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"GRAVE-DIGGER. I carried home to your house the shroud the gentleman was buried in last night; I could not get his ring off very easilly, therefore I brought you the finger and all; and, sir, the sexton gives his service to you, and desires to know whether you'd have any bodies removed or not: if not, he'll let them be in their graves a week longer.
"I remember that there was a stone by the side of the grave. The grave was a little short, a farm hand had to dig it, as the grave-digger was sick at the time, but we will ask him what he has done with the cross." They turned toward the grave-digger, who looked at them with curiosity. He saluted them, taking off his hat.
"Stir at your peril," he cried, turning sharply round upon the grave-digger, and holding a pistol to his head; but the captain pulled his arm away, to the relief of the frightened peasant. "M. D'Effernay," he said, "your conduct for the last half-hour has been most unaccountable most unreasonable."
The men arrange the planks, slip the ropes, and lower the body, disputing in undertones, for it is not so easy as one might think to be a grave-digger. One must have the knack of it. And the night is very dark and the mud very sticky. At last the body is at the bottom of the trench, and the muddy ropes are withdrawn.
Tilly had fixed his head quarters in the house of a grave-digger, the only one still standing in the suburb of Halle: here he signed the capitulation, and here, too, he arranged his attack on the King of Sweden.
Thus was Ralph Peden made free of the Big Hoose of Craig Ronald. Saunders Mowdiewort, minister's man and grave-digger, was going a sweethearting. He took off slowly the leathern "breeks" of his craft, sloughing them as an adder casts his skin. They collapsed upon the floor with a hideous suggestion of distorted human limbs, as Saunders went about his further preparations.
A short pause and his face brightens with a smile, the grave-digger shoulders his pick, and with the thumb of his right hand to his nasal organ, throws himself into a comical attitude. The audience roar with delight; the Star, ignorant of the cause of what he esteems a continued insult, waves his plumes to the audience, and with an air of contempt walks off the stage.
In some places he also fulfils the duties of bell-ringer and grave-digger; that is to say, by ringing a large bell at the top of the church, he summons the people to their devotions, during their lives, and digs a hole in consecrated ground, surrounding the sacred building, to receive their bodies when dead."
The flimsy thatch under which we crouched, put up only to keep the sun from the grave-digger, bent to north and south, and threatened to wing away. But suddenly the shower ran away in a minute, as if it had an engagement elsewhere, and the sun shone more brightly in the rain-washed air. We continued our search, but uselessly.
And as that delineator enters the grave, and commences his tune, the old man's anxiety increases. A twitching and shrugging of the shoulders, discovers Mr. McArthur's feelings. The grave-digger, to the great delight of the Star, bespreads the stage with a multiplicity of bones. Then he follows them with a skull, the appearance of which causes Mr. McArthur to exclaim, "Ah! that's my poor Yorick."
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