“I am sorry, lady,” said the landlady in a whisper, “not to be able to accommodate you better; but a sick cavalier occupies my best room—it is next to this—and he sleeps now, and I would not disturb him.
— from Tales and Stories Now First Collected by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Parenzo has but a single church of moment, but that church is one which would hold no mean place even among the glories of Ravenna.
— from Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice by Edward A. (Edward Augustus) Freeman

The half-tone process is used almost exclusively for reproducing photographs and wash drawings, though it will produce a facsimile of any kind of copy, such as impressions from type, old manuscripts, or typewriting, but a shade composed of minute black dots will appear over the entire print and there will be no absolutely whits areas unless they are produced by routing the plate or cutting out the high lights.
— from The Preparation of Illustrations for Reports of the United States Geological Survey With Brief Descriptions of Processes of Reproduction by John L. Ridgway

Suddenly my sleep was broken by a shade cast over me; between me and the low sunlight Lorna Doone was standing.
— from Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor by R. D. (Richard Doddridge) Blackmore

All the comfort that these assurances gave him was dashed by a settled conviction of Miss Betty’s subtlety.
— from Lord Kilgobbin by Charles James Lever

To the fawn, it was nothing but a sharp clang of metal behind him and an answering shriek of pain,—sounds that in its terror it heard but dimly.
— from The Strength of the Pines by Edison Marshall

It is not a religion at all in our modern sense of being a strict code of morals based upon any revealed or written law; but, like the popular beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome, is rather a mythology resting on traditional reverence for certain objects in certain places.
— from India under Ripon: A Private Diary by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

My chance of escape, therefore, and my only chance, lay in holding to a due west course: hoping first that, being clear of the weed, I might fall in with some passing vessel; and second that I might make the coast before a storm came on me by which my little boat would be swamped.
— from In the Sargasso Sea A Novel by Thomas A. (Thomas Allibone) Janvier