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Tombstone   /tˈumstˌoʊn/   Listen
Tombstone

noun
1.
A stone that is used to mark a grave.  Synonyms: gravestone, headstone.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Tombstone" Quotes from Famous Books



... screaming ships to North America laden with booty and with men grown suddenly rich—and with men who will never care for riches or anything else again. These are the fortunate dead. The rest are received into the sloppy breast of Venus where even a tombstone or marker is swallowed in a few, short weeks. And they die quickly on Venus, ...
— Foundling on Venus • John de Courcy

... am glad to stretch my old limbs after that terrible drive. So here we are together again. What are you sighing for? Upon my soul, you are the same as ever, I see, the same tombstone on your chest, and blowing yourself out with sighs, just as you used. That will never give you a figure, my poor girl; it is no wonder you are but skin and bones. Ah, can't you let the poor fellow rest in his grave Sophia? it is flying in the face of Providence, I call it, to ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... word of wide signification, applying to any writing, mark, or trace that serves as a memorial giving enduring attestation of an event or fact; an extended account, chronicle, or history is a record; so, too, may be a brief inventory or memorandum; the inscription on a tombstone is a record of the dead; the striae on a rock-surface are the record of a glacier's passage. A register is a formal or official written record, especially a series of entries made for preservation or reference; as, a register of ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... see an ancient mannikin, bent double, head to feet, like a bramble, straightening himself, and looking at me more malignantly than the red devil, and without a word he hurled a big skull at my head, but, thanks to a sheltering tombstone, missed me. "Truce, sir, I pray you," cried I, "to a stranger who was never here before, and will never come again, could I but once find the way home." "I'll make you remember you've been here," quoth he, and, again setting upon me with a thighbone, he beat me most ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... here last—a house of stones an' sticks.... An' here's a corral of pebbles with leaves for hosses," said Lassiter, stridently, and pointed to the ground. "Back an' forth she trailed here.... See, she's buried somethin'—a dead grasshopper—there's a tombstone... here she went, chasin' a lizard—see the tiny streaked trail... she pulled bark off this cottonwood... look in the dust of the path—the letters you taught her—she's drawn pictures of birds en' hosses an' people.... Look, a ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey

... our treasures upon the top of a flat tombstone that was somewhat higher than its neighbours and formed a convenient table for our purpose. The stone was overgrown with lichens and moss, and skirted by a growth of nettles and thistles. As we stood around ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton

... him and three young childer, his light went out, and though no more than thirty-five years of age, he felt 'twas the end of the world. He comforted his cruel sufferings with the thought of a wonnerful tombstone to Sarah Bird, and there's no doubt that tombstones, though they can't make or mar the dead, have, time and again, softened the lot of the living. And you may say that poor Sarah's mark in the churchyard was the subject that first began to calm Jonas. But it ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts

... underneath all this," he said at last. "Perhaps something more underneath the statue. I have a huge sort of hunch that there is. We are four men now and between us we can lift that great tombstone there." ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton

... the dust whirl that advanced up the road that ran round the corral. "That doesn't prove anything, Alan. Everybody knows Jose. He's lived all over Arizona—at Tucson and Tombstone and Douglas." ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine

... grass. About fifteen paces from the central tower, and within its shadow, I found a weather-worn slab of marble, seven or eight feet long, the inscription on which interested me somewhat. It was to the memory of Robert Dodsley, the bookseller, Johnson's acquaintance, who, as his tombstone rather superciliously avers, had made a much better figure as an author than "could have been expected in his rank of life." But, after all, it is inevitable that a man's tombstone should look down on him, or, at all events, comport itself ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... of 1582 Shakespeare, when little more than eighteen and a half years old, took a step which was little calculated to lighten his father's anxieties. He married. His wife, according to the inscription on her tombstone, was his senior by eight years. Rowe states that she 'was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... laughed, as he set himself down on a flat tombstone, which was a favorite resting-place of his, and drew forth his wicker-bottle. "A coffin at Christmas! A ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various

... by Charles Dickens in America we have been able to obtain very few. One, to Dr. F. H. Deane, Cincinnati, complying with his request to write him an epitaph for the tombstone of his little child, has been kindly copied for us from an album, by Mrs. Fields, of Boston. Therefore, it is not directly received, but as we have no doubt of its authenticity, we give it here; and there is one to Mr. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... sea! And then you could actually see Vailima, which I would like you to, for it's beautiful and my home and tomb that is to be; though it's a wrench not to be planted in Scotland—that I can never deny—if I could only be buried in the hills, under the heather and a table tombstone like the martyrs, where the whaups and plovers are crying! Did you see a man who wrote the Stickit Minister,[68] and dedicated it to me, in words that brought the tears to my eyes every time I looked at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... together till they came to the churchyard. The gentleman pointed to a tombstone and said: ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost

... exclaimed my father; and the very next morning we had the workmen in, and fixed up a little mound at the bottom of the orchard with a tombstone over it, bearing the ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome

... to the throne, unless Bohemund had fallen into the hands of Danishmend; and the dissensions among the Mahommedans alone made possible the subsequent consolidation of his kingdom. But he had virtu as well as fortuna; and on his tombstone it was written that he was "a second Judas Maccabaeus, whom Kedar and Egypt, Dan and Damascus dreaded." As king, he still retained something of the clerk in the habit of his dress; but he was at the same time a warrior so impetuous, as to be sometimes foolhardy, and his policy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... The inscription on the tombstone of James Weir in the Parish of Carluke, Scotland, says that when only thirteen months old he measured 3 feet 4 inches in height and weighed 5 stone. He was pronounced by the faculty of Edinburgh and Glasgow to be the most extraordinary child of his age. Linnaeus ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... prepare his meals, to entertain his visitors, to bear his children, and that she will be required by law to pay her own bills; that for this inestimable privilege she shall be called Mrs. John Snooks, and may, perhaps, have the honor of being written in the newspapers, and on her tombstone, as the relic of Mr. John Snooks. Could any woman ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... ever in this world? and be content to see on more these dear memorials till others like them should be raised for herself, far away? But then stole in consolations not human, nor of man's devising the words that were written upon her mother's tombstone ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell

... would acknowledge its merits, and his genius would find full recognition. Perhaps he was right: more than one book which seemed dead and was dead for contemporary readers has had a resurrection when the rivals who triumphed over it lived only in the tombstone memory of antiquaries. Comfort for some of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... I hope you may live many years to go a-fishing, and I may live to see it, Sammy. Yes, old boy, this here's one of them days that won't be forgotten: it's engraved on my memory deep as the words on a tombstone, 'Here he lies! Here he lies!'" he repeated with a hiccup, and rolled at full length ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour

... on the flat slabs resting ourselves, several little girls, healthy-looking and prettily dressed enough, came into the churchyard, and began to talk and laugh, and to skip merrily from one tombstone to another. They stared very broadly at us, and one of them, by and by, ran up to U. and J., and gave each of them a green apple, then they skipped upon the tombstones again, while, within the church, we heard them singing, sounding pretty much as I have heard it in our pine-built New England meeting-houses. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... wife of Joseph Raleigh, aged 32 years," whose funeral I attended, to be witness to the profound grief of the husband thus prematurely bereft of a wife who was, as I recollect, a rarely fine woman. Even Carlyle's indifference to "tombstone literature" might tolerate these lines, recorded on her monument, both for their own high quality, and as the eloquent expression of the heart ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth

... which Fox and Lord North, in female attire, and the Duchess in her large picture hat, but decollettee, and with bare arms, are busy singing a dirge on the defeated opponent. Georgina, a figure of delicious sprightliness and beauty, points to the tombstone marked "Here lies poor Cecil Ray," while the spectacled profile of Burke peeps into the door. And here I may remark again how astonishingly to my own experience a study of these prints makes history real, vivid, and living. These dry bones of bygone politics ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton

... those Objects, which others consider with Terror. When I look upon the Tombs of the Great, every Emotion of Envy dies in me; when I read the Epitaphs of the Beautiful, every inordinate Desire goes out; when I meet with the Grief of Parents upon a Tombstone, my Heart melts with Compassion; when I see the Tomb of the Parents themselves, I consider the Vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow: When I see Kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... attended, until they sink into the grave. Such was the case with Peter Anderson: he was ninety-seven when he died, but long before that time his mind was quite gone. Still he was treated with respect, and many were there who attended his funeral. I erected a handsome tombstone to his memory, the last tribute I could pay to a worthy, honest, sensible, and highly ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... now established that Luis de Leon was born at Belmonte in the province of Cuenca: 'Belmonte de la Mancha de Aragon' as he calls it.[10] When was he born? On his tombstone, he was stated to be sixty-four years old when he died on August 23, 1591.[11] This is almost the only scrap of evidence available, for no baptismal registers dating back to the third decade of the sixteenth century are preserved at Belmonte.[12] ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

... for some time, reading the iscriptions on the various monuments which attracted my curiosity, and giving way to the different reflections they suggested, I sat down to rest myself on a sunken tombstone. A winding gravel-walk, overshaded by an avenue of trees, and lined on both sides with richly sculptured monuments, had gradually conducted me to the summit of the hill, upon whose slope the cemetery stands. Beneath me in the distance, and dim-discovered through ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... each to his abode, and an hour after midday they gathered in the church burial-ground, and they drew up a tombstone, and with it rammed the door; and they hurled stones at the windows; and in the darkness they built a wall of dung in the ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans

... of October, 1894, and was buried at Salcombe in his beloved Devonshire not far from his beloved sea. He "made his everlasting mansion upon the beached verge of the salt flood." By his own particular desire he was described on his tombstone as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, so deeply did he feel the complete though tardy recognition of the place he had made for himself among English historians. Otherwise he was the most unassuming of men, simple and natural ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... You would deprive those who are condemned to live like brutes, of the comfort of dying like men. You would have their bodies sewed in sacks and thrown into ditches where they are not even allowed to moulder, but must be destroyed by lime. No tombstone permitted over their remains, nothing to remind their weeping relatives that they were ever alive! Oh, this is cruel! It may be a great thought, sire, but it is a barbarous deed! I know how bold I am, but my conscience compels me to speak; and were I to lose the emperor's favor, I must obey ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... nearer, pray! consider! 115 If it should prove his ghost, the touch would freeze me To a tombstone. No nearer! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... of these facts, the grave of William Paul was recently discovered in St. George's churchyard, Fredericksburg, and his tombstone bears the date of 1774. This effectually disposes of Colonel Buell's contention. For whatever reason John Paul assumed the name of Jones it was not in testamentary succession to William Paul; for William Paul kept his inherited surname to ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... grave before his wife, who was buried in the usual horizontal manner! Job Orton appears to have had a peculiar talent for the composition of epitaphs; as, in his more playful moments, he was accustomed to tell his better-half that if he outlived her he should put the following lines on her tombstone: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various

... came back to England as quick as the trains would carry him, and with him came the sad and mournful burden which had to be deposited in the vaults of the parish church at Manor Cross. There must be a decent tombstone now that the life was gone, with decent words upon it and a decent effigy,—even though there had been nothing decent in the man's life. The long line of past Marquises must be perpetuated, and Frederic Augustus, the tenth peer of the name, must be ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... said. 'You couldn't call him Nigel—that's Toffy's front name—and I 'm afraid he hasn't got any other. I believe fathers and mothers think you must be going to die young when they give you a name like that, and that it will look well on a tombstone.' ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... and so long at March without speaking or smiling, or taking any more notice of him than if he had been an effigy on a tombstone, seemed unaccountable to that youth. Had he been able to look at himself from her point of view he would not have been so ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne

... last like those. I never sit down at my table without looking at the china service, and saying, 'Here are my monuments. That butter-dish is my urn. This soup-plate is my memorial tablet.'—No need of a skeleton at my banquets! I feed from my tombstone and read my epitaph at the bottom, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... this pyramid is the Protestant Cemetery, where tall cypresses rise above the graves of numerous English, American, German, and other visitors. Prominent among those resting there are: Shelley, the English poet (died 1822), whose heart only was buried there; the tombstone of the English poet Keats (died 1821) bears the melancholy inscription: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." There is also the grave of August Goethe (died 1830), the only son ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel

... terrible news that his wife had died suddenly while out driving. It was a crushing blow. Only when it was too late did Carlyle realize all that his wife had been to him. She was, as he wrote on her tombstone, "Suddenly snatched away from him, and the light of his life ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... sad soul of Dante, but he always remembered that he was still an outcast from his native city. Florence stubbornly refused to remove her ban and when Dante died he was buried at Ravenna. There his body still lies, with a Latin inscription on his tombstone that tells the world of the ingratitude of the city of Florence to her greatest son, who is also the greatest poet ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards

... moment. He was distressed at the thought of dying away from home, at being unable to give his family his last blessing, at not having his accustomed physician by his side, etc. Then he would begin to worry about the details of his funeral, the inscription on his tombstone, and so on. Nothing was right in his surroundings; the sky of Paris, his doctors and nurses, his servants, his bed, his rooms, all were matters of complaint. "Strange inconsistency!" exclaimed the holy Bishop. "Here is a brave soldier and a great statesman, fretted ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus

... painting. You have lavished more colour on one cheek than Rubens would have required for all the figures in his cartoons.' Observing one of the Ladies of Honour still more highly rouged than the Queen, he said, 'I suppose I look like a death's head upon a tombstone, among ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... Peter into the pocket of my overcoat, and took him away to his new home. I had the greatest confidence in him, being a firm believer in the doctrine of heredity. His father I never knew, but his grandfather bore a great reputation for courage, as was indicated on his tombstone, the inscription on which ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... retired to Montargis, where he narrowly escaped assassination. He was afterwards seized as a suspected person. On being brought before the revolutionary tribunal, he reminded his judges of his services, and desired it might be engraved on his tombstone, that he had occasioned the events of the 10th of August. He was guillotined ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... his life, so venerated after his death. When Henry Frauenlob died, which was in the year 1318, the females who had insulted him in life carried his coffin to the tomb, which procession is chiseled on the tombstone beneath. I again looked at that noble head. The sculptor had left the eyes open; and thus, in that church of sepulchers—in that cloister of the dead—the poet alone sees; he only is represented standing, and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... comparative one, and inevitably a comparative judgment fixes our attention on the Greek supremacy of style. Indeed, in looking at the antique the thought itself is often alien to us, and the order and movement, being more nearly universal perhaps, are all that occupy us. A family tombstone lying in the cemetery at Athens, and half buried in the dust which blows from the Piraeus roadway, has more style than M. Mercie's "Quand-Meme" group for Belfort, which has been the subject of innumerable encomiums, and which has only style and no individuality whatever to commend it. And ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... capabilities of the art for producing pictures of composition. They are tableaux vivants transferred by the calotype. In the one[Footnote: See Frontispiece] a bonneted mechanic rests over his mallet on a tombstone—his one arm bared above his elbow; the other wrapped up in the well-indicated shirt folds, and resting on a piece of grotesque sculpture. There is a powerful sun; the somewhat rigid folds in the dress of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... not care for their graves; look, how the grass and weeds nod over that tombstone; and you would not clear this, unless you knew something about the girl ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... that I am dying, this one request I crave, To place a marble tombstone above my humble grave! And on the stone these simple words I'd have engraven so— "'MacDonald lost his life for ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... West-end clergyman, the author of a Life of Dorcas and other pleasing booklets. For some time after his boys said "Doctor" in every third sentence, and then grew weary of a too common title, and fell back on Rabbi, by which he was known unto the day of his death, and which is now engraved on his tombstone. ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... "he declared that he had by accident visited the church that morning; that he had observed the tombstone of the Count Ughelli; that his guide had told him the count's son was in Naples,—a spendthrift and a gambler. While we were at play, he had heard the count mentioned by name at the table; and when the challenge was given and accepted, it had occurred to him to name the place of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... wrapper—Fraeulein Roth's. His fingers closed upon them now. A weapon? Better than that. A plan had come to him which he proceeded immediately to put into practice. Taking off his wrapper he seated himself upon a tombstone and began cutting it into pieces, shaping a short sleeveless jacket. He cut the sleeves of the wrapper ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... rest whirled beyond reach and even sight (save in the mirror of a balance-sheet) under the compelling spell of wizard Pinkerton. Dollars of mine were tacking off the shores of Mexico, in peril of the deep and the guarda-costas; they rang on saloon-counters in the city of Tombstone, Arizona; they shone in faro-tents among the mountain diggings; the imagination flagged in following them, so wide were they diffused, so briskly they span to the turning of the wizard's crank. But here, there, or everywhere I could still tell myself it was all mine, and what was more convincing, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... Wuerttemberg. Among the fugitives eagerly sought throughout Germany by the imperial henchmen was Brenz in Schwaebisch-Hall, the renowned theologian of Wuerttemberg, who spoke of the Interim only as "Interitus, Ruin." (C. R. 7, 289.) The tombstone of Brenz bears the inscription: "Voce, stylo, pietate, fide, ardore probatus—Renowned for his eloquence, style, piety, faithfulness, and ardor." (Jaekel, 164.) A prize of 5,000 gulden was offered for the head of Caspar ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... that. I will leave that to sister. For my own part, I will merely say that you are our sunshine—you make our family circle bright as gold. To lose you, my child, would be—well, I won't say what, only when you leave us you may leave an order at the nearest stone-cutter's for a tombstone ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... said Flemming. "The child seems to have been born only to be buried, and have its name recorded on a wooden tombstone." ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... glints on the coat of the Red King. He'd shake it, an' watch the beads rise, an' he'd pull the cork an' smell it—breathe its flavour an' its bouquet deep into his lungs—an' all the while the little beads of cold sweat would be standin' out on his forehead, like dew on a tombstone, an' his tongue would be wettin' his lips, an' his fingers would be twitchin' to carry it to his mouth. Then his lips would twist into that grin, an' he'd put back the cork, an' put the bottle in his pocket, an' ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx

... not have me live a maid? Think of the humiliation of having graven on my tombstone: 'Mistress Frances Jennings, Age 85.' I'm going to marry the richest man that ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major

... of the ten thousand. We want to know the thoughts and the resolves of the soul which made him a marked man above his fellows and which begot strong influences for good and great works, and if none such can be unfolded then drop the man out of sight, with a "Requiescant in pace" engraven upon his tombstone. Few deserve a biography, and to the undeserving none ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... or a hundred years, after there is no possibility of his receiving the reward or the inspiration, they arouse. His fame spreads. His name becomes a household word. They desecrate his grave, if they can find it, by hanging laurel on his tombstone. They tear the wall-paper from the house where he once chanced to live into ribbons for souvenirs. If he happens to be a painter the picture that brought him enough perhaps to keep body and soul together for a month is fought ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge

... know how it is on an island like this. The tiny thing of everyday life becomes a subject for a day's discussion. That affair of six months ago was like dropping a tombstone in a mud-puddle—everything is profoundly stirred, but no one gets spattered except the one who dropped ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... dance. So I looked steadily, till I had to shake the sleep out of my eyes with a great effort. Then I fell to speculating on the tablets painted at the left of the pulpit, to balance the organ. These tablets were encased in a design that suggested a twin tombstone. On one of them were the words, "God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth," a sentence which had always given me great difficulty. But this morning I interpreted it at last to my satisfaction. It meant, I decided, that a man must first die and become a ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... at Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, the following inscription has been copied from the tombstone of a deaf and ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe

... separate establishment before she dies. When that event occurs, I shall be, in effect, homeless—a boarder around upon my rebukeful relatives, who 'always thought how my trifling would end,' and who will be forever scribbling 'vanitas vanitatum,' upon the tombstone of my departed youth—my day of beaux and offers. You may shake your head and look heroic with all your might! You are no better off than I, should your brother see cause to refuse his consent to your marriage with Mr. Chilton. He could, and probably would, coerce you into ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... struggles and escapes Cape York was reached on the 26th of June, and then many places were visited, but no traces nor information concerning the lost expedition could be obtained. So, in August, the Fox sought Beachey Island, and erected a tombstone over the remains of those who lay there, close to Bellot's monument. Many days were occupied in endeavouring to pass Bellot's Strait, but again and again were carried back by tides and ice-drift. Some land expeditions ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith

... it's only their names that appear, and not their bodies, Mr Puddlebrane. And a cremated man may have as big a tombstone as though he had been allowed to become ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope

... profound sensation among the members of the praetorium and of the imperial household. His case must have been inquired into by the philosopher himself, who happened to be consul suffectus at the time. The modest tombstone, discovered by accident among the ruins of Ostia, gives us the evidence of the bond of sympathy and esteem established, in consequence of these events, between the Annei and the founders of ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani

... too. I do not speak of facial beauty. Some may think, in that respect, the English or the Americans handsomer. But these people have the beauty of life. Instead of the tombstone masques that pass for faces among Anglo-Saxons, they have human features, quick, responsive, mobile. Instead of the slow, long limbs creaking in stiff integuments, they have active members, for the most bare or moving freely in loose robes. Instead of a mumbled, monotonous, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... ago, died in the early '80's. In a little French graveyard there's a tombstone that bears my name, my real name, the name of the 'me' that was. Heart, soul and body, I died. My sisters mourned me, my friends muttered, 'Poor devil.' A few women cried, and a girl—well, I mustn't speak of that. It's all over long ago; but I must eternally do something, fight, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... scheme," he pursued;—"schemes to be welcomed and appreciated anywhere—but here. And what is your own? All you can think of is a mongrel heap of cabins and spires and chimneys and shacks that would set a tombstone to grinning. What chance is there for art in such a hotch-potch as that? ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... high and unfortunate Daughter there should be some Biography; and there will surely, if a man of sympathy and faculty pass that way; but there is not hitherto. Nothing hitherto but a few bare dates; bare and sternly significant, as on a Tombstone; indicating that she had a History, and that it was a tragic one. Welcome to all of us, in this state of matters, is the following one clear emergence of her into the light of day, and in company so interesting too! Seven years before her death she had ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... about the defacement of Mr. Skinner's tombstone?" asked Mr. Brown a few days after the funeral of that ...
— Best Short Stories • Various

... Sir Anthony Fitzherbert continues the discussion in the sixteenth century. In connection with the history of the use of marl in agriculture may be cited the tender tribute which Arthur Young recorded on the tombstone of his wife in Bradfield Church. The lady's chief virtue appears to have been, in the memory of her husband, that she was "the great-grand-daughter of John Allen, esq. of Lyng House in the County of Norfolk, the first person according to the Comte de Boulainvilliers, who there ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... patrician Built a tomb to his freed woman, Whom he'd brought as a remembrance From Judaea, at the time of The destruction of the Temple. She was called Zatcha Achyba. There he sat, the spies related; 'Twas a subject for an artist: The Campagna's sombre landscape; Moonlight on the marble tombstone; He his mantle wrapped around him; Mournfully he blew his trumpet Through the gloomy lonely silence. This had brought upon him later Many mocking jeers like this one: 'Signor Werner is composing For the Jewess there ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... wild dusty figure come running out of the church porch with the parish register in his hand, and no hat on his head, he understood the position immediately. He sat down on a tombstone, and laughed till he could laugh ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... grow near Guildford. We dismissed this assertion. But he remarked that it was extraordinary in what odd places we sometimes do find plants; he knew a single plant of Asplenium Trichomanes which had no other within thirty miles of it; it was growing on a tombstone which had come from a long distance and from a Trichomanes country. It almost seemed as if the seeds and germs were always going about in the air and grew wherever they found a suitable environment. I said it was the same with our thoughts; the germs ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... indisputable—to the effect that on a death of a man of unconventional character his mournful family, after much trouble, hit upon the happy thought of satisfying their desire to leave an amiable and incontestable record concerning him by having inscribed upon his tombstone the following epitaph:—"He never ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... answered, half to himself; "times change and fames change almost as quickly. When all is said, however, there may be more lasting honour in building a country's trade than in winning a battle. I'll have a tombstone some day and I want written on it, 'He brought help to the sick land and made the cotton flower to bloom anew.' My name is General Bolingbroke," he added, with his genial and charming smile. "You will ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow

... gathered the summer flowers along these banks—and passed away! Where are they now! Some who wrote their names in the traveller's book in this cottage, have them now written by others on their tombstone. One I knew well, who, full of health and beauty, passed up this wild ravine, who has faded like the flowers she culled, and is now in her father's house, to pass in a few more days to heaven. And of all the rest, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... had had enough of vaults, regarding them, with reason, as uncertain places of sepulture for the presumably defunct. I had never heard, or read, of cremation. I had had the misfortune to break my slate a few days before, and the biggest fragment made a nice tombstone for Caspar Hauser. With a nail and with infinite toil I produced a ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... help them I want to promote culture, like those Renaissance women you're always talking about. I want to do it for Apex City; do you understand? And for father and mother too. I want all those titles carved on my tombstone. They're facts, anyhow! Don't laugh at me...." She broke off with one of her clumsy smiles, and moved away from him to the other end ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... Sheer from your feet downwards went the hill, and then far below stretched the wooded country till your eye reached the towers of Windsor Castle, far away on the horizon. It was the view at which Byron was never tired of gazing, as he lay on the flat tombstone close by—Byron's tomb, as it is still called—of which ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... one Philadelphia prize-fighter, four San Francisco hoodlums, three Virginia beats, two Union Pacific roughs, and two check guerrillas." Among the far-west newspapers, have been, or are, The Fairplay (Colorado) Flume, The Solid Muldoon, of Ouray, The Tombstone Epitaph, of Nevada, The Jimplecute, of Texas, and The Bazoo, of Missouri. Shirttail Bend, Whiskey Flat, Puppytown, Wild Yankee Ranch, Squaw Flat, Rawhide Ranch, Loafer's Ravine, Squitch Gulch, Toenail Lake, are a few of the names of places in ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... about any, but as we were sadly recalling his last intimate talk, it seemed that the desire for "Peace" which he had expressed should be recorded as an acquittal of the deed which brought the fulfilment of his wish. And his father caused the word eiraenae, to be engraved at the head of the tombstone. ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... home Is occupied with Olga fair, An album, fly-leaf of the tome, He leisurely adorns for her. Landscapes thereon he would design, A tombstone, Aphrodite's shrine, Or, with a pen and colours fit, A dove which on a lyre doth sit; The "in memoriam" pages sought, Where many another hand had signed A tender couplet he combined, A register of fleeting thought, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... father wrote to a man in Tombstone, Arizona. See here! Father's name is signed to it! I saw father write it. Why, I rode over to Dry Bottom and mailed it! This man had written to father a long time before, asking for a job. I have his letter somewhere. It was the oddest ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer

... had descended from the well-known family of Prigg, and he prided himself on the circumstance. How often was he seen in the little churchyard of Yokelton of a Sunday morning, both before and after service, pointing with family pride to the tombstone of a relative which bore this beautiful ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris

... curious and eccentric epitaphs into your very amusing and instructive periodical, if the enclosed is worthy a place, it at least has this merit, if no other, that it is a literal copy, from a tombstone ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various

... young America employed in a great university, Galusha might have been, and was, seen hopping about some grass-grown graveyard, like a bespectacled ghoul, making tracings of winged death's-heads or lugubrious tombstone poetry. When they guyed him he merely grinned, blushed, and was silent. To the few—the very few—in whom he confided he made explanations which were as curious ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... a little further on, is a mile in length, and helps to divide the Back Strand from the spacious bay. Just before reaching this Burrow, the visitor will see a tombstone erected to the memory of those who were lost in the "Sea Horse" transport, in January, 1816, when returning from the Peninsular Campaign. No less than 362 lost their lives in this terrible disaster. At the western side of Tramore there are many places along the rock-bound coast well worth a visit. ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger

... adjoining Bradgate Park. In this churchyard is a tombstone on which is engraved only the letters of the alphabet and the simple numerals. The story goes, that he who lies below, an illiterate inhabitant of the village in the last century, whose name, I believe, is now forgotten, being very anxious ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various

... Master Percy, an' maybe he might put up a monyment and a hepithet 'imself for me if he did but know I'd done that for 'im. It's a risk, too; Percy's no 'ead on his shoulders, an' I might be left with no tombstone ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews

... right square down to it he ain't got no more use for 'n' a cat has for two tails. No, I'm a rich woman, but all incomes has their outside fence. 'F a man 's got a million a year, he can't spend two million, 'n' I can't start in child raisin' 'n' tombstone father all in the same year. Father 'll have to wait, 'n' he got so used to it while he was alive 't he ought not to mind it much now he's dead. But I give the man my address, 'n' he give me one o' his cards, 'n' when I go to the Orphan Asylum ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner

... more of the MAGICAL view and a little less of the symbolic, in the older religions; but the difference was probably on the whole more one of degree than of essential disparity. But however that may be, we cannot but be struck by the extraordinary analogy between the tombstone inscriptions of that period "born again into eternity by the blood of the Bull or the Ram," and the corresponding texts in our graveyards to-day. F. Cumont in his elaborate work, Textes et Monuments relatifs aux Mysteres de Mithra (2 vols., Brussels, 1899) gives a great ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... her eyes sank to the ground. Her knees were resting on a tombstone, and she saw many of the same kind about her. She read the names engraven on the stones; they were all Swedish, correct and well-known. "Oh," she said to herself with a sigh, "I have not a name like ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... festivities of a ball-room at some lordly mansion in the country, and to have wandered into a churchyard, damp and dreary with a thick London fog. In the light dress of fashion, he throws himself on a tombstone. "Ye dead!" exclaims the hero, "where are ye? Do your disembodied spirits now float around me, and, shrouded in this horrible veil of nature, glare unseen upon vitality? Float ye upon this intolerable mist, in yourselves still more misty and intolerable? Hold ye ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... all babies. Now, if this had happened up at Quit Claim, Borlan would have had a beautiful tombstone over him long ago. What ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton

... she had invariably treated other gentlemen with such cool indifference that she was a favorite with but few, and as she considered these few her inferiors, she had more than once feared lest John Jr.'s prediction concerning the lettering on her tombstone should prove true! ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes

... upon a tombstone sat the creature Grewsome as an unquenched, burning lust. Sitting livid there With an open-coffin stare— A stare that seemed ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck

... he showed, when a Welsh parson of mean abilities, though a good heart, struck with reverence at the sight of Dr. Johnson, whom he had heard of as the greatest man living, could not find any words to answer his inquiries concerning a motto round somebody's arms which adorned a tombstone in Ruabon churchyard. If I remember ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... catastrophe, would be to give but a feeble idea of the state of their minds. For some minutes they could do nothing but stare in silence at the few feet of the Nora's topmast which alone remained above water as a sort of tombstone ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... the wording of the inscription on the tombstone that covers the victim, his name never transpired. No relations claimed the right to bury him. None appeared to take charge of his ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... read what was inscribed on his tombstone; then he picked up a stone off the path, a little, pointed stone, and began to scrape the letters carefully. He slowly effaced them altogether, and with the hollows of his eyes he looked at the places where they had been engraved, and, with the tip of the bone, that had been his forefinger, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... missed a point all along. I will just take a walk around this old burying ground. I have not been able to learn anything from the living, I may pick up a point from a tombstone." ...
— Two Wonderful Detectives - Jack and Gil's Marvelous Skill • Harlan Page Halsey

... Geofrey Chaucer in the knights Prologue, who liuing in the yeere 1402. [Footnote: Chaucer died 25. October, 1400, according to the inscription on his tombstone at Westminster. Urry, in his edition of Chaucer, folio, 1721, p. 534, attributes the Epistle to Cupid to Thomas Occleue, Chaucer's scholar, but does not give his authority.] (as hee writeth himselfe in his Epistle of Cupide) shewed that ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... Burghersdorp" they call it in the British centres, and Capetown turns anxious ears towards it for the first muttering of insurrection. What history its stagnant annals record is purely anti-British. Its two principal monuments, after the Jubilee fountain, are the tombstone of the founder of the Dopper Church—the Ironsides of South Africa—and a statue with inscribed pedestal complete put up to commemorate the introduction of the Dutch tongue into the Cape Parliament. Malicious ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens

... with its weary length of pipes stretching from end to end of the building, constituted the furniture. As for decoration, there was absolutely none, unless the high arched panel behind the pulpit, painted a dull grey and looking like a gigantic tombstone, or the two shining tin pails hung at the elbows of the stove-pipes to prevent the rain from dripping upon the worshippers could be considered ornaments. But the floor and the walls were white and spotless, the stove and stove-pipes ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith

... of a commonplace—a rather modest volume with most of us, summed up on a tombstone generally, easily enough, but we are bound to believe after all is said and done that the great masterpiece among reference books, for every man,—the one originally intended by the Creator for every man to use,—is the reference book of his own life. ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... official. The baptismal name of the deceased had been Jacob; and the window showed forth Jacob's Dream, as a delicate compliment to the departed. Elisabeth delighted in this window, it was so realistic. The patriarch lay asleep, with his head on a little white tombstone at the foot of a solid oak staircase, which was covered with a red carpet neatly fastened down by brass rods; while up and down this staircase strolled fair-haired angels in long white ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... was the rule of life prescribed by the Pythagorean brotherhood, who were also vegetarians, and advocates of virginity. Their system of purgation, followed by initiation, liberated men "from the grievous woeful circle" ([Greek: kyklou d'exeptan Barypentheos argaleoio] on a tombstone), and entitled them "to a happy life with the gods." (For the conception of salvation as deification, see Appendix C.) Whether these sects taught that our separate individuality must be merged is uncertain; but among the Gnostics, who had much in common with the Orphic mystae, the formula, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... had been his father's pulpit, and who announced to the congregation as they left the church that in the afternoon Wesley would preach in the graveyard. And there that same afternoon Wesley, standing upon his father's tombstone, preached to a congregation, the like of which Epworth had never seen before, the first of a series of ...
— Excellent Women • Various

... together put up a little slab for a tombstone; and she hangs flowers upon it, and ties them there with a bit of ribbon. You can scarce play all that day; and afterward, many weeks later, when you are rambling over the fields, or lingering by the brook, throwing off sticks into the eddies, you think of old Tray's shaggy ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... away. Mr. Grame, who had been hidden by a large upright tombstone, emerged into view. Lucy, with another blush, spoke to cover ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various

... just as I was a-going to speak again, a low, mournful noise went a-rolling through the meetinging-house, that chilled me down like ice-water. It came from behind the great white altar, which looked to me like a big tombstone with night-fog floating over it. Through the fog I saw two rows of wooden seats, with high backs; and in them sat men, all in black and white clothes, singing dismally. No—it wasn't singing, and it wasn't reading; but a long, rolling drawl, in which a few tones of ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... for a moment, she read half dreamily the words engraved on the tombstone. Nearly sixteen years since that short, uneventful life had passed into the unseen, and yet little Dot was at this ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... coolness, growing to statuesque frigidity, would develop in the object of my devotions, and the beauty whose charms had bedeviled me into insomnia and wild-eyed desperation became related to me thereafter as the angel surmounting the tombstone that marked the resting place of ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... with violence, the sword and the pen. In its higher flights it will, in a disputed district, bury ancient-looking stones with suitable inscriptions. It will go beyond the simple changes in the termination of the surnames of those who come under its dominion; the name upon a tombstone will be made to end, according to circumstances, in "off" or "vitch," sometimes in the Roumanian "esco" or the Greek "opoulos." If this is known to the departed, one would like to learn how it affects them. A great deal of energy has been brought to bear ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... is a quaint suggestion of repentance for all this in the cathedral of to-day. If you enter by the Portail des Libraires and stand beside the north-east pillar of the great lantern, at your feet is the tombstone of one of these unjust judges, Denis Gastinel, and beneath it is the great Calorifere that warms the building, a suggestively gruesome foretaste of the punishment which the modern canons evidently think his conduct towards Jeanne ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... upon the grave as she spoke, then pulled out her handkerchief with a jerk, to wipe the perspiration from her face Something fell against the tombstone with a ringing, ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley

... we planted them thar together, When the cloud had passed away; And all they've got fer a tombstone Is the mountains, dull and gray. So, pard, let's take one together, And I'll drink a toast to him, Fer though he wuz rough and ready, He'd a heart, ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart

... with bated breath, and even the purblind committee of the Camels had to alter their views. They no longer denied the supernatural nature of the manifestations, but, with a strange misunderstanding of Mr. Blows's desires, attributed his restlessness to dissatisfaction with the projected tombstone, and, having plenty of funds, amended their order for a plain stone at ten guineas to one in pink marble ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs

... the hour at which we had ordered our dinner to be ready, we rose up from the tombstone; and, after taking a snuff out of Peter's box, we returned arm-in-arm to the tavern, to lay in a ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir

... formed had been encircled with a railing, and transformed into a terrace on a level with the sleeping-room, by my predecessor in this hermitage. His last wish had been to be buried there; and from my bed I could see his white tombstone gleaming in the moonlight a few steps from my window. Every evening I rolled my piano out upon the terrace; and there, facing the most incomparably beautiful landscape, all bathed in the soft and limpid atmosphere of the tropics, I poured forth on the instrument, and ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris

... of oblivion with respect to those who are no more! How many a quadrille shall we see this winter, exclusively made up from the ranks of inconsolable widows! Widows of this order exist only in the literature of the tombstone. In the world, and after the lapse of a certain period, there is but one sort of widows inconsolable—those who refuse to be comforted, because ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... died, and left but a moderate legacy to the younger Levy, who was then about eighteen, that ambiguous person was articled to an attorney by his putative sire, who shortly afterwards returned to his native land, and was buried at Prague, where his tombstone may yet be seen. Young Levy, however, contrived to do very well without him. His real birth was generally known, and rather advantageous to him in a social point of view. His legacy enabled him to become a partner where he had ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... human face; never parody more complete; never had apparition more frightful grinned in nightmare; never had everything repulsive to woman been more hideously amalgamated in a man. The unfortunate heart, masked and calumniated by the face, seemed for ever condemned to solitude under it, as under a tombstone. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... said PLUNKET—watching him as, with legs reverently crossed, and elbow sympathisingly resting on box, carefully suggestive of life-sized figure of tombstone-mourner, he intoned his lamentation—"is not fitted for the part, and consequently overdoes it. L'Allegro is his line. Il Penseroso does ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various

... kindness that sung through the very air and fearlessly I would have decorated any festive ghost that happened along. I looked to see where I might lay the offering I held in my hand. My hostess plucked my sleeve and pointed to a tiny tombstone under a camellia tree. I went closer and read the English inscription, "Dorothy Dale. Aged 2 years." There was a tradition that once in the long ago a missionary and his wife lived in the village. Through an awful epidemic of cholera ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... instance of the extreme peril they ran who contrived to escape, it is recorded on a tombstone in the Churchyard of East Dereham, how Jean de Narde, son of a Notary Public of St. Malo, a French prisoner of war (most likely from Norman Cross), escaped from the Bell Tower of the Church (where he had been confined temporarily ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown

... I behold where for hours I have ponder'd, As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay; Or round the steep brow of the church-yard I wander'd, To catch the last gleam of the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... long fourteenth, they found the first evidence of those who had gone before. In the very midst of the fair green they saw, shining afar, like a white tombstone, stuck in its cleft stick, the card of the first competitor to use up the whole of his allotted strokes. They paused a moment ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... the buildings of ancient Athens. It was founded in B.C. 469, and is a small, graceful, and perfect Doric temple. Having served as a Christian church, dedicated to St. George, it escaped injury. It contains the beautiful and celebrated tombstone of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various

... were chased ower here some score o' years syne. They just danced like mad when they looked on the friars' heads, and the nuns' heads, in the cloister yonder; they took to them like auld acquaintance like.—Od, he is not stirring yet, mair than he were a through-stane! [Footnote: A tombstone.] I never kend a Roman, to say kend him, but ane—mair by token, he was the only ane in the town to ken—and that was auld Jock of the Pend. It wad hae been lang ere ye fand Jock praying in the Abbey in a thick night, wi' his knees on a cauld stane. Jock likit a ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... knocking the door was opened, and my grand-aunt was found kneeling at her bedside, dead. The day of her death was March 14, 1873, corresponding exactly with the date seen in her dream a twelvemonth before. My grand-aunt was buried in Glasnevin, and on her tombstone (a white marble slab) was placed the inscription which she had read in her dream." Our correspondent sent us a photograph of the stone and ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour

... again with the first faint dawn of conscious appreciation, or in other words of the critical spirit, while two or three of the more restrictive friends of the house find our marble lady very "cold" for a Bacchante. Cold indeed she must have been—quite as of the tombstone temperament; but that objection would drop if she might only be called a Nymph, since nymphs were mild and moderate, and since discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those days on that issue of the producible name. ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... on the table and the room kept warm for their comfort. In Brittany the people flock into the cemeteries at nightfall to kneel bare-headed at the graves of their loved ones, and to toll the hollow of the tombstone with holy water or to pour libations of milk upon it, and at bedtime the supper is left on the table for the soul's ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... about seven hundred bodies. Every grave was marked and numbered. Mr. Hordern began this work, but when his health failed, Mr. Murray continued and completed it. So that there is a strict record left of every one lying there, and any one wishing to erect a tombstone can do so. Such service as this was thoughtful indeed, and friends at home ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers

... done all that can preserve to you the world's respect. Yes, I wish that you should be esteemed and honored, for it is you alone upon whom I rely for my vengeance. I have knit around you a net-work which you can never burst asunder. You triumph; my tombstone shall be, as you hoped, the altar of your nuptials, or ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau

... love was and how true; With all a strong man's feeling I loved YOU: (God, how I loved you, my one chosen mate.) But I learned this (So poorly did you play your little part): You married marriage, to avoid the fate Of having 'Miss' Carved on your tombstone. Love you did not know, But you were greedy for the showy things That money brings. Such weak affection as you could bestow Was given the provider, ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... you and your daughters arrived home safe. Say to the elder I shall be most happy to hear from her when she shall have fairly inaugurated some noble life work. I trust each will take to her soul a strong purpose and that on her tombstone shall be engraved her own name and her own noble deeds instead of merely the daughter of Judge Ormond, or the relict of some Honorable or D. D. When true womanhood shall be attained it will be ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children, and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbours not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... British authority among them. Such, indeed, is the ground taken by Dr. Jones, in his minute and authentic account of the occurrence, in which he was, as we have made him in our illustrations, an actor. And even the inscription on the tombstone of the ill-fated French, written when the transaction, and all its attendant circumstances, were fresh in the minds of all, sufficiently proves, if further proof were necessary, that the version we ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... will remember that Anne Bronte had been interred in the churchyard of the Old Church at Scarborough. Charlotte had left directions for a tombstone to be placed over her; but many a time during the solitude of the past winter, her sad, anxious thoughts had revisited the scene of that last great sorrow, and she had wondered whether all decent services had been rendered to the memory of the dead, until at last ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... arrived at a secluded spot near where an aged weeping willow bowed its thick foliage to the ground, as though anxious to hide from the scrutinizing gaze of curiosity the grave beneath it. Jerome seated himself on a marble tombstone, and commenced reading from a book which he had carried under his arm. It was now twilight, and he had read but a few minutes when he observed a lady, attired in deep black, and leading a boy, apparently some five or six years old, coming ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown

... before they returned, so that when they should come home, they would find only her grave, covered with flowers. She even went so far, in one desperate moment, as to compose a fitting epitaph for her tombstone, which was to be of white marble, of course, with ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow

... of the morning to you, Michael Daragh! Here in the rich cream of the day we're waiting for the mail, Dan'l and I and the pup. Guess where? In the graveyard, and I'm sitting on a tumbled-over tombstone. I wish I could make you see this spot. I've always hated cemeteries, the sleek, prosperous, well-fed, well-groomed sort, but this is indeed God's Acre. You step over the broken stones of the wall into a land of gracious gray; gray stone and moss, gray sky and feathery fog. ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... field of cloth-of-gold we came, while the afternoon was young, into Cordoba—"Kartuba the Important," lying like a grave entombing its dead glory, prone at the foot of tombstone mountains. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... fine show in the Musgrave family tree. For I am like him. And I want to leave something in the world that wasn't there before I came. I want my life to count, I want—why, a hundred years from now I do want to be something more than a name on a tombstone. I—oh, I daresay it is only my ridiculous egotism," she ended, with a shrug and Stella's usual quick smile,—a smile not always free from ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... the different sects and the different schools, not only of philosophy, but of medicine. Recollect that everything except the demonstrated truth is liable to die. That is the order of nature. Words die. Every language has a cemetery. Every now and then a word dies and a tombstone is erected, and across it is written the word "obsolete." New words are continually being born. There is a cradle in which a word is rocked. A thought is molded to a sound, and the child-word is ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... but unsteady step she makes her way to the little graveyard; she had gone there often, and there were those who said wantonly that she went to say her prayers before the little cross upon the tombstone she had placed over the grave of Madame Arles. Now she threw herself prone upon the little hillock, with a low, sharp cry of distress, like that of a wounded bird,—"My ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... makes the house hideous with her howling if I choose to eat a bit of pork on a Friday! A good wife indeed! A jewel of a wife, and an apoplexy on all such jewels! A nice wife, who has a face like a head from a tombstone in the Campo Varano for her husband, and who has brought up her daughter to believe that her father is condemned to everlasting flames because he hates cod-fish—salt cod-fish soaked in water! A wife who sticks images in the ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford

... the scoffer should ask, what the deuce brought you there? Of course, it was only to taste the fresh air; To pick cowslips and daisies; and brush off the dew, Or drink gin o'er the tombstone of Brian Boru. As to flags, and all that; 'twas but doing in style, The honours of Freedom to Erin's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various

... madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. "So great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling." Swift's first noteworthy publication was ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... it was one of the pleasantest days I have ever passed in the course of a carefully spent life. Auriol was at her best. She had thrown off the harried woman of affairs. She had put a nice little tombstone over the grave of her romance, thus apparently reducing to beautiful simplicity her previous complicated frame of mind. For aught I could have guessed, not a cloud had ever dimmed the Diana serenity of ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... is not good for the Christian soul to hustle the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles and the heathen smiles And it weareth the Christian down. And the end of the fight is a tombstone white With the name of the dear deceased; And the epitaph drear—'A fool lies here Who tried to ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... Gave Our Country Birth;" to the memory of You whose names, whose giant enterprise, whose deeds of fortitude and daring were never engraved on tablet or tombstone; to You who strove through the silences of the Bush-lands and made them ours; to You who delved and toiled in loneliness through the years that have faded away; to You who have no place in the history of our Country so far as it is yet written; to You who have done MOST for this Land; to ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd

... a dilapidated old tombstone, while I leaned against the rails of the Haygarth vault, looking ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... hair done in some 18th century fashion and her sparkling black eyes, penetrating into those splendours attended by a sort of bald-headed, vexed squirrel—and Henry Allegre coming forward to meet them like a severe prince with the face of a tombstone Crusader, big white hands, muffled silken voice, half-shut eyes, as if looking down at them from a balcony. You remember that trick of ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... reverently leaned over the tombstone. The watchman heard him pronounce a prayer in Jewish. He used so many words of ancient Hebrew, or some other words of a language he did not understand, that he knew only a few separate expressions, although he himself had been in the past a teacher ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein

... a tombstone near her and read the inscription. It described in quaint, but touching language, the death of a young woman, about her own age, the day before her intended bridal. There had been a white rose-tree planted close to the rude monument, but its growth was ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... originally an inscription on a tombstone, or a votive offering in a temple, or on any other thing which required explanation. The unexpected turn of thought and pointedness of expression, which the moderns consider the essence of this species of composition, were not required in the ancient ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... Cornwall; and that the letters carved on it form some Latin words, which may be thus translated:—"PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF DUNGERTH." Seen in the dim light of the last quiet hour of evening, there was something solemn and impressive about the appearance of the old tombstone—simple though it was. After leaving it, we soon entered once more into regions of fertility. Cottages, cornfields, and trees surrounded us again. We passed through pleasant little valleys; over brooks crossed by quaint wooden bridges; up and down ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins



Words linked to "Tombstone" :   memorial, stone, tomb, grave, monument



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