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In one of the churches, at midnight, a lady closely veiled, entered, carrying a bundle, and going up to the altar, without reverence and in haste, deposited her burden at the foot of the cross. The officiating priest directed one of the sextons to follow her in haste, but the lady was too quick for him.
"Oh, come, this is something!" cried the bishop, cheerily, as he stepped into the cathedral. "And your lordship now sees what fine careless sextons we have got!" struck in Ketch. "We must overlook their carelessness this time, in consideration of the service it renders us," said the bishop, in a kindly tone. "Take care of the pillars, Ketch." "Thank ye, my lord.
On the right and left of the litters the torchmen took their places. The sextons lit their long candles, and formed in front. Behind trudged the worn, dust-covered, wretched fugitives; and as they failed to realize their rescue, and that they were at last in safety, they did not abate their lamentations.
Well, while I was musing over the decaying dead, and the distinction between poor dead and rich dead, there came along one Graves, a sort of wayward, half simpleton, who goes about among churchyards, makes graves a study, knows where every one who has died for the last century is tucked away, and is worth six sextons at pointing out graves.
Many houses were then left desolate, all the people being carried away dead, and especially in an alley farther on the same side beyond the Bars, going in at the sign of Moses and Aaron, there were several houses together which, they said, had not one person left alive in them; and some that died last in several of those houses were left a little too long before they were fetched out to be buried; the reason of which was not, as some have written very untruly, that the living were not sufficient to bury the dead, but that the mortality was so great in the yard or alley that there was nobody left to give notice to the buriers or sextons that there were any dead bodies there to be buried.
"What has happened?" cried the pale youth. "O, John, the best that ever could! What Mother Tombs and I and the Sextons and the Coffins and the Graveses and sco'es o' lovin' friends and relations have been a hopin' faw all this year an' last! Sister March has engaged her hand to Brother Garnet!" "I think I'll lie down," said John, beginning to rise.
In that case, as all my experiments emphatically declare, the fall of the stake undermined by the sextons is a pure matter of imagination. Yet another of the fine arguments in favour of the reasoning-power of insects flies from the light of investigation and founders in the slough of error!
Justin's identity had dawned upon most of the congregation by sermon time. A stranger to all but one or two at first, his presence in the Peabody pew brought his face and figure back, little by little, to the minds of the old parishioners. When the contribution plate was passed, the sexton always began at the right-wing pews, as all the sextons before him had done for a hundred years.
Olave's, St. Saviour's, and St. George's, and after the expenditure of more shillings in donations to sextons than I care to remember, I at last lighted on a document which I consider worth three thousand pounds to you and a very decent sum of money to me." "I wonder what colour our hair will be when we touch that money?" said Valentine meditatively.
Sextons and undertakers are the cheerfullest people in the world at home, as comedians and circus-clowns are the most melancholy in their domestic circle. As our old boarding-house is still in existence, I do not feel at liberty to give too minute a statement of the present condition of each and all of its inmates. I am happy to say, however, that they are all alive and well, up to this time.
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