Cimon and Lysimachus and their companions, drawing their swords, made for the stairs, without any opposition, all giving way to them, and as they descended, Pasimondas presented himself before them, with a great cudgel in his hand, being drawn thither by the outcry; but Cimon dealt him a swashing blow on the head and cleaving it sheer in sunder, laid him dead at his feet.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

They both wished me to remain with them until Cochin China was open, and I could travel through the country in safety: I should have liked to do so, could I have foreseen an approaching termination of the war; but in the then state of affairs that was impossible.
— from Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China (Siam), Cambodia, and Laos (Vol. 1 of 2) During the Years 1858, 1859, and 1860 by Henri Mouhot

s. , S; yif , S, S2; gif , S2; ȝeueþ , pl. , S2; gifð , pr. s. , S; yeft , S; yefþ , S2; gaf , pt. s. , S, S2; ȝaf , S, S2, G; ȝæf , S; ȝifuen , pl. , S; yaf , S, C2; iaf , S; ȝiaf , S; gef , S; ȝef , S, S2; gaiff , S3; yafe , S3; ȝaue , S2; ȝeue , pl. , S2; ȝauen , W; iafen , S; iauen , S; geuen , pp. , S; gyuen , S; ȝiuen , S; yiuen , C2; iiuen , S; iȝiue , S; yeuen , S2, C2; y-ȝeue , S2, G; ȝouen , S2; ȝouun , S2, W; iȝiue , S, S2.—AS.
— from A Concise Dictionary of Middle English from A.D. 1150 to 1580 by A. L. (Anthony Lawson) Mayhew

And, now that I am clothed as thou wert clothed, it seemeth I should be able the more nearly to feel as thou didst when the brute soldier—Hark ye, is not this a bruise upon your hand?”
— from The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

"How can I sleep in such an Inferno as this?" "Try, you are so weak, you'll soon drop off;" and, laying the cool tips of her fingers on his eyelids, she kept them shut till he yielded with a long sigh of mingled weariness and pleasure, and was asleep before he knew it.
— from Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott

Cheaper coffee is served in some gardens, which conspicuously display large signs at the entrance, saying: "Families may cook their own coffee in this place."
— from All About Coffee by William H. (William Harrison) Ukers

Still less could I leave the somewhat plain, not to say severe, obelisk near the fountain which celebrates in stately inscriprional Spanish the promulgation of the constitution of 1812.
— from A Confession of St. Augustine by William Dean Howells

With what can I side in such a world as this?
— from The Letters of William James, Vol. 1 by William James

192 The texture of Moquette carpets is shown in section in Fig.
— from Jacquard Weaving and Designing by T. F. Bell

He had a capital smile, and Mills was captivated into smiling in sympathy.
— from The Second Class Passenger: Fifteen Stories by Perceval Gibbon

"It's getting near the end of the term, and there's no use in your beginning any work down here at the settlement while college is still in session.
— from The Seven-Branched Candlestick: The Schooldays of Young American Jew by Gilbert W. (Gilbert Wolf) Gabriel

Sin has come in somewhere, I suppose.
— from Letters to His Friends by Forbes Robinson

“How long have you been out here, Cyril?—Cil, I say, I shall call you Cil.”
— from Real Gold: A Story of Adventure by George Manville Fenn

In fact Americans are getting to dote too much on Grammar and Good Manners, They say the most perfect English in this country is spoken in Sing Sing, And at the Federal Prison in Atlanta, They claim a Knife never touched a Lip, So you see where that junk leads you too, I was going to write a Book on the War, But I heard some fellow had already done it,
— from Rogers-isms, the Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference by Will Rogers