A few days after the departure of Narses, three ambassadors were sent to the court of Sapor, who was already returned from the Scythian expedition to his ordinary residence of Ctesiphon.
— 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

He is hardly past middle age, with something of the artist about him, unconventionally but carefully dressed, and clean-shaven except for a moustache, with an eager susceptible face and very amiable and considerate manners.
— from Mrs. Warren's Profession by Bernard Shaw

And they say p. 46 that it hath been there since the beginning of the world, and was some-time green and bare leaves, unto the time that our Lord died on the cross, and then it dried: and so did all the trees that were then in the world.
— from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville by Mandeville, John, Sir

It sliced through me and went straight into my balls, turning my legs into jelly on the way.
— from Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

There are gate-openings about the middle of the east and west sides , but no barbicans."
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

When I said that my object was not medicine, but to study Buḍḍhism, the physician very plausibly argued that as it was the ultimate object of Buḍḍhism to save men, I might as well stay in the city as a doctor to practise medicine.
— from Three Years in Tibet by Ekai Kawaguchi

He planted bananas there, and we said, 'Now when they eat of these they will all drop down dead, as our fathers assured us, if any one ate fruit from that ground, except only our Sacred Men themselves.'
— from The Story of John G. Paton; Or, Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals by John Gibson Paton

When he tells us again that at that moment (1861) “English literature as a living intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of France and Germany,” we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre of a dozen Englishmen—Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany, further, had scarcely one, though France had more than one or two, great writers of the second class: and we say, “Either your ‘living intellectual instrument’ is a juggle of words, or you really are neglecting fact.”
— from Matthew Arnold by George Saintsbury

A sentry challenged her and when she had passed
— from The Happy Foreigner by Enid Bagnold

In the second place, if we consider our knowledge of objects, we realise that, as we said, at any one moment we only perceive them in part or from one position.
— from The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant by A. D. (Alexander Dunlop) Lindsay

Samuel Lynn had come home for the evening, and was sitting at the table in his parlour, helping the two little girls with a geographical puzzle, which had baffled their skill.
— from Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles by Wood, Henry, Mrs.

I thought of poor Huldah; how she would feel, and what she would do, and what would become of her, away off here in the wilderness, if I was killed.
— from Summerfield or, Life on a Farm by Day Kellogg Lee

And outside is the gusty rushing, Of the fierce November blast, With the snow drift waltzing and whirling, And eddying swiftly past, It's a wild night to be abroad in, When the ice blast and snow drift meet To wreath round all the world of winter A shroud and a winding sheet.
— from Verses and Rhymes By the Way by Norah

There were also small, white eyeless salamanders, small, yellow, speckled sal 67 amanders, with signs of eyes but no sight; also a jet black salamander, which like the rest, was blind.
— from Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills by Luella Agnes Owen