Mr. Hamper would have been only too glad to have secured him as a steady and experienced partner for his son, whom he was setting up with a large capital in a neighbouring town; but the young man was half-educated as regarded information, and wholly uneducated as regarded any other responsibility than that of getting money, and brutalised both as to his pleasures and his pains.
— from North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

All the lads of Zhukovo who could read and write were packed off to Moscow and hired out as butlers or waiters (while from the village on the other side of the river the boys all became bakers), and that had been the custom from the days of serfdom long ago when a certain Luka Ivanitch, a peasant from Zhukovo, now a legendary figure, who had been a waiter in one of the Moscow clubs, would take none but his fellow-villagers into his service, and found jobs for them in taverns and restaurants; and from that time the village of Zhukovo was always called among the inhabitants of the surrounding districts Slaveytown.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

He then passed his hand across his forehead as if to clear his confused and bewildered brain; all this, however, to no better result than to apparently root his feet to the soil and to intensify the stupefaction which seemed to be creeping over him.
— from The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales With Condensed Novels, Spanish and American Legends, and Earlier Papers by Bret Harte

And no man knows where an arrow may hit, even from the hands of a bad bowman; and they have prepared themselves so, that missiles and stones can be thrown from the high stages upon the merchant ships, so that there is less danger for those who are farthest from them.
— from Heimskringla; Or, The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway by Snorri Sturluson

Nor did Niger of Peres escape their hands; he had been a man of great valor in their war with the Romans, but was now drawn through the middle of the city, and, as he went, he frequently cried out, and showed the scars of his wounds; and when he was drawn out of the gates, and despaired of his preservation, he besought them to grant him a burial; but as they had threatened him beforehand not to grant him any spot of earth for a grave, which he chiefly desired of them, so did they slay him [without permitting him to be buried].
— from The Wars of the Jews; Or, The History of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Flavius Josephus

VI A shrilling trompet sownded from on hye, And unto battaill bad them selves addresse: Their shining shieldes about their wrestes they tye, And burning blades about their heads do blesse, 50 The instruments of wrath and heavinesse: With greedy force each other doth assayle, And strike so fiercely, that they do impresse Deepe dinted furrowes in the battred mayle; The yron walles to ward their blowes are weak and fraile.
— from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I by Edmund Spenser

Mr. Stanger's many friends will rejoice to hear that, though he has been cruelly and brutally beaten, and though he has sustained severe injuries about the head, there is no immediate danger to his life.
— from The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle

There was a time When yong men went a hunting, and a wood, And a broade Beech: and thereby hangs a tale:—heigh ho!
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

My wife will be panic-struck and begin by abandoning the house, the kitchen-garden and everything.
— from Peasant Tales of Russia by Vasilii Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko

“There is a beauty beyond all that,” he said stubbornly.
— from The Works of John Galsworthy An Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy by John Galsworthy

Owen touched his horse with the spur; and, his eyes fixed on the spot where he had seen the heron and hawks falling, he galloped, regardless of every obstacle, forgetful that a trip would cost him a broken bone, and that he was a long way from a surgeon.
— from Sister Teresa by George Moore

I hope he is not a sour man with a black beard, and that he does not squint, and has not a high shoulder like the king, and has both his eyes of one colour; for I hate a wall-eyed horse, and it would be worse in a husband--unless one of them was blind, which would indeed be a comfort, as one could be sure of getting on the blind side of him."
— from The Woodman: A Romance of the Times of Richard III by G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) James

The three Misses Thriepneuks were a little jealous of one another before, but already they had forgotten this slight feeling, which indeed was no more than the instinct of proprietorship which young women come to feel in one who has never been long out of their house, and with whom they have been brought up.
— from The Lilac Sunbonnet: A Love Story by S. R. (Samuel Rutherford) Crockett

Abdallah saw that his protest might as well have been uttered to the winds, so he contented himself with a grunt and a shake of the head; meaning that it was a bad business and that he washed his hands of it.
— from For Love of a Bedouin Maid by Voleur

“‘Nothing in particular,’ he said, scanning the banks of the great municipal stream, ‘except that I intend to write a novel some day about a boy born at the headwaters.
— from When Winter Comes to Main Street by Grant M. (Grant Martin) Overton

Nor is this all: these conspirators not only plant an oligarchical sovereignty in the senate-house, but also sustain that sovereignty by inviting a foreign garrison from without, and by betraying Athens to her Peloponnesian enemies.
— from History of Greece, Volume 08 (of 12) by George Grote