I was awfully lewd, but resisted even that; after they had done I gave them a Napoleon apiece in excess of the price paid to the bawd, and left them to dress, and retired with the bawd to make other arrangements.
— from The Romance of Lust: A classic Victorian erotic novel by Anonymous

The hat-box puzzled me extremely, till one day, asking my Father what it was, I got a distracted answer which led me to believe that it was itself a sort of hat, and I made a laborious but repeated effort to wear it.
— from Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments by Edmund Gosse

It may be doubted whether any language be rich enough to maintain more than one truly great poet,—and
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 15, January, 1859 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

In a few minutes the two men, with fowling-pieces on their shoulders, and a remarkably attenuated black boy at their heels carrying a large bore rifle, entered the jungle behind the electrician’s bungalow.
— from The Battery and the Boiler: Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables by R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne

"I 'ad Little Billy right enough, there.
— from Fire Mountain A Thrilling Sea Story by Norman Springer

Chevillere and Lamar, both rising, exchanged the usual salutations, and the good night!
— from The Kentuckian in New-York; or, The Adventures of Three Southerns. Volume 1 (of 2) by William Alexander Caruthers

By those painful, pleasurable thrusts of intimacy edifices, property, prosperity, verility, invincibility, relationships and stature, all that one made of a life by repudiating everything that one once was, were now seen as the sandcastles that they were and he himself as the ravaged spoils of dirt there to be bulldozed by others' wills as before, to sense the suppressed cries of childhood as before.
— from An Apostate: Nawin of Thais by Steven David Justin Sills