The woodman and hunter shall be your sextons, and the children shall tread upon the borders as much as they will.

In 1858 the legislature passed an act requiring the sextons of the different churches to ring the church bells fifteen minutes whenever there was an alarm of fire.

I shivered, seeing once more those grim sextons of the Pacific seaboard.

Over the sexton's grave The growing grass Cried out: "Come home!

It is not used when fainting fits are in season; it is never taken advantage of in the case of people who fall asleep, and require carrying home to bed; it seems to be neither useful nor ornamental; and it ought to be either taken off to the cemetery and quietly inurned, or sold to one of the sextons there.

In short, what with Undertakers, Embalmers, Joiners, Sextons, and your Elegy hawkers upon a late practitioner in Physic and Astrology; I got not one wink of sleep that night, nor scarce a moment's rest ever since.

Why ee'n so: and now my Lady Wormes, Chaplesse, and knockt about the Mazard [Sidenote: Choples | the massene with] with a Sextons Spade; heere's fine Reuolution, if [Sidenote: and we had] wee had the tricke to see't.

Chatterton spent much time in the interesting old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, of which his ancestors had been sextons for several generations.

Thus their militia, like its patron Mars, is the issue only of the mother, without the concourse of royal Jupiter: yet law it is, if they vote it, in defiance to their fundamentals; like the old sexton, who swore his clock went true, whatever the sun said to the contrary.

She was a decent, godly woman, and the bold manners and evil words of street vagrants were terrible to her; and so, when the church gates were open for daily morning and evening prayers, she had often begged the sexton to let her little ones come in and hear the singing, and wander hand in hand around the old church walls.

The old sexton came to the side door and threw out an armful of refuse greens, and then stopped a moment and nodded kindly at them.

" Just now the door opened again, and the sexton began sweeping the refuse out of the church.

The sexton stood and looked and laughed as he saw the little ones so eager for the scraps and remnants.

They made the course of the church and came round by the door again, where the sexton stood smiling on them.

The sexton, seeing their zeal, brought out to them a little cross, fancifully made of red alder-berries and pine.

The sexton looked after them.

But here was I put to a most horrid quaking the moment I passed the door, to perceive old Simon standing foremost in the throng about the altar, in his leather cap (which he would not remove for clerk or sexton, but threatened them, as I am told, with the law if they lay a finger on him).

In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair, 350 And Dungeon-ghyll so foully rent, With ropes of rock and bells of air Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent, Who all give back, one after t' other, The death-note to their living brother; 355 And oft too, by the knell offended, Just as their one!

Buried beneath the earth by tiny nightly sextons, sunk beneath the waters, dissolved into the air, or distilled again and again as food for other organizations,all have had their swift resurrection.

Willet called them the sextons.

"he knows them sextons went to Break-Neck to dig the grave for him.

And poor Sextons.

I am more angry, Ten times more vex'd, not to be pacified: No, there be other places for poor Sextons, Places of profit, Friends, fine stirring places, And people that know how to use our Offices, Know what they were made for: I speak for such Capons?

Looking through the parish register, at the request of a labourer who wished to ascertain his age, the parson finds express words of bequest leaving the watch-coat "for the sole use of the sextons of the church for ever, to be worn by them respectively on winterly cold nights," and at the moment when he is exclaiming, "Just Heaven!

Frequently, also, funds were raised by means of ales called clerk-ales, sexton-ales, etc., to pay the wages of clerks, sextons and other servants of the parish.