United States or Tunisia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then, with his trussing harness tucked under his arm, and the black cap neatly folded and bestowed in a handy side-pocket of his coat, Uncle Tobe would advance forward, and laying a kindly, almost a paternal hand upon the shoulder of the man who must die, would steer him to a certain spot in the centre of the platform, just beneath a heavy cross-beam.
'The sofa was provided, and next day at eleven o'clock, before any of the students came, I went there, with those gentlemen, to get underneath it. It turned out to be one of those old-fashioned sofas with a great cross-beam at the bottom, that would have broken my back in no time if I could ever have got below it.
Day was dawning when they again emerged. A great multitude had already assembled; the windows were filled with people, smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, joking. Everything told of life and animation, but one dark cluster of objects in the centre of all the black stage, the cross-beam, the rope, and all the hideous apparatus of death.
Here an ominous-looking cross-beam had been erected, towering high above the heads of the people with its bare, gaunt poles. This was the gallows on which all people convicted of theft are executed; murderers being put to death in a different manner, having their throats cut from ear to ear in the same way that sheep are killed.
One little stick, another ... cross-beam that's what I ... want, but you, brother, diamond-merchant ... mind ... I'm a man, too!" Raissa crossed the room without a word and taking his arm buttoned his vest. "Let us go, Vassilyevna," he said; "they are all saints here, don't come to them and he lying there in his case" he pointed to David "is a saint, too, but you and I are sinners, brother. Come.
"It might be true," he said again, "that on a cross-beam like that, the manger baby perished for some audacity as I might be put to death if I mocked the usages of a whole nation, as this preacher has done." The cross, an object as high as one of the window-panes, and suffused with the exuding dyes of its jewels, took now a dewy lustre, as if weeping precious gum and amber.
Immediately under the cross-beam a hatch was formed in the roadway of the bridge, measuring seven feet in length and five feet in breadth, made to shut with folding boards like a double door, through which stones and other articles were raised; the folding doors were then let down, and the stone or load was gently lowered upon a waggon which was wheeled on railway trucks towards the lighthouse.
There were other two forms that of the letter T and that of the letter X but, as the accusation of Jesus is said to have been put up over His head, there must have been a projection above the bar on which His arms were outstretched. The arms were probably bound to the cross-beam, as without this the hands would have been torn through by the weight.
'Martin took his seat astride of an African tom-tom or drum; and I noticed at the time that Jean Marie's naked foot hung down from the cross-beam almost directly over Martin's head. 'Martin now began to chant a monotonous African song, accompanying with the tom-tom.
The younger man was at no pains to conceal his emotions. His face ran the gamut from white to red, from red back again to white. It ended ashen. Neither looked at his master. "Let her in," said Can Grande; and each noticed how laboriously he spoke. The servant turned to obey: there in the doorway stood the Lady. Tall enough she was, her head seemingly about a foot from the cross-beam of the door.
Word Of The Day