I went down a short stair leading to the ground floor.
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World by Jules Verne

I loved and love thy daughter and still shall love her, for that I hold her worthy of my love, and if I dealt with her less than honourably, in the opinion of the vulgar, my sin was one which still goeth hand in hand with youth and which an you would do away, it behoveth you first do away with youth.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

We were, in fact, descending a spiral, something like those winding staircases in use in modern houses.
— from A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

Candide, dismayed and stupefied, soon lost sight of the vessel.
— from Candide by Voltaire

Grove ( Dict. of Music 3. 226) quotes from chapter 12, ‘Del baile y cantar llamado Zarabanda,’ of the Tratado contra los Juegos Publicos (‘Treatise against Public Amusements’) of [197] Mariana (1536-1623): ‘Entre las otras invenciones ha salido estos años un baile y cantar tan lacivo en las palabras, tan feo en las meneos, que basta para pegar fuego aun á las personas muy honestas’ (‘amongst other inventions there has appeared during late years a dance and song, so lascivious in its words, so ugly in its movements, that it is enough to inflame even very modest people’).
— from The Devil is an Ass by Ben Jonson

El juez privó también a la tertulia de su presencia, y por fin D. Inocencio dió a su sobrino la señal de partida.
— from Doña Perfecta by Benito Pérez Galdós

In shillings and in pence at first they deal; And steal so little, few perceive they steal; Till, like the sea, they compass all the land, From Scots to Wight, from mount to Dover strand: And when rank widows purchase luscious nights, Or when a duke to Jansen punts at White’s, Or City-heir in mortgage melts away; Satan himself feels far less joy than they.
— from An Essay on Man; Moral Essays and Satires by Alexander Pope

That so many persons should have kept so deadly a secret so long and so faithfully is as great a mystery as ever was invented by a writer of the sensation school; and when Catholics declare that there never was a plot, except that which was formed against their religion by artful men for the worst purposes, they do not talk so unreasonably as at the first blush it should seem.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

The border in front looked unutterably dreary with one or two clumps of frost-bitten dahlias and some scrubby little chrysanthemums.
— from How the Garden Grew by Maud Maryon

Sometimes Loretta would come and spend the day, and she seemed little less distressed than June.
— from The Trail of the Lonesome Pine by Fox, John, Jr.

Environment: frequent dust and sand storms; lack of natural freshwater resources being overcome by desalination plants; desertification *United Arab Emirates, Geography Note: strategic location along southern approaches to Strait of Hormuz, a vital transit point for world crude oil *United Arab Emirates, People Population: 2,657,013 (July 1993 est.)
— from The 1993 CIA World Factbook by United States. Central Intelligence Agency

But when she dragged one wing and whined about his feet, then slowly crawled away, he knew just what it meant—that it was all a trick to lead him from her brood, and he struck at her a savage blow; but little Brownie was quick, she avoided the blow and limped behind a sapling, there to beat herself upon the leaves again in sore distress, and seem so lame that Cuddy made another try to strike her down with a stick.
— from Lobo, Rag and Vixen Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen by Ernest Thompson Seton

Alban was the first to recover self-possession; and, when the friends had seated themselves, he surveyed Darrell's countenance deliberately, and said, "So little change!—wonderful!
— from What Will He Do with It? — Volume 06 by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron

With that question at last definitely rising, the long line of social reformers began which stretched from Abbé de Saint-Pierre to the latest believer in the possibility of a more decent and salutary social life for human-kind.
— from Christianity and Progress by Harry Emerson Fosdick