United States or Mayotte ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There were the chaplets: skeins of chaplets hanging along the walls, and heaps of chaplets lying in the drawers, from humble ones costing twenty sons a dozen, to those of sweet-scented wood, agate, and lapis-lazuli, with chains of gold or silver; and some of them, of immense length, made to go twice round the neck or waist, had carved beads, as large as walnuts, separated by death's-heads.
The elder stones, dated a century back or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, crossbones, scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with here and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner's spirit upward.
There were flowers with watches concealed in their centers; baskets of tiny fruits, hearts, animals, death's-heads every form that was novel or original. Some cases had on their covers miniatures set in jewels; and there were cases of leather studded with decorations in nail heads. In every instance it was the outside of the watch that interested both purchaser and goldsmith not the inside.
And he stretched his arms towards the enchanting vision, while the death's-head, with its bare jaw, gave its eternal grin. He woke and found himself kneeling near his bed, facing the wreck of humanity. Horror soiled him. His empty room was filled with spectres. He saw hell-hags with death's-heads sporting and swarming on his bed.
There was the chancel, guarded by two little cherubims looking uncomfortably squeezed between arch and wall, and adorned with the escutcheons of the Oldinport family, which showed me inexhaustible possibilities of meaning in their blood-red hands, their death's-heads and cross-bones, their leopards' paws, and Maltese crosses.
These walls are everywhere scratched over with representations of wounded hearts, crucifixes, death's-heads, and even of flowers with broken stems; all of them clearly enough of very old fabrication, though unfortunately none of them dated.
The whole irregular space is, as it were, fringed with quaint old monuments, rich in death's-heads and scythes and hour-glasses, and doubly rich in pious epitaphs and Latin mottoes rich in them to such an extent that their proper space has run over, and they have crawled end- long up the shafts of columns and ensconced themselves in all sorts of odd corners among the sculpture.
Day in, day out, it demanded its food a veritable pound of flesh and they dragged themselves into the forest to chop wood on their knees. Once, crawling thus in search of dry sticks, unknown to each other they entered a thicket from opposite sides. Suddenly, without warning, two peering death's-heads confronted each other. Suffering had so transformed them that recognition was impossible.
Then came some men with silver death's-heads and crossbones on their caps; then hundreds and hundreds of mounted fellows with needle-guns and sabres; then three regiments of infantry, marching in superb time. Every five hundred men had a drum corps and fifes playing in perfect unison. You could almost feel the ground shake with the steady thud of their march as they tramped on.
There were the chaplets: skeins of chaplets hanging along the walls, and heaps of chaplets lying in the drawers, from humble ones costing twenty sons a dozen, to those of sweet-scented wood, agate, and lapis-lazuli, with chains of gold or silver; and some of them, of immense length, made to go twice round the neck or waist, had carved beads, as large as walnuts, separated by death's-heads.
Word Of The Day