The queen looked around her for some sacred object by which she could swear, and taking out of a cupboard hidden in the tapestry, a small coffer of rosewood set in silver, and laying it on the altar: “I swear,” she said, “by these sacred relics that Buckingham was not my lover.”
— from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas

My right leg chain'd into the crag, I lay Pent in a roofless close of ragged stones; Inswathed sometimes in wandering mist, and twice Black'd with thy branding thunder, and sometimes Sucking the damps for drink, and eating not, Except the spare chance-gift of those that came To touch my body and be heal'd, and live:
— from The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson by Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron

Neither the wizened Greek physician, nor the dignified Templar, considered the soft but piteous assurance of the wife that the venom had at once been removed by her own lips as more than mere feminine folly, and Dame Idonea's real experience of knights thus saved, and on the other hand of the fatal consequences of rude surgery in such a climate, were disregarded as an old woman's babble.
— from The Prince and the Page: A Story of the Last Crusade by Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge

Now, believe me or believe me not, you who may come to read this simple story, I’d clean forgotten the money that Mr. Garside had entrusted to my care, or, rather, should I say, it had not recurred to my mind.
— from Miriam: A Tale of Pole Moor and the Greenfield Hills by D. F. E. Sykes

This will not appear very strange when we consider our remarkable success in scanning the surface of the moon at the present day, and remember that the inhabitants of the moon were then nearing the close of their history, and so at the height of their civilization.
— from Daybreak; A Romance of an Old World by James Cowan

Not a girl among them would have sense enough to get up and close windows in case of rain, so I sleep with one ear pricked for the first patter on the roof.
— from How To Write Special Feature Articles A Handbook for Reporters, Correspondents and Free-Lance Writers Who Desire to Contribute to Popular Magazines and Magazine Sections of Newspapers by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

What, indeed, he said publicly, “The revolution will come here,” everyone capable of reasoning said in secret.
— from Pius IX. And His Time by Æneas MacDonell Dawson