How to Become a Boy Scout The easiest way to become a boy scout is to join a patrol that has already been started.
— from Boy Scouts Handbook The First Edition, 1911 by Boy Scouts of America

But for the greater part of the day I did nothing but walk about the room waiting for telegrams, or made a boy sit in the lodge while I went for a walk in the garden, until the boy ran to tell me that there was a tapping at the operating machine.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

I T is so long since the reader of this rhapsodical work has been parted from the midwife, that it is high time to mention her again to him, merely to put him in mind that there is such a body still in the world, and whom, upon the best judgment I can form upon my own plan at present, I am going to introduce to him for good and all: But as fresh matter may be started, and much unexpected business fall out betwixt the reader and myself, which may require immediate dispatch;——’twas right to take care that the poor woman should not be lost in the mean time;—because when she is wanted, we can no way do without her.
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

The ‘Poop-poop’ rang with a brazen shout in their ears, they had a moment’s glimpse of an interior of glittering plate-glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed back into a droning bee once more.
— from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

I had conquered her heart by my talent, and had a passionate desire to paint for her sake alone; and I dreamed of her as of my little queen who with me would possess those trees, those fields, the mists, the dawn, the exquisite and beautiful scenery in the midst of which I had felt myself hopelessly solitary and useless.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

She hands the newcomer a little glass in which air bubbles sparkle in the transparent liquid.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

“I have; if it were only possible to place a deaf and blind sentinel in the gallery beyond us.”
— from The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas

If the kings of the earth and all their subjects, if all princes and judges of the earth, if young men and maidens, old and young, every age, and both sexes; if they whom the Baptist addressed, the publicans and the soldiers, were all together to hearken to and observe the precepts of the Christian religion regarding a just and virtuous life, then should the republic adorn the whole earth with its own felicity, and attain in life everlasting to the pinnacle of kingly glory.
— from The City of God, Volume I by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

Her fingers, stiff from their tight clutch upon the keys, were anything but skilful in their efforts to turn the bolt in the lock; but at last the heavy, carved door swung slowly back on its hinges.
— from Pollyanna by Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter

He foresaw the coming triumph of the North and of the Union, a triumph won after many great disasters, but he remembered what an old man at a blacksmith shop in Tennessee had told him and his comrades before the Battle of Stone River.
— from The Tree of Appomattox by Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander) Altsheler

The youth led the King a crooked course through Southwark, and by-and-by struck into the high road beyond.
— from The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain

There is a bad storm in the west, and it will reach here in a few minutes.
— from Tom Swift and His Motor-Boat; Or, The Rivals of Lake Carlopa by Victor Appleton

has not enough already been said in the world?
— from In the Levant Twenty Fifth Impression by Charles Dudley Warner

Upon landing at the island, we directed our steps to their huts, which were of most miserable construction, being nothing more than a bush stuck in the ground, and forming only a very indifferent shade.
— from Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 — Volume 1 by Philip Parker King

These ten thousand men all went up the Andes bearing shovels in their hands, and singing the name of Meiggs as they went.
— from Peru in the Guano Age Being a Short Account of a Recent Visit to the Guano Deposits, with Some Reflections on the Money They Have Produced and the Uses to Which It Has Been Applied by A. J. (Alexander James) Duffield

He has also been seen in the church, in the farthermost corner, where the confessional is to stand.
— from The Forest Schoolmaster by Peter Rosegger

Just now it was without important fuel or ammunition; and this assignment of Cowperwood, with its attendant crime, so far as the city treasury was concerned, threatened, as some politicians and bankers saw it, to give it just the club it was looking for.
— from The Financier: A Novel by Theodore Dreiser

A box sunk in the earth at the further end of the yard, with an opening so that bunny can go in and out, is a luxury that he will greatly appreciate.
— from Harper's Round Table, May 14, 1895 by Various