No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all glances were directed towards a single point, a wooden bench placed against a small door, in the stretch of wall on the President’s left; on this bench, illuminated by several candles, sat a man between two gendarmes.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Mr. Snagsby was about to descend into the subterranean regions to take tea when he looked out of his door just now and saw the crow who was out late.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

In the agreement she had made with him he had engaged to let her dance a ‘pas de deux’ in the second opera, and he had not kept his word.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Hard parts seem to affect the form of adjoining soft parts; it is believed by some authors that with birds the diversity in the shape of the pelvis causes the remarkable diversity in the shape of the kidneys.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition by Charles Darwin

Instead of being attentive and eager to drink in the story or the information, we have not enough respect for the talker to keep quiet.
— from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden

I assured him that he must be mistaken by almost half, for I had not left the country from whence I came above two hours before I dropt into the sea.
— from Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World by Jonathan Swift

By cell-division it grows and progresses step by step through each lower realm of being until it comes to be a water-creature with gills; and science teaches that all organic life on this planet once dwelt in the seas.
— from The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. (Walter Yeeling) Evans-Wentz

Here I found myself confronted with a problem, the solving of which I was just at that time disposed to take as easily as possible, and displayed my courage by discarding all prejudice, and that daringly, in the short criticism just mentioned in which I simply scoffed at Euryanthe.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

LXII 550 Unworthy wretch (quoth he) of so great grace, ° How dare I thinke such glory to attaine?
— from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I by Edmund Spenser

Here the position of the stake being determined by Mr. Hirst, who was at the theodolite, I pierced the ice with the auger, [Pg 291] drove in the stake, and descended
— from The Glaciers of the Alps Being a narrative of excursions and ascents, an account of the origin and phenomena of glaciers and an exposition of the physical principles to which they are related by John Tyndall

They caught up two fast ponies, and clumb onto ’em, dug in they spurs, and started eastwards as fast as they could go.
— from Alec Lloyd, Cowpuncher by Eleanor Gates

All you do is to split the plank and ruin his life.
— from The Arm-Chair at the Inn by Francis Hopkinson Smith

And Madeira Lodge tended to become more and more divided into two silently hostile parties.
— from The Raft by Coningsby Dawson

If he had had a cap, he had evidently parted with it during his dive into the sea.
— from A Rogue by Compulsion An Affair of the Secret Service by Victor Bridges

Pursuing, the next day, our course through the town, we dropped into the Somerset House Exhibition, where there could not have been less than two thousand of our unhappy fellow-creatures, who had paid, all of them, one shilling, most of them two shillings, mewed up in close hot rooms, with hardly space to move or breathe, and without the smallest refreshment; nay, not even a crust of bread—not even a drop of water to relieve them in their lamentable condition.
— from The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore Hook by Theodore Edward Hook

Decorative idler though she is, Helen would make an excellent mother.'
— from Franklin Kane by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

They forced them in where the grass was dead in the space of the half-mile track; So William prayed that the hand of fate might suddenly strike him blue
— from The Man from Snowy River by A. B. (Andrew Barton) Paterson

Dreaming is the safety valve through which it all escapes, with a terrible spluttering, an intensely hot vapor and floating images which instantly disappear.
— from The Nabob, Vol. 1 (of 2) by Alphonse Daudet

During the wait, we ordered a full wardrobe of clothing made, as we could hardly expect to find any stores down in the South Seas.
— from Through the South Seas with Jack London by Martin Johnson