Through the obscurity which hid their faces their thoughts seemed to dart at each other like serpents shooting venom.
— from Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

And touching that mildew upon which the editor of Le Soleil so pertinaciously insists, that he employs the word no less than three times in the brief paragraph just quoted, is he really unaware of the nature of this mildew?
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

—Edmund "Crouchback," Earl of Lancaster, second son of Henry III.
— from A Complete Guide to Heraldry by Arthur Charles Fox-Davies

Thus ended our little Sabbath school in the pious town of St. Michael's.
— from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

But I had no choice, no power even of longer struggle; steps were heard along the gallery, and the voice of the preacher drew near.
— from The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Venegas had already committed the fatal error of letting Sebastiani slip away unmolested: he now hesitated between the idea of carrying out his own plan, and that of obeying Cuesta’s original orders, and after much hesitation sent his first division under General Lacy towards Toledo, while he himself, with the other four, marched by Tembleque upon Aranjuez.
— from A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. 2, Jan.-Sep. 1809 From the Battle of Corunna to the End of the Talavera Campaign by Charles Oman

Throughout he received the close attention of the jury, but that he was entirely successful in eradicating the effect of Littell's speech seemed very doubtful.
— from A Master Hand: The Story of a Crime by Richard Dallas

With the North not only not friendly to slavery, but henceforward bitterly hostile to slaveholders, and no more to be reckoned upon as heretofore, it might have been infallibly by the Southern white population in any difficulty with the blacks (a fact of which the negroes will be as well aware as their former masters)—with an invisible boundary stretching from ocean to ocean, over which they may fly without fear of a master's claim following them a single inch—with the hope and expectation of liberty suddenly snatched from them at the moment it seemed within their grasp—with the door of their dungeon once more barred between them and the light into which they were in the act of emerging—is it to be conceived, that these four millions of people, many thousands of whom are already free and armed, will submit without a struggle to be again thrust down into the hell of slavery?
— from Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation: 1838-1839 by Fanny Kemble

Riding due east, our long sharp shadows pointed ahead: there was a peace over all things.
— from In the Tail of the Peacock by Isabel Savory

It was not so dramatic when, time and time again, both he and his brother, Isidor, would insist upon bundling themselves in all sorts of disagreeable weather and going downtown or up, because an old employee of L. Straus & Son was to be buried or a new one of the retail store was ill.
— from The Romance of a Great Store by Edward Hungerford

On making further inquiry, he ascertained that Tophania (who was by this time near seventy years of age, and who seems to have begun her evil courses very soon after the execution of La Spara) sent large quantities of it to all parts of Italy in small vials, with the inscription "Manna of St. Nicholas of Barri.
— from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions — Volume 2 by Charles Mackay