The news that Smike had been caught and brought back in triumph, ran like wild-fire through the hungry community, and expectation was on tiptoe all the morning.
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

The church at Balbec, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still half romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our Norman gothic, and so exceptional that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspiration."
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

A little girl, a year and a half old, was teased by some other children, and before bursting into tears her eyebrows became decidedly oblique.
— from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin

[321] Sic ( star con altrui ); but "being in the service of or dependent upon others" seems to be the probable meaning.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

By a huge stove, called a base burner, in the living room of the house sat the daughter reading a book.
— from Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life by Sherwood Anderson

Their geometrical plan represented the typographical sign “&,” which signifies “et cetera” abridged, but by isolating the upper mouth of the sign, through which the south and west winds blew so strongly, they could succeed in making the lower part of use.
— from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

At noon Sir W. Batten told me Sir Richard Ford would accept of one-third of my profit of our private man-of-war, and bear one-third of the charge, and be bound in the Admiralty, so I shall be excused being bound, which I like mightily of, and did draw up a writing, as well as I could, to that purpose and signed and sealed it, and so he and Sir R. Ford are to go to enter into bond this afternoon.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

This menace shows that the Chaldæan and Babylonian belief in the vampyre, called Akhkharu in Assyrian, was fully developed at a very early date.
— from Demonology and Devil-lore by Moncure Daniel Conway

Six or eight men, therefore, by the help of water-carriage, can carry and bring back, in the same time, the same quantity of goods between London and Edinburgh as fifty broad-wheeled waggons, attended by a hundred men, and drawn by four hundred horses.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

For the next hour or so he read to her from "The Seven Seas," while the afternoon passed, the wind stirring the chaparral and blackberry bushes in the hollows of the huge, bare hills, the surf rolling and grumbling on the beach below, the sea-birds wheeling overhead.
— from Blix by Frank Norris

Last of all he perused, with dogged resolution, the column of petty casualties: a boy bit in the calf by a dog who was not mad; the frustrated burgling of a baker's shop; even to the bunches of keys and the umbrella and two cigar-cases picked up by the police, and consigned to the appropriate municipal limbo; until he came to the following lines: "This morning the Guardians of Public Safety , having been called by the neighbouring inhabitants, penetrated into a room on the top floor of a house situate in the Little Street of the Gravedigger (Viccolo del Beccamorto), and discovered, hanging from a rafter, the dead body of
— from Vanitas: Polite Stories by Vernon Lee

The expences of this Act were to be wholly borne by the Company, and the Company are bound by it to provide the inhabitants of Paddington, and parishes and streets adjacent, with water as heretofore.
— from Paddington: Past and Present by William Robins

These important and correlated differences of structure do not invariably characterise any breed; but if they had been attended to and selected with as much care as the more conspicuous external differences, there can hardly be a doubt that they would have been rendered constant.
— from The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication — Volume 1 by Charles Darwin

"One by one, with the softness of falling snow, the leaves dropped upon the brown carpet beneath, but there was no more fragrance, since the sap had ceased to move through the secret channels and breathe balm into the forest.
— from Flower of the Dusk by Myrtle Reed

Ask it for a hundred thousand francs to realize an idea that will be useful to humanity,—the steam-engine for instance,—and you’ll die, like Salomon de Caux, at Bicetre; but if the money is wanted for some paradoxical absurdity, Parisians will annihilate themselves and their fortune for it.
— from The Works of Balzac: A linked index to all Project Gutenberg editions by Honoré de Balzac

His father had been an Alsacian from an old German family, a merchant, who, conducting a branch business in that city of beautiful women, had finally lost his heart to the most charming one.
— from A Divided Heart and Other Stories by Paul Heyse

"I'll take a cab and be back in ten minutes," Rigby said.
— from The Yellow Face by Fred M. (Fred Merrick) White

The news that Smike had been caught and brought back in triumph, ran like wildfire through the hungry community, and expectation was on tiptoe all the morning.
— from Dickens As an Educator by James L. (James Laughlin) Hughes

You do indeed, generally, in all considerable storms, observe that the wind blows from some easterly point, and that seeming clouds are blown by it to the [Pg 44] westward; but what you see, and call clouds, are not the clouds which furnish the rain.
— from The Philosophy of the Weather. And a Guide to Its Changes by T. B. (Thomas Belden) Butler