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Mortuary   /mˈɔrtʃuˌɛri/   Listen
Mortuary

noun
(pl. mortuaries)
1.
A building (or room) where dead bodies are kept before burial or cremation.  Synonyms: dead room, morgue.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Mortuary" Quotes from Famous Books



... the quadrangle in front of the chapel northwards to the entrance to the vaults, the sisters of the community chanting the psalm Miserere. It opened up at the mortuary door, and the coffin was borne into the vault, and placed in the recess assigned to it beside the coffin of his first wife, and under those of his two children. A short service here took place, the Benedictus was sung, ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby

... quietly surveying the stranger, uttered a sardonic bray, and ambled away to the little cemetery on the hill, whose tangled chapparal effectually prevented all pursuit by her skilled antagonist. From that day she forsook the camp, and spent her Sabbaths in mortuary reflections among the pine head-boards and cold ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages concerning life and death; we began ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... These mortuary emblems furnished me with congenial food for reflection. I used to lie in the long grass, and speculate on the advantages and ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... led Juve towards one of the rooms, where the corpse of Captain Brocq was: it had been laid down on the floor. Pious hands had lighted a mortuary candle, and, in view of the position held by the dead man, two of the police staff were keeping watch and ward until someone came to claim the ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre

... Afterward the engineer had gone for a visit to the dam, the drops, and the canal line, a last view of the project as a whole; and the ride was pursued in that peculiar melancholy of spirit which appertains to mortuary events. To him, indeed, the ride marked a burial, a burial of high hopes and ambition, and of his youth, with the partially excavated canal providing their pit and the concrete work standing as ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd

... fact, however, they really had outstripped the train, but it had been Cleek's pleasure to make two calls on the way, one at Saxmundham, where the paralysed Murple lay in the infirmary of the local practitioner, the other at the mortuary where the body of Tolliver was retained, awaiting the sitting of the coroner. Both the dead and the still living man Cleek had subjected to a critical personal examination, but whether either furnished him with any suggested clue he did not say; indeed, the only remark he made upon ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew

... have saved me an awkward interview," he reflected, "if Mrs. Glendower could have taken herself opportunely out of the world. If we may trust the usual form of mortuary resolutions, Divine Providence is habitually pleased with the removal of mortals from this sublunary sphere; and in this case ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... differences which are obvious, in comparing the Christian with the heathen mortuary inscriptions, is the introduction in the former of some new words, expressive of the new ideas that prevailed among them. Thus, in place of the old formula which had been in most common use upon gravestones, D.M., or, in Greek, [Greek: TH.K.], ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... arrived at the mortuary, a gay red and white building, which had been newly erected and consecrated by a duke with much festivity and rejoicing. Mr Clinton was sworn with the other jurymen, and with them repaired to see the bodies on which they were to sit. But Mr ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham

... as certain sins and certain crimes are still considered to be inevitable in the world; the alternative of avoiding them has never occurred to any one. Class-rooms have black desks, and bare, gray walls, more devoid of ornament than those of a mortuary chamber; this is to the end that the starved and famishing spirit of the child may "accept" the indigestible intellectual food which the teacher bestows upon it. In other words, every distracting element has to be removed from the environment, so that the teacher, by his oratorical ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... that!" asserted Bryce. "You'll have to go into that pretty deeply. But the inside of the Cathedral's like a rabbit-warren, and whoever threw the man through that doorway no doubt knew how to slip away unobserved. Now, you'll have to remove the body to the mortuary, of course—but just let me fetch Dr. Ransford first. I'd like some other medical man than myself to see him before he's moved—I'll have him here ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher

... tribune, Ramuntcho looked at the women entering, all like black phantoms, their heads and dress concealed under the mourning cashmere which it is usual to wear at church. Silent and collected, they glided on the funereal pavement of mortuary slabs, where one could read still, in spite of the effacing of ages, inscriptions in Euskarian tongue, names of extinguished families and dates ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti

... Felpham, and his epitaph by Mrs. Opie may be read by the industrious on the wall of the church. Among the many epitaphs on his neighbours by Hayley himself, who had a special knack of mortuary verse, is ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... "dead boat" which carries the city's unclaimed corpses away for burial had long ago left, when we arrived. The anxious callers who pass all day through the portals of the mortuary chamber seeking lost friends and relatives had disappeared. Except for the night keeper and one or two assistants, the Morgue was empty save of ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve

... said Chief Inspector Kerry. He tilted his bowler hat farther forward over his brow and contemplated the ghastly exhibit which lay upon the slab of the mortuary. Two other police officers—one in uniform—were present, and they treated the celebrated Chief Inspector with the deference which he had not only earned but had ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... bell for full service," he commanded; "throw open the outer gates and great doors, and lead these horses to the secret crypt beneath the mortuary chapel." ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... literally buried in the wooded combe. Slabs of gray wall and purple roof, sunk in the black-green like graves in grass. A white house here and there faced him with the stare of monumental marble. In the middle a church with a stunted spire squatted like a mortuary chapel. They had run up a gaudy red-brick villa or two outside, but on the whole Little Sutton was all right, too. He had always thought it very like a cemetery—a place where people lay buried ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... Republican Party that they exercised such control over their feelings when the day for unveiling the LINCOLN Monument arrived. Some parties might have made a demonstration on the occasion of post-mortuary honors being accorded to a leader whom they professed to worship while he lived, and whom they demi-deified after his death. No such extravagant folly can be laid at the door of the Republican Party. "Let bygones be bygones" ...
— Punchinello Vol. 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870 • Various

... he did NOT stand on his head or call out a confederate youth from a closet, as the woman might have expected. To the left was a green baize door, outlined with brass-studded rivets like a cheerful coffin-lid, and bearing the mortuary inscription, "Private." This he pushed open, and entered the ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte

... a dozen other young men who had been somewhat intimate with this lost genius. Four torches flickered on the coffin, which was covered with crape. The rector, assisted by one discreet choirboy, said the mortuary mass. Then the body of the suicide was noiselessly carried to a corner of the cemetery, where a black wooden cross, without inscription, was all that indicated its place hereafter to the mother. Athanase lived and died in shadow. No voice was raised to blame the rector; the bishop ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... vineyards hedged by the prickly cactus, or lightly sprinkled with myrtles and cystus, and all those odoriferous plants which now perfumed the balmy night air. Embowered in these, we had remarked some mortuary chapels, the burying-places of Ajaccian families. One of them, high up on the hill-side, was in the form of a Grecian temple; and we now passed another, standing among cypresses, close to the shore. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... called back one must go to some priest— Buddhist or Shinto—who knows the rite of incantation. And the mortuary tablet, or ihai, of the dead must be ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... burning question in Scotland, and about Annie's time the flames raged with peculiar ferocity. Her father, Sir Robert Laurie, was a bitter enemy of the Covenantry, and his name finds a somewhat unenviable fame in mortuary verses of ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell

... the case of Whitby, and of Holy Island, the introduction of nuns at Tynemouth, in the reign of Henry VIII, is an anachronism. The nunnery of Holy Island is altogether fictitious. Indeed, St. Cuthbert was unlikely to permit such an establishment; for, notwithstanding his accepting the mortuary gifts above mentioned, and his carrying on a visiting acquaintance with the abbess of Coldingham, he certainly hated the whole female sex; and, in revenge of a slippery trick played to him by an Irish princess, he, after death, inflicted severe penances on such ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... ejaculated Happy, deeply humiliated at his failure to increase the mortuary record ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco

... proceeded to a third mortuary, if it may so be called, and here Maqueda pointed out the skeleton of a man, in front of which stood a tray piled up with what evidently had been the medicine bottles of the period and among them a number of rude ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard

... themselves, that the forces of society tend to hurl them out of existence. We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary, when the dead waggon drove up and five bodies were packed into it. The conversation turned to the "white potion" and "black jack," and I found they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who in the Infirmary gave too much trouble or was in a bad way, was "polished ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... offerings of birds and fish and seaweed, rice and rice-wine, which were made to the spirit of the Founder of the Empire twenty-five hundred years ago. But before the period of Chinese influence the family would seem to have worshipped its dead only before the mortuary house, or at the grave; and the spirits were yet supposed to dwell especially in their tombs, with access to some mysterious subterranean world. They were supposed to need other things besides nourishment; and it was customary to place in the grave various articles for their ghostly ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn

... quietly: "But it is so, it is so." And then, putting her knitting on the counter, she went upstairs, to the first floor, where she met two other neighbors, who had just come, and who were discussing the event with Madame Caravan, who was giving them the details, and they all went together to the mortuary chamber. The four women went in softly, and, one after the other, sprinkled the bed clothes with the holy water, knelt down, made the sign of the cross while they mumbled a prayer, then they got up, and open-mouthed, regarded the corpse ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... correct notion of the character and scope of the art as practiced by the mound-builders. No doubt the finest articles of apparel were often buried with the dead, but a very small fraction only of the mortuary wrappings or costumes has been preserved, and from vast areas once thickly inhabited by the most advanced tribes nothing whatever has been collected. Of embroideries, featherwork, and the like, so frequently mentioned by early travelers, hardly a ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes

... last twenty years there has gradually come into existence the custom of placing the photograph of a dead parent, brother, husband, or child, beside the mortuary tablet kept in the Buddhist household shrine. For this reason, also, the departing soldier wishes to leave at home ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn

... beyond her powers of endurance, asserting herself at last — and they laid him down in his old favourite haunt, with his books around him, having made the place look like it did before the house had been turned into a veritable hospital and mortuary. ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... to bury her in the cathedral of Mayence (where a stone bearing her name could still be seen a few years ago), but the emperor refused to part with the beloved body. Neglectful of all matters of state, he remained in the mortuary chamber day after day. His trusty adviser, Turpin, suspecting the presence of some mysterious talisman, slipped into the room while the emperor, exhausted with fasting and weeping, was wrapped in sleep. After carefully ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... with openings are so numerous that it is difficult to make a selection. That known as La Justice, near Beaumont-sur-Oise, consists of a small vestibule and a very long mortuary chamber, separated by a slab pierced with a round opening. We must also mention the megalithic monument of Villers-Saint-Sepulchre at Trie (Oise) (Fig. 70), that of Grand-Mont, with many of those of Morbihan, of which that ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... no more of what took place round the beloved dead; for when she took her hands from her face streaming with tears, the house of the rich widow no longer sheltered its mistress; her remains had been borne away to the nearest mortuary. The law forbade its being any longer kept within doors, but did not allow of its being buried till night fell. The child might not follow her own mother to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... was still engaged in preparing the material for the final volume upon the mortuary customs of the North American Indians, in the prosecution of which the large amount of information received and obtained from various sources has been carefully classified and arranged under proper divisions, so that the manuscript ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... consoled, and pitying the poor man's distress, which appeared to be considerable, promised to supply him. The waggon has accordingly gone this day to Northampton loaded in part with my effusions in the mortuary style. A fig for poets who write epitaphs upon individuals! I have written one that serves two ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... forth shuddering, home-bound citizens, nerved by the tankards within to their fearsome journey adown that eldrich avenue lined with the bloodstained weapons of the fighting dead. What street could live inclosed by these mortuary relics, and trod by these spectral citizens in whose sunken hearts scarce one good whoop ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... mortuary deposition. You understand, Dantes' relations, if he had any, might have some interest in knowing if ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... expense; and a provision was included that when a lodge was given the body of an outsider for burial it would furnish coffin, hearse, tomb, minister and marshal at a price of fifty dollars all told.[86] The mortuary stress in the by-laws, however, need not signify that the lodge was more funereal than festive. A negro burial was as sociable as an ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... it is not so odd. Coffin-maker to the world, the American casket industry had by now almost completely automated box-making and gravedigging, with some interesting assembly lines and packaging arrangements; there still remained the jobs of management and distribution. The President of General Mortuary, an ebullient fellow affectionately called Sarcophagus Sam, put it well. "As long as I have a single prospective customer, and a single Stockholder," he said, mangling a stogie and beetling his brows at the one reporter who'd showed ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)

... 83. Again:—"Why are mortuary and anniversary masses for the dead continued, and why does he not return or permit the withdrawal of the endowments founded on their behalf, since it is wrong to pray ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... Mike Clinch had selected his own mortuary site and had driven a section of iron pipe into the ground on a ferny knoll overlooking Star Pond. In explanation he grimly remarked to Eve that after death he preferred to be planted where he could see that ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers

... taken to the mortuary of the town hospital. A large crowd, grave, silent, and resolute in mood, had gathered quite early near the mortuary. It mostly consisted of labouring men, and their wives and children. The large square in front of the hospital, with its dirty, unpaved spots, its trampled ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... perhaps explains a fact, otherwise amazing, that no Polynesian seems at all to share our European horror of human bones and mummies. Of the first they made their cherished ornaments; they preserved them in houses or in mortuary caves; and the watchers of royal sepulchres dwelt with their children among the bones of generations. The mummy, even in the making, was as little feared. In the Marquesas, on the extreme coast, it was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... society which, we are informed by Engineering, whence we take the annexed engravings, has branches in various parts of the world), was held in Dresden. Before this meeting, a large number of designs for cremation and mortuary buildings were brought in competition, and finally the prize was awarded to Mr. G. Lilienthal, a Berlin architect, for the ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various

... Antonio was calmer. To my trembling inquiries he said something consolatory as to the blessed relief of tears. When not praying fervently in the mortuary chamber, he could be seen pacing the gallery in a severe aloofness of meditation. In the evening he took me by the arm, and, without a word, led me up a narrow and winding staircase. He pushed a small ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... of Berks, writes of the old church at East Shefford, of which Rev. John Prince was rector from 1620 to 1644: "The church where he preached still stands, being used only for a mortuary chapel, a new one for use having been erected near by. The old chapel is a most interesting building of the time of Henry VIII., and considered worthy to be described in full in archaeological works ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various

... get into her head it might be her dear girl that was lying there alone and unclaimed; and she would pay her fare—if she could afford it—or if not, trudge the distance on foot, creep, trembling, into the mortuary or the public-house where the body lay, blue from drowning, or with the ugly red gash across the throat, take one look, and then cry with a sigh of relief, "No, it ain't my child," and return again to her ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... the fulness of the hair about the ears. The bust was by Gerard Johnson or Janssen, who was a Dutch stonemason or tombmaker settled in Southwark. It was set up in the church before 1623, and is a rudely carved specimen of mortuary sculpture. There are marks about the forehead and ears which suggest that the face was fashioned from a death mask, but the workmanship is at all points clumsy. The round face and eyes present a heavy, unintellectual expression. The bust was originally coloured, but in 1793 Malone ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... the concierge replied. "He was stabbed by some one who stole in through the bathroom—they say that he couldn't ever have moved again. The Commissioner of Police is upstairs. The ambulance is round at the back to take him off to the Mortuary." ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... contents of which were the papyrus rolls whereupon this history is written. The tomb itself is spacious, but otherwise remarkable only for the depth of the shaft which descends vertically from the rock-hewn cave, that once served as the mortuary chapel for the friends and relatives of the departed, to the coffin-chamber beneath. This shaft is no less than eighty-nine feet in depth. The chamber at its foot was found to contain three coffins only, though ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... employed at this date for mortuary purposes, he has less opportunity of being indefinite, since there were but three notabilities, Scheemakers, Rysbrack, and Roubillac,—all foreigners. Of these Scheemakers, whom Chesterfield regarded as a mere stone-cutter, and who did the Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey, is certainly the ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson

... The dear departed, or grief for his memory, frequently played but too small a role in all these trappings of despondency, and the insignificance of the deceased might only be likened to the secondary position of a man at his own wedding. It was all fuss and mortuary feathers, mourning rings and mulled wine in the one case, just as in the other it is entirely a show of bride and blushes, flounces and femininity. [Footnote A: In writing of the customs connected with old-time English funerals, Misson says: "The ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... have to remember that at the end of the eighteenth century, and under the illumination of the 'ideas of 1789,' the tomb of this Princess in the chapel of Ste-Catherine was broken into, and her bones flung about on the floor of the mortuary vault, while at the end of this nineteenth century the legitimate owners of the chateau which has replaced the home of Louise de Lorraine et de Conti have been driven into exile for no other crime but that ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... glas begins to moan from St. Saviour's Church. Two bells are rung together so as to make as nearly as possible one clash of sound. At first it is a moan, but it soon becomes a strident cry with a continuous under-wail. At the Hospitalet on the hill the bell of the mortuary chapel is also tolling. It is the bell of the dead who lie there in the stony burying-ground upon the edge of the wind-blown causse, calling upon the bells of Roc-Amadour to move the living to pity for those who have ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... arks of safety, floating just five feet above the troubles of this life. These buildings are most of them painted red; and there is fine carving on panels, friezes and pediments, and also much tawdry gaudiness. Behind these two sanctuaries is the mortuary chapel where repose the memories of many of the greatest in the land. Behind this again are the priests' dormitories, with a lovely hidden garden hanging on the slopes of a sudden ravine; its presiding ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... its plan has been gleaned by students of Moroccan art. The number of its "countless" columns has been counted, and it is known that, to the right of the mirhab, carved cedar doors open into a mortuary chapel called "the mosque of the dead"—and also that in this chapel, on Fridays, old books and precious manuscripts are sold ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... and wrought iron; Brushes, fine leather articles, fancy articles, and basket work; Articles for traveling and for camping; India-rubber and gutta-percha industries; Toys; Decoration and fixed furniture of buildings and dwellings; Office and household furniture; Stained glass; Mortuary monuments and undertakers' furnishings; Hardware; Paper hanging; Carpets, tapestries, and fabrics for upholstery; Upholsterers' decorations; Ceramics; Plumbing and sanitary materials; Glass and crystal; Apparatus and processes for ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

... covered all alike with thick dust [206] —the faded flowers, the burnt-out lamps, the tools and hardened mortar of the workmen who had had something to do there. A heavy fragment of woodwork had fallen and chipped open one of the oldest of the mortuary urns, many hundreds in number ranged around the walls. It was not properly an urn, but a minute coffin of stone, and the fracture had revealed a piteous spectacle of the mouldering, unburned remains within; the bones of a child, as he understood, which might ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... certain social and economic conditions, and of its products. The second book, consisting also of ten chapters, treats of the religion and superstitions of the Chinese (wherein some peculiar parallels with the Christian religion are drawn), their mortuary and marriage customs, and treatment of the poor and infirm. The third book has twenty-four chapters, wherein are treated, in some detail, many different matters relating to China. These include an historical account ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair

... entry was a cold and formal thing of itself; not a nice place to lie dead in, having glazed white tiles for its walls and concrete for its flooring; something about its appearance in that grey morning air suggested to Spargo the idea of a mortuary. And that the man whose foot projected over the step was dead he had no doubt: the limpness of his pose certified ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher

... the unknown girl had been removed to the mortuary for a post-mortem examination, but nothing else had been moved, and two officers of the C.I.D. were busy making ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux

... not do any more work that day, but before going home he went to the doctor's house and the latter dressed the cuts on his head and arms. Philpot's body was taken away on the ambulance to the mortuary. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... Post and Powell streets. Trinity Church was at that corner and many people who were strangers were taken to the mortuary chapel. One sad funeral occurred there on June 18, 1887, of Abner Lincoln Blake, a grandson of Major-General Lincoln of revolutionary fame. He was ex-deputy of the custom house in Port Townsend and was on his way to Washington, with papers of importance, to give ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson

... rent-collecting agencies, hospitals, and poor lists, hotel-registers, mortuary records, with many other means of discovery, were unavailingly employed. Investigation at the bank where Mary Dodge drew the hundred pounds failed to disclose any clew to the identity of the ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... other nations the ancient Egyptians rendered mortuary service to their ancestors, and solid tomb-chapels had to be constructed in honour of the more important dead. Both for the purpose of preserving the mummy intact, and also in order to keep the ceremonies going for as long a period of time ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... anthropotomic laboratory, known to common speech as the dissecting-room. He had that quality which is the special gift of the man born for a teacher,—the power of exciting an interest in that which he taught. While he was present the apartment I speak of was the sunniest of studios in spite of its mortuary spectacles. Of the students I met there I best remember James Jackson, Junior, full of zeal and playful as a boy, a young man whose early death was a calamity to the profession of which he promised to be a chief ornament; the late Reverend J. S. C. Greene, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... one's last legs, on one's death bed; at the point of death, at death's door,, at the last gasp; near one's end, given over, booked; with one foot in the grave, tottering on the brink of the grave. stillborn; mortuary; deadly &c. (killing) 361. Adv. post obit, post mortem[Lat]. Phr. life ebbs, life fails, life hangs by a thread; one's days are numbered, one's hour is come, one's race is run, one's doom is sealed; Death knocks at the door, Death stares one ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... the Abbot's Mortuary was kept at Furness throughout three centuries. This was almost unique among Cistercian monasteries, for only names of those abbots who, having presided for ten years, continued at the abbey and died abbots there, were ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home

... reached the age of twenty years my parent departed to the ruth of Allah Almighty, bequeathing to me a thousand thousand dinars and fiefs and tenements and landed estates, so I let perform for him a sufficiency of mortuary-ceremonies after committing him to mother earth, and caused read twenty perlections of the Koran, and bestowed for him in alms a mighty matter. I abode a-mourning for him a month full told, and when the term was ended my heart turned to diversion ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... flat," he said. "The poor woman's body is at the mortuary. If you come with us we can reconstruct the crime. It occurred about this very hour if the doctor's ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... minister in the rites of hospitality; but much is to be pardoned to the spirit of self-love. He must indeed be ingenious who can make out the words her hvilir from any characters in the inscription in question, which, whatever else it may be, is certainly not mortuary. And even should the reverend gentleman succeed in persuading some fantastical wits of the soundness of his views, I do not see what useful end he will have gained. For if the English Courts of Law hold the testimony of gravestones from ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... C. Yarrow, Introduction to the Study of Mortuary Customs among the North American Indians, p. 5 ff.); Egypt (Wilkinson, The Ancient Egyptians, chap. x); see article "Funerailles" in La Grande Encyclopedie. Grant Allen, in The Evolution of the Idea of God, chap. iii, connects the idea ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... just who you are," said Fall, calmly, "but why you should come here under the impression that the late Mr. Farrington is an inmate of this establishment I do not understand. We are a lunatic asylum, not a mortuary," he ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace

... delirium and fever which had flung him, first convulsed and quivering, and then totally insensible, at the foot of the grim, world-forgotten men who passed the midnight hours in digging their own graves, he had been judged by them as dying or dead, and had been carried into a sort of mortuary chapel, cold and bare, and lit only by the silver moonbeams and the flicker of a torch one of the monks carried. Waking in this ghastly place, too weak to struggle, he fell a-moaning like a tortured child, and was, on ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... know of. The nostrum-makers have labelled all the features of Nature on the mainland, as if our country were a vast apothecary's shop. The Romans had a gloomy fashion of lining their great roads with tombs and mortuary inscriptions. The modern practice is quite as dreary. The long lines of railway that lead to our cities are decorated with cure-alls for the sick, the ante-mortem epitaphs of the fools who buy them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... address she had given him. The letter contained but a few lines, merely intimating that he had important business with her. The young man was now anxious to visit the beach under High Rock, for the purpose of identifying the mortuary emblem which had so strongly impressed the author of the journal, in the lightning and the hurricane; but he could not be spared from his work, and it was several months before he was able to verify ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic

... passage of the Toleration Act. All might have gone smoothly had they not suddenly stirred Governor Saltonstall to renewed dislike, the magistrates to fresh alarm, and the people to great contempt and indignation. This they accomplished by a sort of mortuary tribute to their leader, John Rogers, who died in 1721. This tribute took the form of renewed zeal, and was marked by a revival of some of their most obnoxious practices. The Rogerines determined to break up ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.

... Cromwell, which was the most respectable thing to suffer in those times. In the reign of Queen Anne, Colonel Maurice Hussey sold Cahirnane to the Herberts, and there is a garden still called Hussey's Garden in the property. He built a mortuary chapel for himself on the top of a small hill just outside the gates of Muckross, where his own grave near that beautiful abbey can be seen ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey

... toward a mortuary discussion of love. Being young, nearly all of them are anxious for, completely puzzled by and rather afraid of it, all at the same time. They wish to draw up one logical code to cover its every variation; they look at it, as it is at present with the surprised displeasure ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet

... preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of cousins, merely for the pleasure of being at their funerals, which he was often asked to superintend, and I suspect had sometimes to pay for. He carried me with him as often as he could to these mortuary ceremonies; but feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental, I escaped ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... Polke. "He'll have to be taken down to the town mortuary. We'd better see to it at once. What are you going to do, Starmidge?" he asked, as the ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher

... of the Han dynasty are almost all comprised in the sculptured stone slabs embellishing mortuary chambers and of these the artistic merit is most unequal.[4] Their technique is primitive. It consists in making the contours of figures by cutting away the stone in grooves with softened angles, leaving the figure in silhouette. ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci

... characteristic motion of the hand from him, the others left us. We sat down in the "horsehair" chairs of a well-to-do farmer's parlor—furnished in black walnut, with the usual organ against one wall, and the usual marble-topped bureau against the other. I remember the "store" carpet, the mortuary hair-wreaths on the walls, the walnut-framed lithographs of the Church authorities and of the angel Moroni with "the gold plates;" and none of these seem ludicrous to me to remember. They express, to me, in the recollection, some of the homely and devout simplicity ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... in with a stretcher. The corpse was pushed on to it and carried away to the mortuary. There it would be sewn up in an army blanket, ready for burial. And then a telegram would be sent to a wife or mother, informing her that her husband or son had "died of wounds received ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt

... an instant, was turned into a mortuary bed, and the four officers, straight, rigid and sobered up, with the harsh faces of warriors on duty stood near the windows, searching and ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... dinner, but you are a writer, and this is an odd case. Here is something you would not like to miss, for in all human probability you will never see anything like it again.' While he was speaking he had brought me into the mortuary of the hospital. ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker

... remarked Miss Roscoe, impersonally, addressing the world at large. Then she called to the girl between the box rows. Was there a touch of amusement in the mortuary voice? ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... pictures of the Pharaohs' tombs, representations of the horse. The oldest, now known, picture of the horse is found on the walls of the tombs of Seti I. (1458-1507 B.C.) under whose reign the Israelite wandered from Egypt. The horses of the mortuary pictures are very well drawn, and have an unmistakable oriental type. There has therefore undoubtedly existed in Egypt high culture, for over 4,000 years, without representation of the horse, which was the next ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... country. The bishop, being concerned that many were being interred in unconsecrated ground, purchased three acres of land in West Smithfield outside the city boundaries, known as "no man's land," and consecrated it for purposes of burial, and erected also a mortuary chapel. The whole he called Pardon Churchyard and Chapel. It was situated adjoining the north wall of the garden of the monastery, and extended from St. John Street to Goswell Street. In 1349 additional ground was ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... composer marked a step forward in French music, for he gave it more boldness and freedom, and was the first really scientific and well-equipped exponent of a national school. His choruses were full of energy and fire, his orchestral effects rich and massive. He died in 1764, and the mortuary music, composed by himself, was performed by a double orchestra and ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... Sunday afternoon arrived, Mrs. Sammet's house on One Hundred and Eighteenth Street presented an appearance of unusual festivity. The long, narrow parlor had been liberally draped with smilax and sparingly decorated with ex-table-d'hote roses, until it resembled the mortuary chapel of a Mulberry Street undertaker; and this effect was, if anything, heightened by four dozen camp-chairs that had been procured from the sexton of ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass

... and small, black moustache, combined with I know not what of martial in his air, struck into me a certain indefinable alarm. No sooner had he caught my eye, than he gathered up his reins, just raised his whip, and started the mortuary vehicle at a walk down the road. I followed it with my eyes till a bend in the avenue hid it from my sight. So wrapt up was my spirit in the exercise of the single sense of vision that it was not till the hearse became lost to view that I noticed the entire absence of sound which ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... and mortuary customs generally prevalent in the islands. The natives practice a sort of embalming of the dead. The dead person is usually buried in the lower part of his own house; and the funeral is succeeded by feasting and carousing—the immediate relatives, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson

... the Convent of St. Clara. In the background appears a partly demolished convent building, from which a gang of workmen are carrying out timber and debris. At the left is a mortuary chapel. Its windows are lighted from within, and whenever the door is opened, a brilliantly illuminated crucifix on the chancel wall, with a sarcophagus standing in front of it, becomes visible. A number of the graves have been opened. The moon is just ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... preserved, occasioned the singular custom of embalming the corpses of the departed to preserve them from decay, and of treasuring them up in the shape of {21} mummies in shaft-like passages and mortuary chambers. Through this belief, the priests, who, as judges of the dead, possessed the power of giving up the bodies of the sinful to corruption, and by this means occasioning the transmigration of their souls into the bodies of animals, obtained immense authority. Notwithstanding the magnificence ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield

... within, three male persons—a young man, an old man, and a boy—seem to be bringing home, somewhat wearily, to their "long home," the young man, his armour, the boy, and the old man, like old Socrates, the mortuary cock, as they approach some shadowy, ancient deity of the tomb, or it may be the throned impersonation of their "fathers of old." The marble surface was coloured, at least in part, with fixtures of metal here and there. The designer, whoever he may have been, was ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... apparatus is saturated, has turned into mud, as though there had been a shower of rain. Through the hole at the bottom, which is protected by a flat pebble, the gruel trickles drop by drop. It is a still at work, a mortuary still, in which the Snake is being drawn off. Wait a week or two; and the whole will have disappeared, drunk up by the sun: naught but the scales and bones will remain ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... removed to the station mortuary," he said at last. "Then, if I were you, I should have the saloon shunted on to a siding and left absolutely untouched. You had better place two of your station police in charge while you telephone to ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... a bad accident," replied the superintendent. "In fact, sir, he's dead! A couple of men found his body an hour or so ago in Hobwick Quarry, up on the moor, and it's been brought down to the mortuary. You'd better come round, Mr. ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher

... asylum that stands up so naked among the bare fields, I looked over a hedge, and there, behind the engine-house with its heaps of scoriae and rubbish, lay a little trim ugly burial-ground, with a dismal mortuary, upon which some pathetic and tawdry taste had been spent. There in rows lay the mouldering bones of the failures of life and old sin; not even a headstone over each with a word of hope, nothing but a number on a tin tablet. Nothing more incredibly sordid could be devised. ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... facile Venetian Muse shall sing for him. If his child is brought happily through the measles by Dottor Cavasangue, the Nine shall celebrate the fact. If he takes any public honor or scholastic degree, it is equal occasion for verses; and when he dies the mortuary rhyme shall follow him. Indeed, almost every occurrence—a boy's success at school, an advocate's triumphal passage of the perils of examination at Padua, a priest's first mass, a nun's novitiate, a birth, an amputation— is the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... Paris, however, at midnight were unsafe even for sober ladies, and these soon fell among thieves, were stripped of the rest of their clothing, then taken up for dead by the watch and flung into the mortuary in the cemetery of the Innocents; but, to the terror of the gravedigger, were found lying ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... sermons, 18 mortuary discourses, solemnized 21 hymeneal ceremonies, delivered 17 lectures, of which 16 were on secular and all the rest on religious subjects; made 39 addresses, of which all but 27 were on matters most nearly touching the vital religious concerns of the church, read aloud in church ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous

... one one's last legs, on one's death bed; at the point of death, at death's door, at the last gasp; near one's end, given over, booked; with one foot in the grave, tottering on the brink of the grave. stillborn; mortuary; deadly &c (killing) 361. Adv. post obit, post mortem [Lat.]. Phr. life ebbs, life fails, life hangs by a thread; one's days are numbered, one's hour is come, one's race is run, one's doom is sealed; Death knocks at the door, Death stares one in the face; the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... Vane turned his steps once again towards the beach at Paris Plage. The wreckage in the hospital had been cleared away, and there were rows laid side by side in the mortuary. Over everyone there breathed a sense of restless excitement and fierce anger, and Vane wanted to get away by himself. He felt that he had ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... earth and to get poor Joe that depth which the frozen clay would seem to grudge him. It was long after dark when his bed was ready, and by the light of a couple of lanterns we laid him down in the great rest. The graveyard and the funeral had few of those accessories of the modern mortuary which are supposed to be the characteristics of civilized sorrow. There was no mute, no crape, no parade—nothing of that imposing array of hat-bands and horses by which man, even' in the face of the mighty ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler

... abode of worms and pismires," peering round with a boundless curiosity and no fear; noting the various casuistical considerations of men's last form of self-love; all those whims of humanity as a "student of perpetuity," the mortuary customs of all nations, which, from their very closeness to our human nature, arouse in most minds only a strong feeling of distaste. There is something congruous with the impassive piety of the man in his waiting on accident from without ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... annum, and if it should be twice or three times that amount he has no redress. Should not these companies stipulate, in every policy, a sum for expenses which could not be exceeded? Should they not separate the mortuary and expense account, and contract with every policy-holder to use, not exceeding a specified per cent of the premium paid, for expenses, and to hold the balance a sacred trust for the payment of claims, the surplus above such requirement to be returned to ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various

... Zenone are a tomb and sepulchral urn which claim that they contain the mortal remains of Pepin, king of Italy, the son of Charlemagne. Besides these, altar-tombs, pillared and canopied monuments and mortuary chapels meet the eye everywhere inside and outside of the churches. That which attracts most attention now-a-days is decidedly the least ornamental—the doubly-doubtful tomb of Juliet. It is so acknowledged a lion that the street-boys of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... It was the mortuary ground of these Indians that occupied the only level spot we could get for the block-house. Their dead were buried in canoes, which rested in the crotches of forked sticks a few feet above-ground. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... Develop improved mechanisms for the coordination of medical and mortuary activities ...
— An Assessment of the Consequences and Preparations for a Catastrophic California Earthquake: Findings and Actions Taken • Various

... Christ," should no longer be extorted under pain of excommunication or debarring from the sacraments, but left to the free will of the givers (Concilia Scotiae, ii. 148, 149). The Council met this demand for reformation by enacting that in future the poor should be freed from mortuary dues, while those not quite so poor were only to pay them in a modified form; and the small tithes and oblations were to be taken up before Lent so as to avoid the appearance of selling the sacrament ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... was discharged for life from the necessity of further fighting. If his enemy's dagger must be pressed into his throat, or if he has been slain outright, there is a passage under the middle of the side of the amphitheatre through which the body will be dragged by a hook into the mortuary. Another combat follows between another pair—sometimes between two sides—and should the arena become too sodden with blood, it is raked over and ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... of this hall, barely lighted by a candle at one end, the mortuary table being behind the post like a horizontal bar, a sort of vast, vague cross resulted from Javert erect and Mabeuf ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... New York was phenomenal. Even our interested household could not follow her in all the changing splendor of her raiment. In time even Miss Forsythe ceased to read all these details, but she cut them out, deposited them with other relics in a sort of mortuary box of the child and the maiden. I used to wonder if, in the Brandon attitude of mind at this period, there were not just a little envy of such unclouded prosperity. It is so much easier to forgive a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... mortuary rites and customs of the primitive peoples of all ages of the world's history (548) reveals many instances of the belief that when men, "the common growth of mother-earth," at last rest their heads upon her lap, they do not wholly die, for the immortality of Earth is theirs. Whether ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... for bookkeeping,[3174] for paper and administrative work. Never, like Robespierre and Billaud can he attend to both official and police duties at the same time, carefully reading minute daily reports, annotating mortuary lists, extemporizing ornate abstractions, coolly enunciating falsehoods and acting out the patient, satisfied inquisitor; and especially, he can never become the systematic executioner.—On the one hand, his eyes are not ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... wrote or adapted the epitaph; but it was somebody who thought Shakespeare (or Bacon?) "a clayver man." The monument (if a trembling conjecture may be humbly put forth) was conceivably erected by the piety of Shakespeare's daughter and son- in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Hall. They exhibit a taste for the mortuary memorial and the queer Latin inscription. Mrs. Hall gratified the Manes of her poor mother, Mrs. Shakespeare, with one of the oddest of Latin epitaphs. {187a} It opens like an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and ends in an unusual strain of Christian mysticism. Mr. Hall possesses, ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang

... thing about it," said Ben Price the bald-headed, at length breaking through the mortuary silence that reigned around the table; "it do ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... China and Korea, but the same respect, though in a somewhat less rigid form, is paid the dead in Japan. Then at last the individual receives that recognition which was denied him in the flesh. In Japan a mortuary tablet is set up to him in the house and duly worshipped; on the continent the ancestors are given a dwelling of their own, and even more devotedly reverenced. But in both places the cult is anything but funereal. For the ancestral tombs ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... alcoholic irritation, emitted a strong odour of chloroform. An inquest was held, and a verdict returned that B. F. Perry had died of congestion of the lungs caused by the inhalation of flame or chloroform. After lying in the mortuary for eleven days the ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... intended for his own service. Such an apology for a dinner had not been seen during the last four months of wild travel—unpleasant when guests have been bidden to a feast! The night at the Docks, also, was a trifle mortuary, over-silent and tranquil: all hands, officers and men, who could not get leave to sleep ashore, simply took leave—I believe myself to have been for a time both captain and crew of the Sinnr. And, lastly, we heard that both our dog-companions, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton

... cured me of my repugnance to wearing dead men's clothes, or rather it made my nakedness so painful that I was glad to cover it as best I could, and I began foraging among the corpses for garments. For awhile my efforts to set myself up in the mortuary second-hand clothing business were not all successful. I found that dying men with good clothes were as carefully watched over by sets of fellows who constituted themselves their residuary legatees as ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... liquor was served to all who had to do with a funeral, let me give the bill for the mortuary expenses of David Porter, of Hartford, who was ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... the vault. The window in the north end wall, however, is of large dimensions. The windows are all filled with good fifteenth century tracery, similar to that in the restored south aisle of the choir. This part of the edifice is now used as a mortuary chapel for the family of the Marquess of Lothian. The tower over the crossing is 33 feet square and 86 feet in height. It contains three pointed and cusped lancets on each side, and is without buttresses. It appears to have been erected about 1500. At the top, near the north-west ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... at least to mitigate your resentment—natural, I allow."—Jolt, jolt! And still a mortuary silence within the coach! It was disconcerting. Robie for a certainty was driving his best, and already we were beyond the last rare outposts of light on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... old world, is unsurpassed by any on the globe. To such as are in quest of health, no comparison can be instituted, as it has been demonstrated that the Northwest, especially in the region of the lakes, possesses the most invigorating climate in the world. A reference to the mortuary tables removes all doubt on this point. In the town of Marquette, on Lake Superior, containing a population of over three thousand, there were during the last year but eight deaths, and only a portion of that ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... at the mortuary was easily obtained at the local police station, when I had given my name, and mentioned that I had come for purposes ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson



Words linked to "Mortuary" :   dead room, death, funeral church, funeral parlour, crematory, edifice, funeral-residence, funeral parlor, funeral, funeral home, crematorium, building, funeral chapel, morgue



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