The unimaginative "Anglaise" proved better than the Parisienne's fears: she sat literally unprovided, as bare of bloom or leaf as the winter tree.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

But I was wishing we had a good farm in Bartlett or Bethlehem or Littleton, or some other township round the White Mountains, but not where they could tumble on our heads.
— from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne

They were presided over nominally by my mother, but really by Mr. Murdstone and his sister, who were always present, and found them a favourable occasion for giving my mother lessons in that miscalled firmness, which was the bane of both our lives.
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

The promenaders one by one left the Malecon for the Luneta, the music from which was borne to him in snatches of melodies on the fresh evening breeze; the sailors on a warship anchored in the river performed their evening drill, skipping about among the slender ropes like spiders; the boats one by one lighted their lamps, thus giving signs of life; while the beach, Do el viento riza las calladas olas Que con blando murmullo en la ribera Se deslizan veloces por sí solas.
— from The Reign of Greed by José Rizal

But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves—with their old fantastic flourishes, and decorative rubric interlacings—their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers—with pious sentences at the beginning, without which our religious ancestors never ventured to open a book of business, or bill of lading—the costly vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some better library ,—are very agreeable and edifying spectacles.
— from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 Elia and The Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb

The rite itself consists in the application 21 of a thin paste made by mixing rice-flour with water: this is taken up in a brush or “bouquet” of leaves and applied to the objects which the “neutralisation” is intended to protect or neutralise, whether they be the [ 78 ] posts of a house, the projecting ends of a boat’s ribs ( tajok p’rahu ), the seaward posts of fishing-stakes ( puchi kelong ), or the forehead and back of the hands of the bride and bridegroom.
— from Malay Magic Being an introduction to the folklore and popular religion of the Malay Peninsula by Walter William Skeat

And oft the conjuror’s words will make The stubborn demon groan and quake; And oft the bands of iron break, Or bursts one lock, that still amain, Fast as ’tis opened, shuts again.
— from Marmion: A Tale Of Flodden Field by Walter Scott

That house, on the previous night, had been one blaze of light in honor of the State dinner.
— from For Woman's Love by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

A box of Cream Sticks, containing the following colors: Two shades of Flesh, one Black, one Brown, one Lake, one Crimson, one White, one Carmine, and a color for Shading Wrinkles, $1.00.
— from Santa Claus' Daughter: A Musical Christmas Burlesque in Two Acts by F. W. Hardcastle

"If there be but one body of legislators, it is no better than a tyranny; if there are only two, there will want a casting voice.
— from The Grammar of English Grammars by Goold Brown

Footnote 29 : So called because they wore shoes made from the inner bark of basswood or linden trees.
— from The Deluge: An Historical Novel of Poland, Sweden, and Russia. Vol. 1 (of 2) by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Gard crowded in on the pretense of getting a bill changed and saw blocks of bills of large denominations being taken from the vault.
— from Uncle Sam, Detective by William Atherton DuPuy

Is it reasonable to believe that the electric currents and magnetic energy of our earth could evolve [Pg 269] billions of billions of little living creatures which float in the air thicker than motes in a sunbeam, that swim in the waters so abundant that there are millions in a raindrop, that penetrate all vegetable and animal substance and organisms, that course through the veins of our bodies by the billion, and eat our food for us that we may digest it better; yet in other suns and worlds produce no such results?
— from The Universe a Vast Electric Organism by Geo. W. (George Woodward) Warder

When, in 1778, Lord Carlisle came out as Commissioner, in a letter speaking of the great scale of all things in America, he says, 'We have nothing on a great scale with us but our blunders, our losses, our disgraces and misfor [Pg 152] tunes.'
— from The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 From 1620-1816 by Egerton Ryerson

The Story of Brother Elias "O brother mine, O beautiful brother, O brother of love, build me a castle which shall have neither stone nor iron.
— from The Story of Assisi by Lina Duff Gordon

It is the Call not only of London, but of Beauty, of Life.
— from Nights in London by Thomas Burke

I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend.
— from Orthodoxy by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton