His disease is so offensive that he is thrust out of his hostel, and in his wretchedness sitting on a stone he still avows his faith, and confesses that even then he has not received his deserts.
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

Amelia bore her harshness quite gently; smoothed the uneasy pillow; was always ready with a soft answer to the watchful, querulous voice; soothed the sufferer with words of hope, such as her pious simple heart could best feel and utter, and closed the eyes that had once looked so tenderly upon her.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Then all the men who were not known to have violated the law of the first-fruit offering and that of marriage during the year were summoned by a crier to enter the holy square and observe a solemn fast.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

The Christian thinker—and I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminated in faith, rather than the public apologist—proceeds by rejection and elimination.
— from Pascal's Pensées by Blaise Pascal

He ventured to disclose his melancholy situation, and conjured the emperor to hasten to the relief of his unhappy rival.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

The king was nearly captured at Long Marston, for some troopers of Cromwell suspected the party, and came to examine the house where they rested.
— from English Villages by P. H. (Peter Hampson) Ditchfield

"Of course he'll have a chance to explain things," he said, with laborious carelessness.
— from The Red House on Rowan Street by Lily A. (Lily Augusta) Long

He remembers that if these gaudy birds do flout in vivid colors that dazzle and charm the eye, they have not the exquisite power of song which inspires our more soberly clad New England favorites.
— from Equatorial America Descriptive of a Visit to St. Thomas, Martinique, Barbadoes, and the Principal Capitals of South America by Maturin Murray Ballou

The Portuguese royal family were obliged to flee away to Brazil; but the Spaniards and Portuguese would not submit to the French yoke, and called the English to help them.
— from The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, April 1884, No. 7 by Chautauqua Institution

A ghastly, horrid place in which, as I sat shuddering by the fire, while my companion and the landlord slept near it--wondering if by now Juana had accomplished her dreadful purpose, unable longer to bear the company of the man, Morales, to whom she had sold herself; or, almost worse still, the company of her sin stained father; wondering too, if by now that splendid form was stiff in death!--I almost cursed the escape that had come to me.
— from Across the Salt Seas: A Romance of the War of Succession by John Bloundelle-Burton

He saw the two, as in a certain twilight, entering the Hotel Dardanelle in Venice; the two coming forth from some brilliant Viennese café, and elsewhere in remote Asiatic capitols, always followed by a word, pitying the tall, proud girl to whom a sardonic destiny had given such beauty and such fortune.
— from The Gilded Chair: A Novel by Melville Davisson Post

The emissary having set off, the captains occupied themselves in obtaining a large supply of dry wood, as producing less smoke, to keep up the fires; and some forty warriors, under the orders of the Gueyma, had started off as a hunting party for two or three days, while the Indians who remained at the camp employed themselves in constructing enramadas, to shelter the warriors, and corals to enclose the horses.
— from The Flying Horseman by Gustave Aimard

He had been stolen by some sailors and carried to England; there he had learned the language.
— from The Beginner's American History by D. H. (David Henry) Montgomery

Nobody expected anything more of him, and it came as a comfort to everybody that he had viewed the high prices in a serious light.
— from Royal Highness by Thomas Mann