When they find a specially good piece of material it lures them on to lavish on it an excess of labour, and to produce things too good to be used, but only so much the more desirable for possession.
— from Argonauts of the Western Pacific An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea by Bronislaw Malinowski

He was rather disorderly, to be sure, with a black unshaven beard of several days' growth, making his pale face look yet paler, and a jacket which would have been all the better for patching.
— from North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

The gunboats soon engaged the water batteries at very close quarters, but the troops which were to invest Fort Henry were delayed for want of roads, as well as by the dense forest and the high water in what would in dry weather have been unimportant beds of streams.
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

Yet we know that precisely analogous evolutions have been undergone by other stone-gods elsewhere.
— from The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions by Grant Allen

"May our next meeting be under brighter omens," said Robert.
— from The Lords of the Wild: A Story of the Old New York Border by Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander) Altsheler

Blocks upon blocks of stone are scattered over these desolate moorlands, that have been excavated, dug into hillocks, disturbed and turned over and over again, sometimes by the primeval stream-works of the old men or ancient miners, sometimes by more modern labour in search of metallic wealth.
— from The Subterranean World by G. (Georg) Hartwig

In deciding the question as to how often manure should be removed in cities and towns, it should be borne in mind that when the larvæ have finished feeding they will often leave the manure and pupate in the ground below or crawl some distance away to pupate in dé bris under boards or stones and the like.
— from The House Fly and How to Suppress It by F. C. (Fred Corry) Bishopp

She was eventually discovered hiding in the Rufiji Delta in German East Africa, towards the end of October, 1914, where she was kept blocked up by our ships for nearly nine months.
— from The Battle of the Falkland Islands, Before and After by Henry Edmund Harvey Spencer-Cooper

When a shell falls in the midst of this wire protection, the rods are bent and twisted, but unless broken off short they always support the wire, and even after a severe bombardment present a serious obstacle to the assaulters.
— from Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories; Second Series by James Edmund Dunning

You saw them enter with the lantern, saw them shift a cider press, uncover the floor, and there beneath, in a dry well, were barrels upon barrels of spirits, and crouched among them was a man whom you all knew at once—Lancy’s brother, Tom.
— from There Is Sorrow on the Sea by Gilbert Parker

He seems to have combined two Italian types of character, which never have been united before or since,—that of the ecclesiastic, earnest and dogmatic, seeing human nature from a doctrinal platform, not working and thinking with it; and secondly the poetic type, of which Dante is the noblest example, perfectly clear and definite in inward and outward vision, and illuminating all that it touches with an indescribable glow of pure poetic imagination.
— from Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero by W. Warde (William Warde) Fowler

It was then that Diana seemed to be holding in her girlish hands something very complex and rare; a nature not easily to be understood by one so much younger.
— from The Testing of Diana Mallory by Ward, Humphry, Mrs.