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Updated: May 28, 2025
Here and there upon these green winding-sheets might be seen the stains of blood, while the warriors who carried the frightful burdens displayed upon their naked limbs similar sanguinary marks. The shaven head of the foremost had a deep gash upon it, and the clotted gore which had flowed from the wound remained in dry patches around it. The savage seemed to be sinking under the weight he bore.
The writers whom I have just named are dead, at least I presume so, for I must not profess to have done more than touch their winding-sheets in the course of my private reading. But there are two moralists of the period who remain alive, and one of whom burns with an incomparable vivacity of life.
She promised, three years ago, to choose one of us for a husband as soon as she should finish the winding-sheets for old Laertes in case of his death. "Then she began to weave upon her loom a dainty web of vast length and width. And she said to each one of us: 'Do not urge me to marry, I pray, until I finish these shrouds for the hero Laertes, when his hour of death shall come.
I think she was naturally more inclined to Mrs Forrester's side, but a desire of proving herself a worthy sister to Miss Jenkyns kept her equally balanced Miss Jenkyns, who would never allow a servant to call the little rolls of tallow that formed themselves round candles "winding-sheets," but insisted on their being spoken of as "roley- poleys!" A sister of hers to be superstitious!
And now the sun, higher risen, had struck the river into a broad sheet of spun metal, over which the swallows even as in the olden days darted and spiraled, with now and then a flick and dash of spray. Far off, wool-white winding-sheets of mist were lifting, lagging along the purple hills, clothed with inviolate forest. Again the man tried to raise her head, to burn his kisses on her mouth.
And those who have noticed what pains are taken by excessively careful mothers and ignorant nurses to exclude from the lungs of infants the "free, pure, unadulterated air of heaven," and, by means of many thicknesses of enveloping shawls and blankets, require them to re-respire portions at least of their own breath, until it becomes a virulent and deadly poison, will think with me that this is a low estimate, and wonder that the swaddling-cloths of more infants do not become their winding-sheets.
A wild stormy wind swayed the branches of the apple-trees, surging and roaring as it rushed over the downs; the candles flickered and burned low, and from them dropped those strange waxen off-shoots that old women call winding-sheets. At last the church-bell struck twelve, slowly, awfully. Betty was listening still, her head raised, her finger on her lip. "Hush!" she said, with a strange smile.
I shuddered again, and meseemed the grey clouds in the sky waxed blacker, while deathly pale airy forms floated through the mist over the pools, in long, waving winding-sheets.
I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.
Accordingly, mysterious shapes were made of tables and chairs, heaped together in the middle of rooms, and covered over with great winding-sheets. Bell-handles, window-blinds, and looking-glasses, being papered up in journals, daily and weekly, obtruded fragmentary accounts of deaths and dreadful murders.
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