Curious I halt and silent stand, Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket; Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?
— from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

“Excuse me!” said the jeune premier, overtaking him.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Now, if I were not happily so much engaged, Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, sweetly casting her eyes for a moment on me and considering where to put the particular letter she had just opened, "this would distress and disappoint me.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, [69] the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel edge, which are measured out by his plumb and foot rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop bill as in the history of a state,—do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.
— from Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here I fell into acquaintance and eat and drank with the divine, but know not who he is, and after an hour’s bait to myself and horses he, though resolved to have lodged there, yet for company would out again, and so we remounted at four o’clock, and he went with me as far almost as Tibbald’s and there parted with us, taking up there for all night, but finding our horses in good case and the night being pretty light, though by reason of clouds the moon did not shine out, we even made shift from one place to another to reach London, though both of us very weary.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

" "It is impossible that I should ever marry Sir James Chettam," said Dorothea.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

When her memory could be once more trusted to serve her, she would naturally refer to persons and events in the past with a certainty and a familiarity which no impostor could simulate, and so the fact of her identity, which her own appearance had failed to establish, might subsequently be proved, with time to help her, by the surer test of her own words.
— from The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

I endure my sorrow, and shall endure it until my life comes to a natural end.
— from Uncle Vanya: Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Tom's second blast was even more successful than the first, and enough of the hard rock was loosed and pulverized to give the Indian laborers ten days' work in removing it from the tunnel.
— from Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel; Or, The Hidden City of the Andes by Victor Appleton

Assiduously, in the pauses of his private conversation, every man smokes his long pipe, and drinks his beer or punch.
— from A Tramp's Wallet stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France by William Duthie

He made them in the late evening and in the early morning, snatching his sleep at intervals between the departing night and the returning day.
— from Life of a Scotch Naturalist: Thomas Edward, Associate of the Linnean Society. Fourth Edition by Samuel Smiles

" "Emma McChesney, you're not marrying me because a lot of overdressed, giggling, skittish old girls have taken a fancy to make eyes at me, are you!" Emma McChesney stood up very straight and tall.
— from Emma McChesney and Co. by Edna Ferber

Lee Randon made a sharp effort to rouse himself from what threatened to be a stupor faintly lurid with conceptions of insanity; and the result of this mental drawing himself erect was even more startling, more disconcerting, than his previous condition.
— from Cytherea by Joseph Hergesheimer

I planted myself every here under the trees in the fields and footpaths, by day and by night, and that is why I have never put myself into the charge of the many wheeled creatures that move on the rails and gone back thither, lest I might find the trees look small, and the elms mere switches, and the fields shrunken, and the brooks dry, and no voice anywhere.
— from Field and Hedgerow: Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies by Richard Jefferies

If one could dream of a nearness like that, which doubts nothing, and questions nothing, but which teaches the soul to move in as unconscious a unison with another soul as one's two eyes move, so that the brain cannot distinguish between the impressions of each, would not that be worth the loss of all that we hold most sweet?
— from At Large by Arthur Christopher Benson

When the song was ended, no one spoke for a time, and even Mr. Sims was silent.
— from The Man from Glengarry: A Tale of the Ottawa by Ralph Connor

steel pen from the enterprising merchant [shopkeeper] whose advertisement was to be found on the third page of this paper.—An interesting Surprise Party [cheap theatricals] had transpired [bah!] on Thursday evening last at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
— from Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works by Oliver Wendell Holmes