WHITTIER'S REPLY My Dear Young Friend—I was very glad to have such a pleasant letter on my birthday.
— from The Story of My Life With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert Macy by Helen Keller

My wife this evening discoursing of making clothes for the country, which I seem against, pleading lack of money, but I am glad of it in some respects because of getting her out of the way from this fellow, and my own liberty to look after my business more than of late I have done.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

This will preserve a surface mulch of dry earth and prevent loss of moisture by evaporation.
— from The Vegetable Garden: What, When, and How to Plant by Anonymous

They were burned and pitted like other meteorites by their passage through the earth's atmosphere.
— from The Fire People by Ray Cummings

Desmond and his supporters accompanied him through Limerick into Cork, quartering their retainers on the lands of their enemies, but sparing their friends; the Earl of Ormond with a corps of observation moving on a parallel line of march, but carefully avoiding a collision.
— from A Popular History of Ireland : from the Earliest Period to the Emancipation of the Catholics - Volume 2 by Thomas D'Arcy McGee

That Nature does sometimes make a leap, and a pretty long one, must be obvious to any visitor to the Museum of the London College of [Pg 238] Surgeons, who has examined the two-headed and four-legged human fœti there preserved in spirits.
— from Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics With Some of Their Applications by William Thomas Thornton

Murray brought it out early in 1846, in his Colonial and Home Library, as ‘A Narrative of a Four Months’ Residence among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands; or, a Peep at Polynesian Life,’ or, more briefly, ‘Melville’s Marquesas Islands.’
— from Typee: A Romance of the South Seas by Herman Melville

The vast rock upon which it is built is separated from the end of a projecting line of mountains by a widish chasm, at the bottom of which we found ourselves, after scrambling up a path which wound among masses of rock and huge stones which at some remote period had fallen from above.
— from Visits to Monasteries in the Levant by Robert Curzon

“These fellows are always playing larks on me before it is my cue to go on.
— from Twenty Years of Spoof and Bluff by Carlton

I reckon Mis’ Sol did think ’twas a powerful lot o’ mail, bein’ as I never had more’n one and a card before at a time.”
— from Rilla of the Lighthouse by Grace May North