Hangings

“ Having discussed the origin and reason for hangings, and having tried to draw from what has been accepted as beautiful and perfect in taste, some guidance in hanging our modern rooms, supposing always that the spaces are fitted for really fine decorations, I yet would add a few more words on this subject. There are in general some previous conditions which will help us to choose the style and design of such furnishings. In the first place, we should study what is appropriate to the persons who will first inhabit the rooms. ”

“ The warp and nap being relatively thin, and color and design not being dependent upon strong or direct light to emphasize them, they are excellently adapted 37for hangings—indeed, they are too tender and precious to be placed upon the floor. ”

“ Hanging was termed formerly, “être élevé sur une bûche de quinze pieds, épouser cette veuve qui est à la Grève, danser sous la corde, danser une cabriole en l’air sans toucher à terre, avoir le collet secoué, être tué de la lance d’un puits, regarder par une fenêtre de chanvre, jouer du hautbois.” For other synonyms see Monte-à-regret. American thieves use the expression “to twist,” i.e. to hang.
Sans-le-sou, m. (popular) , needy man, one who is “hard up.” ”

“ As they stretch in dim distance far, far away,
And on Fancy's swift pinions my spirit hath flown
To rest 'mid the scenes which my childhood has known—
Where the old Hanging Fork, with its silvery gleam,
Glides away 'tween the meadows like thoughts in a dream,
And far to the south, with their outlines so blue,
The rugged knobs blend into heaven's own hue! ”

“ The walls, the floors, the very furniture,—your hammock at night and your clothes in the morning,—feel damp and have a sort of clammy chill; and the sun comes out with such fitful gleams, that, intense as is its heat while it lasts, nothing becomes thoroughly dried. ”

“ If hung for a few days in the warm sun, and occasionally dipped in water, they change into feathery, green objects that grow more and more beautiful, and are far more artistic than our one conventional hanging-basket. ”

“ As we climbed with the tips of our fingers in some small crevice, and the tips of our toes just resting on some painfully minute ledge, probably covered with ice or snow, one question gradually forced itself upon us, almost to the exclusion of the previously absorbing one, whether we should get to the top of the mountain, and this was, how on earth we should ever get down again—get down, that is to say, in any other state than that of débris. ”

“ Inch by inch, the wind contests the ground; another struggle, and he stands upon the veranda. On such occasions I make it a point to open the door myself, with a calmness and serenity that shall offer a marked contrast to his feverish and excited air, and shall throw suspicion of inebriety upon him. If he be inclined to timidity and bashfulness, during the best of the evening he is all too conscious of the disarrangement of his hair and cravat. ”

“ You pass through the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and perhaps see a range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloister round the court, and in the intervals, from pillar to pillar, are strewn fragments of antique statues, headless and legless torsos, and busts that have invariably lost—what it might be well if living men could lay aside in that unfragrant atmosphere—the nose. ”

“ Let a rack be instantly prepared, and let a tree be erected without loss of time, whereon his tortured limbs, whilst their fibres shall yet have hardly ceased to feel, may be hung as tender food for the ravens. His throat shall be squeezed by the hangman’s rope, until all he hath gained by his espial be disgorged or closed up for ever within it. ”

“ The sputtering of the rain on the veranda, a few feet above her head, made her thrill with fear; if she sought to relieve her wearied limbs by changing her position, either by supporting her arm on the hand-rail, or by leaning against the door, the rustling of her drapery, whenever she moved, turned her heart cold, and conjured up before her the most morbid and distracting fancies. ”

“ Since, returning to my old theme of the Garden of Life, I find that the misapplication of that word Hanging, and its original literal suggestion, lends added significance to this allegoric dictum: Of all the Gardens of Life the best worth cultivating are often the Hanging Ones. ”

“ I was thrust into a hole in a wall; and those horrible walls close in upon the poor prisoners and press and stifle them. There is nothing but thick darkness without any mixture of light, and yet I know not how it is, though there be no light there, yet one sees there all that may be most mortifying to the sight. ”

“ At length, as I stretched my hand upward, I found somewhat that seemed like a recession in the wall: it was possible that this was the top of the cavity, and this might be the avenue to liberty. My heart leaped with joy, and I proceeded to climb the wall. No undertaking could be conceived more arduous than this: the space between this verge and the floor was nearly smooth; the verge was higher from the bottom than my head; the only means of ascending that were offered me were by my hands, with which I could draw myself upward, so as at length to maintain my hold with my feet. ”

“ On the other side, once an old garden, there is now a long, rambling wall, with here and there an opening through which, to your surprise, you catch the drooping figure of a poor, forlorn mule, condemned for some crime of his ancestors to go round and round in a treadmill, grinding refuse brick. ”

“ At length they reach the foot of the stairs and find themselves in a dark, narrow passage, with many windings and turnings. Along this they proceed carefully, until they stand before the massive doors of the dungeon. Trying one key after another, they find one that turns the lock, and the door swings open. What a sight meets their sorrowful gaze! Bones—human bones—lie scattered everywhere, and, as they become more accustomed to the darkness, they distinguish human forms still living, with haggard faces, and despair written on every feature. ”

“ The wall replied: "I may be strong, but a rat can scratch a hole through me."
"Oh, rat, you must be strong to scratch a hole through the wall that keeps the sun from melting the snow that clogs my little feet." ”

“ The Hole in My Curtain
It is because of the hole in my curtain.
I have stared through the torn space
Into Life's tortured face
As she leaned low and treadled her loom,
Watching, watching for the inevitable doom. ”

“ A bed-post, grown colossal, jigs about the ceiling, And shadows, strangely altered, stain the walls, revealing Eagles, and rabbits, and weird faces pulled awry, And hands which fetch and carry things incessantly. ”

“ The hanging is a device of my own, of which I am perhaps pardonably proud, and it pleases me that it is to be first tried on so worthy an assemblage. With much labour we have elevated to the battlements an oaken tree, lopped of its branches, which will not burn the less brightly next winter in that it has helped to commit some of you to hotter flames, if all ye say be true. ”

“ The brain and the crumbs of earth are inseparably wedded. Come with us, skull. You look scholarly, and shall lie upon our desk,—a solemn epistle to the living. But the cave is filled with the vile smoke of our torch, and we are choked with the heat and dust. ”

“ Some stole gently down their sides in silver rills, giving beauty and vigor wherever they meandered. Others tumbled from fragment to fragment, with a noise not undelightful to the ear, and formed for themselves a deep bed in the valley, over which trees, that appeared coeval with the building, bent their old and leafy heads. ”

“ It needs but a moment for the conversation to become general,—about roots under the shoulder, stubs in the back, a ridge on which it is impossible for the sleeper to balance, the non-elasticity of boughs, the hardness of the ground, the heat, the smoke, the chilly air. ”

“ When we passed Long Branch the motion was a steady rock from side to side, that made one feel like a baby in a cradle, and before bedtime it was a violent swing that flung one about like a toy, and tossed the furniture around like doll-house belongings. ”

“ By night, for instance, after you have turned in to your little narrow bed—the cradle of the deep, in which you are nightly rocked—to hear it rising and falling, and ending in long-drawn cadence, gives one an indescribable feeling of peace and security. ”

“ No sooner were we in this vast place than we saw a strange and startling thing—a man, sitting or crouching on the floor, his hands before him, the wrists tied together, his body bound with thongs of raw hide to a big post which stood in the centre of the floor and supported the beam of the loft above. ”

“ The beds, the floors, the walls, the doors are splashed with blood, and the chambers are cumbered with dead and dying men in dreadful agony. Happy those who passed quietly from the sweet sleep of Nature to the deeper sleep of death! ”

“ Once, at the dusk of the evening, we saw a figure all in white, apparently of more than human stature, flourishing about the road, now throwing up its arms, now leaping to an astonishing height in the air, then turning round several times successively, then raising itself to its full height and gesticulating violently. ”

“ The falls, which chanced to be indeed no falls, but shower-swollen into rapids, are one of the most wonderful presentations of Nature's masonry that I have ever seen. It is not the water, but the rock, that amazes. ”

“ A frail, thin floor and roof which soon melted into the clouds, and was more like a shadowy prism, such as we see through coloured glass, than a strong, firm foundation, and we might well distrust the feeble rampart which kept back that fearful weight of waters. ”

“ The wall, which once surrounded the church-yard, is entirely swept away, many of the graves broken up, and the remains of bodies interred washed into the sea: whence human bones are found among the sand and shingles on the shore. ”

“ We breathed an air heavy with mortality, on pavements made slimy by countless naked feet, in a shaft, in a pit, between dank walls. Shapes drifted by like sheeted corpses, peering, floating up, melting away ”

“ The cellar windows were banked up with sawdust
And swollen tight and buried under snow.
It was the bones. I knew them—and good reason.
My first impulse was to get to the knob
And hold the door. But the bones didn’t try
The door; they halted helpless on the landing,
Waiting for things to happen in their favor. ”

“ Sometimes the wind would cause her veil for a few moments to rear straight up above her head in a monstrous black column of woe. Sometimes, if she stopped a moment waiting to cross the street, it would whip round the body of any one who happened to be near, like a cord. ”

“ As they struck the floor the little man in black emitted a most piercing and terrible scream, and instantly relaxing his efforts of attack, fell to beating the floor with the back of his hands and drubbing with his heels upon the rug in which he had become entangled. ”

“ I could distinguish now an outlandish trampling on the steps of my staircase, on the wooden floors, on the carpets—a trampling not of shoes and of foot-coverings such as are worn by human beings, but of crutches, crutches of wood and crutches of iron, which rang with a noise such as is made by the beating of cymbals. ”

“ The wall, where visible, is seen to be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoulders of some giant warrior. ”

“ A narrow walk of planks spans this vaulting, and one creeps forward cautiously above the billows of stone, bending low under the great cross-timbers of the roof, and peering down into abysses masked in blackness. ”

“ Only the cloak is privy to this secret, and therefore we are very cautious of windy days, and of going upstairs that are light, or mounting a-horseback. We make it our business to study postures against the light; and if it prove a very bright day, we walk with our legs as close as may be, and sit as if our knees were clung together, for fear lest we open them the gashes may appear. ”

“ But some trifle touches the hidden spring by mere accident; as in the old story of the man groping along a wall till his finger happens to fall upon one inch of it, and immediately the concealed door flies open, and there is the skeleton. ”

“ If a vein or bed unveils itself on the flank of a mountain, it may be explored, according to the greater or less slope of its inclination, either by a longitudinal gallery opened in its mass, from the outcropping surface, or by a transverse gallery falling upon it in a certain point, from which either an oblong gallery or a sloping shaft may be opened. ”

“ It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!—painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. ”

“ A small hole is then made in the roof, through which the medicine-man, with a bunch of feathers, brushes in the souls, in the shape of bits of bone and the like, which he receives on a piece of matting. ”

“ Where once the savage stretched his tents of skins, brown-stone mansions lift their open portals in invitation to the weary sons of toil. By the sweat of man’s brow, by the toiling of the multitudes, we are saved from desolation and made to dwell securely among the gardens.
Toil saves from sickness. Without the putting forth of physical effort all men are weaklings. ”

“ Nay, some have proceeded to the paradoxical extreme of suggesting that certain modes of death are attended with pleasurable sensations, as for instance, hanging; and a late reviewer, who regards this sombre topic with a most cheerful eye, gives us instances which he considers in point. I have seen many men hung, forty at least, a strangely large number. ”

“ All you see is holes. These beer bottles are just holes surrounded by glass. The doors and windows—they're holes in walls. The mine tunnels make a network of holes under the desert. Caves are holes, animals live in holes, our faces have holes, clothes have holes—millions and millions of holes! ”