But the cupidity of the Indian was soon gratified, and the different bodies again moved slowly onward.
— from The Last of the Mohicans; A narrative of 1757 by James Fenimore Cooper

Ere I had time to look up and mark where, in which story, or by whom unclosed, a tree overhead shook, as if struck by a missile; some object dropped prone at my feet.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

The tray may be a massive silver one that requires a footman with strong arms to lift it, or it may be of Sheffield or merely of effectively lacquered tin.
— from Etiquette by Emily Post

When Valerian sunk under the weight of shame and grief, his skin, stuffed with straw, and formed into the likeness of a human figure, was preserved for ages in the most celebrated temple of Persia; a more real monument of triumph, than the fancied trophies of brass and marble so often erected by Roman vanity.
— 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 one seemed to be a monstrous son of baleful Typhoeus or of Earth herself, such as she brought forth aforetime, in her wrath against Zeus; but the other, the son of Tyndareus, was like a star of heaven, whose beams are fairest as it shines through the nightly sky at eventide.
— from The Argonautica by Rhodius Apollonius

“And if you had been reading by yourself?” “It would have still been a pleasure, but a much smaller one.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

When the consul displayed the standard of the republic, each citizen bound himself, by the obligation of an oath, to draw his sword in the cause of his country, till he had discharged the sacred duty by a military service of ten years.
— 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

Thence mightily dissatisfied back at night to my uncle Wight’s, and supped with them, but against my stomach out of the offence the sight of my aunt’s hands gives me, and ending supper with a mighty laugh, the greatest I have had these many months, at my uncle’s being out in his grace after meat, we rose and broke up, and my wife and I home and to bed, being sleepy since last night.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

This light, the production of a distempered fancy, the creature of an empty stomach and an empty brain, was adored by the Quietists as the pure and perfect essence of God himself; and as long as the folly was confined to Mount Athos, the simple solitaries were not inquisitive how the divine essence could be a material substance, or how an immaterial substance could be perceived by the eyes of the body.
— 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

A peculiar quivering began to agitate the form of his companion; the hand that lay unresistingly in Somerset’s trembled as with ague; and presently there broke forth, in the shadow of the carriage, the bubbling and musical sound of laughter, resisted but triumphant.
— from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson

But when they recovered their breath, the air was rent by a mighty shout of joy in honor of the kind conqueror.
— from The Story of the Greeks by H. A. (Hélène Adeline) Guerber

But there is little suggestion in the hotel or its surroundings of its ever having been a "mouldy sort of an establishment in a close neighbourhood," and it is hard to believe that Copperfield's bedroom "smelt like a hackney-coach and was shut up like a family vault."
— from Dickens' London by M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

To be a myth seems original,—to be a mere man, quite ordinary.
— from Thelma by Marie Corelli

Reverend W. T. Boutwell accompanied Mr. Schoolcraft on this journey, and his account of it is published in the religious paper.
— from Old Fort Snelling, 1819-1858 by Marcus Lee Hansen

They were not all sick, not by any means; some of the chaps that gathered about our place were about as lively and fractious as one meets at an Irish picnic.
— from The Boy Spy A substantially true record of secret service during the war of the rebellion, a correct account of events witnessed by a soldier by Joseph Orton Kerbey

Washington grew to be a magnificent specimen of physical manhood.
— from A New History of the United States The greater republic, embracing the growth and achievements of our country from the earliest days of discovery and settlement to the present eventful year by Charles Morris

The first time they had struck blow for this or themselves; their stand for Magna Charta, so much vaunted, being a mere settling of disputes between barons and king; no quarrel of theirs, nor its results much gain to them.
— from No Quarter! by Mayne Reid

Confucius is said to have selected these three hundred odd pieces from a much larger pre-existing mass of material, but his language here hardly strikes us as that likely to be used by a man speaking of his own compilation.
— from The Sayings of Confucius A New Translation of the Greater Part of the Confucian Analects by Confucius