Die casting

“ No matter how carefully the die-casting molds have been made, there is always a certain amount of trimming to be done on the finished die-castings, on account of the crevices left in the die for air39 vents, or which exist from improper fitting of the parts of the dies. ”

“ There is probably no class of die-making in which the work produced is more faithful to the dies, both in showing up the little details in the making that reflect credit on the dies, and in exposing the defects and shortcomings in the workmanship, if there be any. The castings from casting-dies or molds as they are sometimes called, may be produced in dimensions down to ten-thousandths for accuracy if necessary, and once the dies are made the castings will not vary in the slightest degree, if the working conditions are kept uniform. ”

“ The outside corners and edges of the faces of both die-halves should be well rounded off so as to insure the absence of slight dents or rough places that might prevent the dies from fitting perfectly. ”

“ Briefly, this style of die is similar to the simple casting-die, except that slides are provided, to the required number, which form the edge of the casting. A die for a plain grooved pulley would require but two slides, while a die for a printing wheel with forty letters around its edge would necessitate forty slides, one for each of the letters. The die about to be described, shown in Fig. ”

“ Death is about to return to the tomb, the phantom to retire in darkness."
"What do you say, Edmond?"
"I say, since you command me, Mercedes, I must die."
"Die? and why so? Who talks of dying? Whence have you these ideas of death?"
"You do not suppose that, publicly outraged in the face of a whole theatre, in the presence of your friends and those of your son -- challenged by a boy who will glory in my forgiveness as if it were a victory -- you do not suppose that I can for one moment wish to live. ”

“ How fashions change! There are styles even in death-bed scenes. This one was of the old fashion, bearing a strong tinge of fatalism; no hopeful make-believe to the dying that death was other than death; no covert, diligent, desperate economies of the vital spark; but a frank, helpless reception of the dread angel as a royal guest, and a pious, inert consent to let the dying die. Before either Hugh or Ramsey could come from the cabin the twins had reached the bedside and had been received with a final lighting up of the boy's spent powers, which his mother made no effort to restrain. ”

“ Yes, death comes of itself, death comes, and takes away the life that was no real life, no candid revealment, no genuine self. I once knew a great actor. To an actor, death will always be the hardest, not only because he has so often counterfeited death, but because he knows that he leaves behind him his parts, his masks, his paints, his wilted wreaths, his rounds of applause, and he can never be called out again. My son, we diplomatists, we die the death of the actor. I have led an unprofitable life. I had no fatherland to give me other than diplomatic farces to perform. ”

“ And yet, more fortunate in this than other actors, Willie Hughes was to know something of immortality. Inseparably connected with Shakespeare’s plays, he was to live in them.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie. ”

“ But I shall be buried in the church, and I know that my tablet will bear the inscription, "Sir Gerald Wilder, Kt." so that even our dust may not meet,—what matter?
I am not afraid to die; in fact, if I could be glad about anything, I should now be glad. Death seems to me such a little withered, contemptible figure, for ever jealous of Love—yet sometimes death seems to me like a white marble portico, seen down an alley of cypress trees, under a sky all dark with autumn. ”

“ The spirit that can assume form at will must surely be able to bend that form to completest and most delicate expression, and the part of the ghost in the play offers work worthy of the highest artist. The would-be actor takes from it vitality and motion, endowing it instead with the rigidity of death, as if the soul had resumed its cast-off garment, the stiffened and mouldy corpse—whose frozen deadness it could ill model to the utterance of its lively will! ”

“ You may judge of my sorrow; to be interred alive seemed to me as deplorable an end as to be devoured by cannibals. But I must submit; the king and all his court would honour the funeral with their presence, and the most considerable people of the city would do the like. When all was ready for the ceremony, the corpse was put into a coffin, with all her jewels and magnificent apparel. The cavalcade began, and, as second actor in this doleful tragedy, I went next to the corpse, with my eyes full of tears, bewailing my deplorable fate. ”

“ And if such was really the intention of the ceremony, it is obvious that it was better effected by compelling the young communicants, as we may call them, to die and rise from the dead in their own persons than by obliging them to assist as mere passive spectators at a dramatic performance of death and resurrection. ”

“ Yes indeed, but dying is no more than a change of bodies, just as the comedian changes his costume, or if the body were to be entirely despoiled, this is no more than when an actor, at the end of a drama, lays aside his costume, only to take it up again when once more the drama begins. ”

“ At the theater the house was good; the play was "Romeo and Juliet," and I played well. While I was changing my dress for the tomb scene—putting on my grave-clothes, in fact—I had desired my door to be shut, for I hate that lugubrious funeral-dirge. How I do hate, and have always hated, that stage funeral business, which I never see without a cold shudder at its awful unfitness. I can't conceive how that death's pageant was ever tolerated in a theater. ”

“ What a thin film it is that divides the Living from the Dead! In still nights, as Jean Paul says, "the limbs of my Buried Ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin." Let us turn back into Life. ”

“ This mortal air is one wide pestilence, that kills us all at last. Whom the Death-cloud spares, sleeping, dies in silent watches of the night. He whom the spears of many battles could not slay, dies of a grape-stone, beneath the vine-clad bower he built, to shade declining years. We die, because we live. ”

“ She sat there in the hot heavy night, pressing her hand hard against the ebbing heart of the unseen, and awaited Death. Suddenly an odd fancy possessed her. Where was Death? Why was he tarrying? Who was detaining him? From what quarter would he come? He was taking his leisure, drawing near with footsteps as measured as those of men keeping time to a funeral march. By a wayward deflection she thought of the slow music that was always turned on in the theatre when the heroine was about to appear, or something eventful to happen. ”

“ The chief differences were in the number of the performers and the greater or less display of scenic apparatus. The head-dresses or leafy masks worn by the actors in the sacred drama were made secretly in the bush; no woman or uninitiated man might witness the operation. When all was ready, and the people were assembled, the men being stationed in front and the women and children in the background, the disguised actors appeared on the scene and played the part of the dead, each one of them mimicking the gait and actions of the particular man or woman whom he personated ”

“ As I mentally review that portentous hour it seems that it must have originated with my first glimpse of that funeral scene, silently strengthening its grip with a subtle insidiousness. A baleful malignant influence that seemed to emanate from the corpse itself held me with magnetic fascination. My whole being seemed charged with some ecstatic electrifying force, and I felt my form straighten without conscious volition. My eyes were trying to burn beneath the closed lids of the dead man's and read some secret message they concealed. ”

“ Death is no evil at all.” As the actress said this, her hollow, shadowy face grew dark, and her large, luminous eyes glanced aside, and fell upon the door—fixed in an intense, suffering, almost querulous gaze—as if of one enduring pain. “It must come abruptly at last,” she said, looking up, suddenly. “My dear, have you any insurmountable prejudices against a theatrical life for yourself?” ”

“ Decreed by God Omnipotent it is, that Death should be the last scene of the last act of man's play;—a play, which begin how it may, in farce or comedy, ever hath its tragic end; the curtain inevitably falls upon a corpse. ”

“ As another instance of the severe and mental trials which an actor has to undergo, it may be mentioned that during the time his friend was lying dead, he was engaged for many hours each day in rehearsing broadly humorous pantomime, and that, as if to render the contrast more striking, the burial being fixed for the 26th of the month, he was compelled to rehearse part of his Clown's character on the stage, to run to the funeral, to get back from the churchyard to the theatre to finish the rehearsal, and to exert all his comic powers at night to set the audience in a roar. ”

“ His eyes with the hollow sockets stare round with an empty chillness.
He bears a scythe in his hands. It is Death with his icy message.
Clutching the bulky book, the host is in peaceful slumber,
When Death draws near to him softly, and peacefully near him lingers. ”

“ On the site of an old cemetery stands the theatre known as the Gymnase Dramatique. A suggestive fact for the moralist. Death replaced by Momus; the mourner's tears succeeded by the quips and cranks of an Achard, by the wreathed smiles of a Rose Chéri. Where the funeral once took its slow and solemn way, rouged processions pass, tinsel heroes strut, and vapour. Thousand-tinted garlands supplant the pale immortelles that decked the graves; the sable cloak is doffed, and motley's the only wear. Surely actors must be bold men to tread a stage covering so many mouldering relics of mortality. ”

“ A theatrical phrase. Actors assembling at the theatre for their weekly salaries generally put the question among themselves: “Is the ghost walking?” While those about to accept an engagement with a manager of whom they know nothing ask: “Does the ghost walk?” Its origin is as follows:--Many years ago a manager of the Bogus type had in his company a self-willed actor whose strong part was the Ghost in “Hamlet.” If his salary was not forthcoming on a Saturday morning he exclaimed: “Then the ghost won’t walk to-night.” Indispensable actor as he was, the manager invariably acceded to his demands. ”

“ Death was not only the common executioner, he arrested the prelates and the nobles, stripped them of their robes and their possessions, and tried them whether they were of God or Mammon. In these many-varied forms of terror, sport, and irony Death filled the imagination and reflection of the age; the shrouded figure or the naked skeleton was seen on the stage of the theatre, amid the games of the people, on the walls of the churches and the monasteries, throughout the whole range of art and literature. ”

“ “Fare you well, my brother! Death is good! Thus, indeed, I would die, for I have made me a mat of men to lie on,” he cried with a great voice. ”

“ Do you want to become another Courtlandt Allerton and go rocking down the avenue—a grimacing, tailor-made sepulcher?—the pompous obsequies of a dead intellect?—a funeral on two wavering legs, carrying the corpse of all that should be deathless in a man? ”

“ I’ve a notion I shall not be long for this world anyhow, and I’ve a great fancy to see my own funeral afore I die.’ I was greatly shocked, at the first speaking, to hear him speak so light about his funeral, and he to all appearance in good health; ”

“ So, on the modest actor, manager, and man, after the short and well-meant scene of his quiet, checkered, not unsuccessful life, the curtain fell in swift and tragic close, leaving the mourners, who would often speak kindly of him, to go about the streets for a little while and then fade out like his memory. ”

“ But, is this fitting for the obituary of a comic actor? Yes, we reply, and as both are but occasions of appeal to the passions, we may think the death of a tragedian less striking than the former, since all tragedies end with death, and death in itself is but a scene of tragedy. ”

“ The difficulty of frightening the reverend victim, whose mind seems well prepared for the end, however premature, has made Death put himself somewhat out of the way to appear sensationally startling; his grim humour seems to have been laid aside for once, and he is weakly seeking effect in a theatrical pose, striking a stagey attitude, poising his weapon, and holding on high his warning hourglass. ”

“ And as, happily, the actors have tried to perform it in the simple fashion in which it must have been done long ago, we can get from it a very good idea of the plays which pleased our forefathers. On the title-page of Everyman we read: "Here beginneth a treatise how the high Father of heaven sendeth Death to summon every creature to come to give a count of their lives in this world, and is in the manner of a moral play." So in the play we learn how Death comes to Everyman and bids him follow him. ”

“ One looks at casts taken after death with curiosity and interest, and yet it is not probable that they should show the real natural or habitual character of the person: they can often only mark the degree of bodily pain or ease felt in the moment of death. I think these casts made me pause to reflect more than anything else I saw this day. ”