She passed close to a little group of men who were laughing, but whose laughter could have been struck dead by a single word.
— from The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad

An order was immediately promulgated, that, on a stated day, the Gothic youth should assemble in the capital cities of their respective provinces; and, as a report was industriously circulated, that they were summoned to receive a liberal gift of lands and money, the pleasing hope allayed the fury of their resentment, and, perhaps, suspended the motions of the conspiracy.
— 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

Evil is foreshadowed if a light goes out during meals, or while some auspicious thing, such, for example, as a marriage, is being discussed.
— from Omens and Superstitions of Southern India by Edgar Thurston

The victorious bird, draggled and woebegone, with great patches of red flesh showing through its wet plumage, with the membrane of its face and its short gills and comb swollen and bloody, with one eye put out, and the other only kept open by the thread attached to its eyelid, yet makes shift to strut, with staggering gait, across the cock-pit, and to notify its victory by giving vent to a lamentable ghost of a crow.
— from Malay Magic Being an introduction to the folklore and popular religion of the Malay Peninsula by Walter William Skeat

The captain, having given up all hope of finding F——, and being unwilling to delay any longer, gave orders for unmooring the ship, and we made sail, dropping slowly down with the tide and light wind.
— from Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana

But there was such a cloud of smoke in the dining-room, mingled with the tobacco smoke, that they could not breathe, so the commandant opened the window, and all the officers, who had returned for a last glass of cognac, went up to it.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

The king took the hand with a poorly disguised reluctance, and let go of it as willingly as a lady lets go of a fish; all of which had a good effect, for it was mistaken for an embarrassment natural to one who was being called upon by greatness.
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

[ As lights go out and curtain falls all the characters hold their positions as if petrified. ] CURTAIN SCENE THREE [ The curtain rises to show Alice still asleep in the armchair, the fire in the grate suffusing her with its glow.
— from Alice in Wonderland A Dramatization of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" by Alice Gerstenberg

The entrance was by a large gate, open by day and closed at night, with two iron ship's guns near at hand.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

Of his faithful friends, the nobles Bragadin, Barbaro and Dandolo, the first had died in 1767, having gone into debt “that I might have enough,” sending Casanova, from his death-bed, a last gift of a thousand crowns.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

A little girl of 1900.
— from U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1956 January - June by Library of Congress. Copyright Office

Modern psychophysics has pointed to a large group of false perceptions due to illusions of pressure, stabs, or other contact with the skin.
— from Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students by Hans Gross

A great-grandson was chief justice and lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia.
— from Children Above 180 IQ Stanford-Binet: Origin and Development by Leta Stetter Hollingworth

That he can be, as I have elsewhere noted, a Persian unto Persians, and a Romany among Roms, and a professional among the hanky-pankorites, is likewise on the cards, as surely as that he knows the roads and all the devices and little games of them that dwell thereon.
— from The Gypsies by Charles Godfrey Leland

We found further that (1) an extravagant development of the secondary sexual characters was not really favourable to the reproductive process, the males thus differentiated belonging to a lower grade of sexual evolution, being bad fathers and unsocial in their conduct; (2) that the most oppressed females are as a rule
— from The Truth About Woman by C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine) Hartley

You were lost when you were a little girl out picking berries.”
— from Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1889-1890, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1894, pages 159-350 by Lucien M. (Lucien McShan) Turner

That the author knew how visionary for the immediate future were these ideas, which we at that time so eagerly discussed with a little group of intimate sympathetic friends, is shown by the prefatory lines in the book: [147] “Forlorn the way, yet with strange gleams of gladness; Sad beyond words the voices far behind.
— from William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir Compiled by His Wife Elizabeth A. Sharp by Elizabeth A. (Elizabeth Amelia) Sharp

While revolving in his mind thoughts connected with these subjects—and, somehow or other, with his more ambitious reveries were always mingled musings of curiosity respecting his correspondent—he was struck by the beauty of a little girl, of about eleven years old, who was walking with a female attendant on the footpath that skirted the road.
— from Ernest Maltravers — Volume 07 by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron