr. R., the parson, looking fit to go straight into his grave, was up here to ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... counter object of attention for the gay worshippers in the side pew. A little woman in black came hurrying up the aisle and entered the seat before them. She put down on the narrow shelf her prayer-book and a tumbled red handkerchief, and then bowed her head. Suddenly, in the midst of her devotions, she hastily withdrew the offending radical handkerchief, and substituted ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... itself, and which (horresco referens) I did not in the least scruple to seize, occurred at the Church of the Reverend Doctor Drummummupp, where I found myself established, one Sunday, just at sermon time, not only in the pew, but by the side, of that worthy and communicative little friend of mine, Miss Tabitha T. Thus seated, I congratulated myself, and with much reason, upon the very flattering state of affairs. If any person knew anything about Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, that person, it was ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... present to the living; and I am not at all sure that I shall let George have it. He is fond of processions, and all that stuff. The only procession in the Church of England is that of the lord of the manor to his pew. I will be the ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... to whom life was a very pretty thing; he could not afford to have tarnish on the glass; he must have pleasant looks about him and a sweet air, or at least scope for the making of them. Baron Malise blew like a miasma and cramped him like a church-pew: then Adventure beaconed from far off, and his heart leapt to greet the light. He left at dawn, and alone. Roy, his page, had begged as hard as he dared for pillion or a donkey. He was his master's only friend, but Prosper's ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... joining audibly in the responses, and keeping his eyes pretty steadily on the prayer-book, which he found lying there. He even rebuked Huckaback for whispering (during one of the most solemn parts of the service) that "there was an uncommon pretty gal in the next pew!"—He thought that the clergyman was a remarkable fine preacher, and said some things that he must have meant for ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... six-year term on the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange beginning in 1997. He currently serves on many public policy and organizational boards, including as Chair of the Pew Oceans Commission and Co-Chair of the California Council ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... we get a front pew," said Allerdyke. "Hurry up, and let's be off! Our best plan," he went on as they made for a cab, "will be to get as near the platform as possible, so that I can make certain sure this is the woman I saw at Howden yesterday morning—when I positively ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... her two younger boys that he could avoid thinking of Barbara. There was a busy exchange of presents after dinner, and next day he accompanied his parents to church, as he had done for five and twenty years, finding peace and a welcome in the worm-eaten pew, the cobwebbed window, the top-heavy decorations and the familiar musty books. The state prayers were invoked therein on behalf of "Victoria, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the Princess of Wales and all the ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... increased; but he said no more. "My bre—thren!" responded he a second time; his teeth chattered louder; his cheeks became clammy and death-like. "My brethren!" stammered he a third time emphatically, and his knees fell together. A deep groan echoed from his mother's pew. His wildness increased. "My mother!" exclaimed the preacher. They were the last words he ever uttered in a pulpit. The shaking and the agony began in his heart, and his body caught the contagion. He covered his face with his hands, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... see the front of her dress—she wore a very floppy scarlet teagown—rising and falling rapidly in the intensity of her passion. I understood more or less what she felt. If God is at all what we think He is, sublime, then there is something a little grotesque about requiring a cushioned pew, a good system of heating and a nice fat footstool as aids to communion with Him. Yet I am not convinced that man is incapable of the highest emotion when his body is at ease. Some degree of physical comfort seems to be required if the excursions of the soul are to be successful. ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... preached a sermon in Hawaiian, I, not understanding a word, looked at the side pews where the old folks sat, and tried to picture the life they had known in their youth, when the great Kamehameha reigned. In the pew next to the side door sat Mr. Sea-shore, straight and solemn as a deacon, and his wife, a fat old woman with a face that looked as if it had been carved out of knotty mahogany, but which was irradiated with an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... Mr. Fraser's breast. All three horses reared at the report and flash, and Mr. Fraser fell dead on the ground. Karim galloped off, followed at a short distance by the trooper, and the two peons went off and gave information to Major Pew and Cornet Robinson, who resided near the place. They came in all haste to the spot, and had the body taken to the deceased's own house; but no signs of life remained. They reported the murder to the magistrate, and the city gates ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... prayed, an' they sang, i' ther owd fashioned way, Until a gert chap says, "I've summat to say;" An', bi t'heart, I'st a fallen dahn sick i' mi pew, But I thowt at toan hawf he sed worn't trew; Fer he charged Parson Ball wi' bein' drunk i't'street, 'At he'd been put ta bed three times i' ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... hard times these are indeed with the Church," he informs the promoters of this ecclesiastical benefit, "to send her to the playhouse to gather pew-money. For shame, gentlemen! go to the Church and pay your money there, and never let the playhouse have such a claim to its establishment as to say the Church is beholden to her.... Can our Church be in danger? How is it possible? The whole nation is solicitous and at work for ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... childish. She dropped her bouquet as we went towards the vestry. She was passing the front pew at the time, and it fell over into the pew. There was a moment's delay, but the gentleman in the pew handed it up to her again, and it did not appear to be the worse for the fall. Yet when I spoke to her of the matter, she answered me abruptly; and in the carriage, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Meanwhile he continued to thrive, and one of the old-fashioned New England families of ten children gathered about him. As they grew towards maturity, he bought a share in the Library Association, built a pew for his family in the church, and comported himself in all ways as became a prosperous farmer and ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... own favourite daughter; for indeed there can be no doubt, as Mrs. Pigeon asserted vigorously, that a substantial grocer, whose father before him had established an excellent business, and who had paid for his pew in Salem as long as any one could recollect, and supported every charity, and paid up on all occasions when extra expense was necessary, was in every way a more desirable son-in-law than a poor minister who was always dependent on pleasing the chapel folks, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... she said once, 'I can't pray in the meeting-house with my eyes shut—I can't, I can't. I seem to know what they're all wishing for when they pray,—for more riches, and more comfort, and more security, and more importance. And God is such a long way off. I can't feel Him, and the pew hurts my back.' She used to read me some, out of a book of poetry, and one verse I got by heart—I guess her prayers ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... an almost general unrest. For when he sat down in one of the pews, every one of the peasants seated in it moved along to the extreme farther end, and when he moved along toward them they finally deserted the pew altogether. This moving along and getting up was repeated in three or four pews, so that the aristocratic gentleman, who was attending this little country service with the best of intentions, was finally obliged to give ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... The squire's pew was one of the old-fashioned high ones, and Milly's head did not reach the top of it. Very quiet and silent she was during the service, and very particular to follow her uncle's example in every respect, though she nearly upset his gravity at the outset by taking off her hat in ...
— Probable Sons • Amy Le Feuvre
... of the neighboring people of rank, who sat in pews sumptuously lined and cushioned, furnished with richly-gilded prayer-books, and decorated with their arms upon the pew doors; of the villagers and peasantry, who filled the back seats and a small gallery beside the organ; and of the poor of the parish, who were ranged on benches in ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... rank, employments, and rate of pay. The rows of seats were all marked with the class of employers that were expected to sit in them. Labourers were near the door. The others were in successive rows forward, until the pew of the "Admiral Superintendent," next the Altar rails, was reached. I took my seat among the "artificers," being of that order. On coming out of church the master-attendant, next in dignity to the admiral-superintendent, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... went in one of the pews which the lady had pointed out to him. Then he remembered that in his haste, he had forgotten to take his hat with him. He proceeded to fetch it. The lady who was occupying the pew with her husband and daughter handed him his hat, ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... (the famous Old North Church) has a Chiesa Italiana on its grounds. There are many touches to stir the memory in this Old North Church. The chime of eight bells naively stating, "We are the first ring of bells cast for the British Empire in North America"; the pew with the inscription that is set apart for the use of the "Gentlemen of Bay of Honduras"—visiting merchants who contributed the spire to the church in 1740; vaults beneath the church, forbidden now to visitors, where lie ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... of the women attached to this office, if your lady is too wideawake or too nice-looking to be dealt with by a man. There will be cab hire, and postage-stamps—admissions to public amusements, if she is inclined that way—shillings for pew-openers, if she is serious, and takes our people into churches to hear popular preachers, and so on. My own professional services you shall have gratis; but I can't lose by you as well. Only remember that, and you shall have your way. By-gones shall be by-gones, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... and confident of ingress, boldly rang the bell. Unfortunately, Elsie chanced that day to be on post as sentinel, and, though she immediately recognized the visitor as the mother of the small colony of Spiewells who crowded every Sunday morning into the pew of the pastor, she courtesied, and gave ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... qualify as notaries. In addition to the title of "Sieur," baronies are created in Canada, foremost among them that of the Le Moynes of Montreal. The feudal seignior now has his coat of arms emblazoned on the church pew where he worships, on his coach door, and on the stone entrance to his mansion. The habitants are compelled to grind their wheat at his mill, to use his great bake oven, to patronize his tannery. The seigniorial ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... end of the palace is the Cathedral San Giovanni Battista. To the left of the altar is the pew of the royal family. Behind the altar, and approached by two staircases of 37 steps each, is the Cappella del Sudario (open till 9 A.M.), acircular chapel, separated from the church by a glass screen. It was built by Guarini in 1694, and ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... neighbour's was. And I knew another to whom God had given health and plenty; but a wife that nature had made peevish, and her husband's riches had made purse- proud; and must, because she was rich, and for no other virtue, sit in the highest pew in the church; which being denied her, she engaged her husband into a contention for it, and at last into a law-suit with a dogged neighbour who was as rich as he, and had a wife as peevish and purse-proud as the other: and this law-suit begot higher oppositions, and actionable words, and ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... so happened that although Theodore had been for years a member of the same Sabbath-school with this young lady, and had seen her sitting in the Hastings' pew in church on every Sabbath day, still this was the first time that he had met her face to face, near enough to speak to her, since that evening so long ago when they conversed together on a momentous subject. Theodore's ...
— Three People • Pansy
... came on the air a cracking sound, and one of the boards which served the purpose of a pew broke in the centre and came down with a crash, precipitating nearly half a score of buxom, screaming girls into a promiscuous heap upon the floor. This was too much for Fernando. He could not but attribute the disaster ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end, would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is, if you had all the churches ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... criticism or archaeology or any of the departments of scientific research into the subject-matter of religion. Most of my readers will understand quite well what I mean. Everyone knows that, broadly speaking, certain ways of stating Christian truth are taken for granted both in pulpit and pew; the popular or generally accepted theology of all the churches of Christendom, Catholic and Protestant alike, is fundamentally the same, and somehow the modern mind has come to distrust it. There is a curious want of harmony between our ordinary views of life ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... groom receives the bride from her father's hand. The latter steps back a few paces, but remains near enough to "give away the bride." When this point in the ceremony has been passed, the father quietly joins the mother in the front pew. ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... their way; and whether they break through malice or revenge, no man, no court can inquire. Bare suspicion without oath is sufficient. This wanton exercise of this power is not a chimerical suggestion of a heated brain. I will mention some facts. Mr. Pew had one of these writs, and when Mr. Ware succeeded him, he endorsed this writ over to Mr. Ware; so that these writs are negotiable from one officer to another; and so your honors have no opportunity of judging the persons to whom this vast power is delegated. Another ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... very satisfactory, even to myself. In the first place I belonged to another branch of the church; then I had only one leg and could not kneel at the altar, and would have felt while standing something like a beggar in dirty rags in a fine pew among silks and satins; then again I would have lost my influence over many of my fellow-prisoners. I may have been wrong in all this, but as I once said to my fellow-prisoners when appealed to on the subject of religion, "There are only three cardinal points in my religious belief, and these are ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... behind his niece and Mrs. Dunn up the center aisle to the Warren pew. He wrote his housekeeper afterwards that he estimated that aisle to be "upwards of two mile long. And my Sunday shoes had a separate squeak for ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... singing-seats the fiddle and the bass—viol formed the sole link (and an unconscious one) between the simple song-service of the Puritan meeting-house and the orchestral accompaniments to the high masses of European cathedrals. The men still sat at the end of the pew—a custom which had grown up in the days when they went to the meeting-house gun in hand, not knowing when they should be hastily summoned forth to fight the Indians. In the earliest days the drum was the martial summons to worship, but soon European bells sent forth their milder call. Behind ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... had just left, but he saw a few persons entering, and he joined them. The interior of the church was far more gorgeous than the plain village meeting-house which he had been accustomed to attend with his mother. He gazed about him with a feeling of awe, and sank quietly into a back pew. As it was a week-day evening, and nothing of unusual interest was anticipated, there were but few present, here and there one, scattered ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... salary was made up by pew-rents; but pew-rents are, according to James ii. 1-6, against the mind of the Lord, as, in general, the poor brother cannot have so good a seat as the rich. 2. A brother may gladly do something towards my support if left ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... loftily. "Prayer-meeting isn't on Sunday. Besides, I sat away at the back in a dark seat and nobody saw me. You were sitting right up front where every one saw you. And I took the gum out of my mouth for the last hymn and stuck it on the back of the pew right up in front where every one saw you. And I took the gum out of my mouth for the last hymn and stuck it on the back of the pew in front of me. Then I came away and forgot it. I went back to get it next morning, but it was gone. ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... early in their pew, and the Twins watched the other worshipers as they came slowly up the aisle and took their places before time for the service to begin. Sandy winked at them most indecorously across the church, but his mother poked him to remind him of his duty, and he sent no more silent messages ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... man struck him on the nose, knocked him down, kicked him in the ear, and when pulled off by a policeman, he said no holyghoster could call his dead father names, not around him. The minister said he couldn't have been more surprised if some one had paid a year's pew rent, than he was when that ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... changes now," said Ezra, "an' seems as if I wuz in the old frame meetin'-house. The meetin'-house is on the hill, and meetin' begins at half-pas' ten. Our pew is well up in front,—seems as if I could see it now. It has a long red cushion on the seat, and in the hymn-book rack there is a Bible an' a couple of Psalmodies. We walk up the aisle slow, and Mother goes in first; then comes Mary, then me, then Helen, then Amos, and then Father. ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... in the dim pulpit at the other end a man was speaking. Elizabeth dropped breathlessly and embarrassed into the pew nearest the door. She had no idea what this gathering was for or who the speaker was. Mrs. Jarvis attended the regular Sunday morning services in St. Stephen's, whenever a headache did not prevent, ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... beholding her admirer (for that everybody admires who sees her is a point which she never can for a moment doubt) in the next pew to her at St. James's Church last Sunday; and the manner in which he appeared to go to sleep during the sermon—though from under his fringed eyelids it was evident he was casting glances of respectful rapture towards Jocasta—deeply moved and interested her. On coming out of church, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... always remember as a day of smells, the smell of the pew-cushions in the empty church, the smell of the lilies-of-the-valley, that dear, sweet, scatter-brained Fanny-Rain-In-The-Face (she rushed to town an hour after getting my wire) insisted on carrying, the smell of the leather in the damp taxi, the ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... following my awakening I had no care for sounds outside, no eyes for my bouquets, though they stood at either hand of the pulpit; I got permission to sit in Aunt Keren's pew, where I could see Aunt Em'ly's face; and all through the sermon I studied it with ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... Perpendicular moulding, window, Christchurch, Oxford Diagram of a manor Ancient plan of Old Sarum A Norman castle Tournament A monk transcribing Ockwells manor-house Richmond Palace Doorway and staircase, Ufton Court The porch, Ufton Court Window of south wing, Ufton Court Ancient pew-work, Tysoe Church, Warwickshire Early English screen, Thurcaston, Leicestershire Norman piscina, Romsey Church, Hants Lowside window, Dallington Church, Northamptonshire Reading-pew, seventeenth century, Langley Chapel, Salop. Chalice and paten, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... you will mind some friends of Miss Avies sitting with you in your pew to-morrow evening. She has especially asked—two of them ... ladies, I believe. But it seems that there will be something of a crowd, and as your pew is always half empty— He would not have asked except that ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... parts of his person. His letters display his solicitous love of jewels, velvets, and embroidered damasks. Mr. Jeaffreson has lately found among the Middlesex MSS. that as early as April 26, 1584, a gentleman named Hugh Pew stole at Westminster and carried off Walter Raleigh's pearl hat-band and another jewelled article of attire, valued together in money of that time at 113l. The owner, with characteristic promptitude, shut the thief up in Newgate, and made him disgorge. To complete ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... so, for it has been pulled down to make room for the Hicks Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. When I did not dine there, I attended a quaint survival of last century's coffee-houses in Glasshouse Street: Tall, pew-like boxes, wooden tables without table-cloths, panelled walls; an excellent menu of chops, steaks, fried eggs, sausages, and other British products. Once the resort of bucks and Macaronis, Ford's coffee-house I found frequented by a strange ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... this church the individuals whose place was in the pew must not be forgotten. The minister passes from church to church; the layman remains. In hurried review there comes to mind Alethea Tanner, who rescued the church when it was about to be sold at auction. There were George Bell and Enoch Ambush, who operated in this church basement a large school ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... was nearly drowned by the people weeping, and he came down from the pulpit and passed up and down through the church, exhorting and directing them, as many as three and four persons being in an agony of spirit in every pew. Even after the service closed, the cries and groans of anxious persons could be heard at a considerable distance up and down the harbour. At Harbor Grace, Port a Grave, Bay Roberts and other places, similar scenes were witnessed, of deep conviction for sin, and ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... excellent one, and the accommodations are first-class. It bears a very appropriate name. After partaking of a hardy supper, I walked out to "take a look at Europe!" At 6:45 p.m., I entered St. Peter's Church, and was conducted to a pew. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, the young and the old of both sexes occupy the same seat together. One of the little boys of the family occupying the same pew with me, gave me a hymn-book. A part of the exercises consisted in chanting psalms. The eagle lectant and the Bible characters ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... from my knees, put a little money in the plate which the sacristan held out to me, gave a shilling to each of the two old sponsors, took baby back into my arms, and sat down in a pew to put on her bonnet ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... must give them both to the slave."—"Give 'em the larnin' after y'u've sot 'em free!" said he; "I'll fight for 'em; don't want to hear nuthin' 'bout nuthin' else but liberty to them that's bound." He stooped and pulled a long whip and a tin pail from under the seat of the pew where he had been sitting, making considerable noise, so that the people, as they passed out, turned, and the sight of him and his accoutrements made great sport for some whose opinions and feelings were the least to be regarded. I saw in him, dear Aunty, a fair specimen of native, inbred ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... I had fallen asleep in the pew of the old church of pretty Dereham. I had occasionally done so when a child, and had suddenly woke up. Yes, surely, I had been asleep and had woke up; but no! if I had been asleep I had been waking in my sleep, struggling, striving, ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... Angus McRae and showed him to his seat this morning with a happy bustle, for his pride and joy in the Lad's return was only second to his own father's. Roderick sat beside his father in their old pew near the rear of the church, gazing about him happily at the familiar scene. The people were filling up the aisles, with a soft hushed rustle. There was Fred Hamilton and his father, and Dr. Archie Blair and his family. Dr. Blair was rarely too busy to get ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... adjusted. How the carriages rattle up, and deposit their richly- dressed burdens beneath the lofty portico! The powdered footmen glide along the aisle, place the richly-bound prayer-books on the pew desks, slam the doors, and hurry away, leaving the fashionable members of the congregation to inspect each other through their glasses, and to dazzle and glitter in the eyes of the few shabby people in ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... Poet at the Breakfast Table Over the Teacups Elsie Venner The Guardian Angel A Mortal Antipathy Pages from an Old Volume of Life Bread and the Newspaper My Hunt after "The Captain" The Inevitable Trial Cinders from Ashes The Pulpit and the Pew Medical Essays Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science Border Lines of Knowledge in Some Provinces of Medical Science Scholastic and Bedside Teaching The Medical Profession ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... walks on the moors, the tales under the thorn-trees must henceforth be incomplete. The two elders of that little band were no longer to be found in house or garden—they lay quiet under a large paving-stone close to the vicarage pew at church. The three little sisters, the one little brother, must have often thought on their quiet neighbours when the sermon was very long. Thus early familiarised and neighbourly with death, one of them at least, tall, courageous Emily, grew up to have no dreary thoughts of it, ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... done you good to see Hiram on Sunday, elaborately dressed, going to church with the Widow Hawkins on his arm, followed by the two Miss Hawkins. Walking up the aisle, his countenance composed and serious, he would open the pew-door and wait reverently for Mrs. H. and the young ladies, to pass in. They, 'the young ladies,' would flutter along and enter the pew with a pleased, satisfied air—they were already in love with Hiram—and after the usual turnings and twistings and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... thought to such things at all. Mrs. Lancaster supported Virginia's suspicions by memories of young men who had suddenly and mysteriously appeared, to ask her to accept them as boarders, and young attorneys who had their places in church changed to the pews that surrounded the Lancaster pew. But Susan dismissed these romantic vapors, and in her heart held Mary Lou in genuine admiration, because Mary Lou had undoubtedly and indisputably had a real lover, ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... trap-door at the bottom of the pew," said Henry; "it is not only secured down, but it is locked likewise, and I have the ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... Sabbath morning saw Donald and Elsie in the courts of Zion, and great peace was upon their brows. When I ascended the pulpit stairs, they were already in their ancestral pew, now the property of Hector Campbell, who had abandoned it with joy, only asking that he be given one in the gallery from which he ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... some good result from the incident. A waggish clergyman once saw a pompous clerical brother march quite to the head of the aisle of a crowded church to find a seat, with an air of expectation that all pew-doors would fly open at his approach. But as every seat was full, and nobody stirred, the crestfallen brother was obliged to retrace his steps. As he retreated by the pew, far down the aisle, where the clerical wag was sitting, that pleasant man leaned over the door, and ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... the new King and Queen, was required from the parishioner as a qualification for attending divine service, or for receiving the Eucharist. Not one in fifty, therefore, of those laymen who disapproved of the Revolution thought himself bound to quit his pew in the old church, where the old liturgy was still read, and where the old vestments were still worn, and to follow the ejected priest to a conventicle, a conventicle, too, which was not protected by the Toleration Act. Thus the new sect was a sect of preachers without hearers; and such ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... which Dr. Muscroft was surgeon. I had assisted all day in bringing in the wounded from the field-hospital, in the rear of the battle-ground. The boys of the 10th and 3d Ohio were crowded into a little church, each pew answering for a private apartment for a wounded man. One of the surgeons in attendance requested me to assist in holding a patient while his leg was being amputated. This was my first trial, but the sight ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
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