what a course did we run for an hour together, losing ourselves, and indeed I despaired I should ever come to any path, but still from thicket to thicket, a thing I could hardly have believed a man could have been lost so long in so small a room.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

Did the roots extend down into some enchanted cavern? Then laughing at herself for so childish a notion, she made another effort: up came the shrub, and Proserpina staggered back, holding the stem triumphantly in her hand, and gazing at the deep hole which its roots had left in the soil.
— from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne

He was forced by his ducking in such extreme cold to turn back to Khathyl.
— from Beasts, Men and Gods by Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski

As they walked to the door that gave from the library on the hall it was opened from the outside, and a seedy-looking man, dressed in shabby evening clothes that bore many traces of past libations, walked unceremoniously midway into the room.
— from The Heart of a Woman by Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness

But since other vital processes also show a certain undulatory increase and decrease in strength (e. c. the systole and diastole of the heart), it is more probable that the periodicity of ovulation is due to an undulatory motion, where the length of the wave is about four weeks.
— from Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-attraction for the use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence by Bernard Simon Talmey

Others who lost their way or lay down in sheer exhaustion, cursing the Germans and not caring if they came, straggled back later—weeks later—by devious routes to Rouen or Paris, after a wandering life in French villages, where the peasants fed them and nursed them so that they were in no hurry to leave.
— from The Soul of the War by Philip Gibbs

'It was absinthe that did it,' said Elise calmly, taking a fresh charge into her brush, and working away at the black trimmings of the Infanta's dress.
— from The History of David Grieve by Ward, Humphry, Mrs.

Yet, after all, probably Lyly was only laughing in his sleeve at the follies of others, and was, as has been asserted, aiming at the purification of the language; for in his dramas his diction is simple enough, considering the taste of the age.
— from Cassell's History of England, Vol. 2 (of 8) From the Wars of the Roses to the Great Rebellion by Anonymous

Fire drills in schools enable children to get out in a few minutes without confusion when without them the most serious results could be looked for.
— from Psychotherapy Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of Disease by James J. (James Joseph) Walsh