I don’t complain; I rather enjoy these little strolls.
— from The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad

Before I came to live here, she commenced—waiting no farther invitation to her story—I was almost always at Wuthering Heights; because my mother had nursed Mr. Hindley Earnshaw, that was Hareton’s father, and I got used to playing with the children: I ran errands too, and helped to make hay, and hung about the farm ready for anything that anybody would set me to.
— from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Arising early in the morning, and contriving again to escape the vigilance of my creditors, I repaired eagerly to the bookseller’s stall, and laid out what little ready money I possessed, in the purchase of some volumes of Mechanics and Practical Astronomy.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 1 by Edgar Allan Poe

When a man has not in him what is loftier and mightier than all external impressions a bad cold is really enough to upset his equilibrium and make him begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog howling in every sound.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Instantly, my countenance altered, I began to think most intently whether children were wont in any kind of play to sing such words: nor could I remember ever to have heard the like.
— from The Confessions of St. Augustine by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

The Kimberley crater is roomy enough to admit the Roman Coliseum; the bottom of the crater has not been reached, and no one can tell how far down in the bowels of the earth it goes.
— from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain

But whereas you shall see many discontents, common grievances, complaints, poverty, barbarism, beggary, plagues, wars, rebellions, seditions, mutinies, contentions, idleness, riot, epicurism, the land lie untilled, waste, full of bogs, fens, deserts, &c., cities decayed, base and poor towns, villages depopulated, the people squalid, ugly, uncivil; that kingdom, that country, must needs be discontent, melancholy, hath a sick body, and had need to be reformed.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to speak of actual changes, he had little more to propose than a system of peasant proprietorship.
— from Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham by Harold Joseph Laski

The Independent leaders, aware that it would not be in their power to control the city while their forces were employed in the field, sought a reconciliation.[b] The parliament was suffered to vote that no change should be made in the fundamental government of the realm by king, lords, and commons; and the citizens in return engaged themselves to live and die with the parliament.
— from The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the Accession of King George the Fifth Volume 8 by Hilaire Belloc

People of all ranks flocked to Change-alley, and crowded the courts in riotous eagerness to purchase shares.
— from London in Modern Times or, Sketches of the English Metropolis during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. by Unknown

It is the very reverse of what I noticed in some other lizards feebly lapping up an egg (see p. 71), for in a most expeditious manner does Heloderm cause its raw eggs to disappear.
— from Snakes: Curiosities and Wonders of Serpent Life by Catherine Cooper Hopley

A rough ladder-way had been fixed in the shaft by this time, so that it was not necessary for the windlass to be called into requisition every time an ascent or descent was made.
— from The Lost Explorers: A Story of the Trackless Desert by Alexander MacDonald