And he hath seen when the said fish have been frozen in the sledge, so as that he hath taken a fish and broke a-pieces, so hard it hath been; and yet the same fishes taken out of the snow, and brought into a hot room, will be alive and leap up and down.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

No doubt she was a wicked person, and no doubt she had murdered Ustane when she stood in her path, but then she was very faithful, and by a law of nature man is apt to think but lightly of a woman’s crimes, especially if that woman be beautiful, and the crime be committed for the love of him.
— from She by H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard

Then they led him to a room and told him to strip for a bath; after which he had to walk down a long gallery, past the grated cell doors of the inmates of the jail.
— from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Then did Babbitt, almost tearful with joy at being coaxed instead of bullied, at being permitted to stop fighting, at being able to desert without injuring his opinion of himself, cease utterly to be a domestic revolutionist.
— from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

When Darius advanced into the Moldavian desert, between the Danube and the Niester, the king of the Scythians sent him a mouse, a frog, a bird, and five arrows; a tremendous allegory!
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

long, the legs and feet are black and the front covered with 6 scales the hinder part smothe, the toes are also imbrecated, four in number long and armed with long sharp black tallons.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

He had a pair of pistols in the holsters of his saddle, but he did not draw them: there was no danger from a blackfellow a hundred yards off.
— from The Book of the Bush Containing Many Truthful Sketches of the Early Colonial Life of Squatters, Whalers, Convicts, Diggers, and Others Who Left Their Native Land and Never Returned by George Dunderdale

Many thousands of the Christians, flying from a devastated land and a merciless enemy, sought refuge beyond the Austrian frontier, and became a burden upon the Austrian Government.
— from A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878 by Charles Alan Fyffe

Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts doth clear.
— from Spare Hours by John Brown

We have a sense of obligation irrespective of consequence, the violation of which is followed again by a sense of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame.
— from Essays in Literature and History by James Anthony Froude

I looked at Blenkiron, shuffling his Patience cards with his old sleepy smile, and Sandy, dressed like some bandit in melodrama, his lean face as brown as a nut, his bare arms all tattooed with crimson rings, and the fox pelt drawn tight over brow and ears.
— from Greenmantle by John Buchan

On the right and left the ploughed hill-land showed like vast, grey, vague seas intersected by this ribbon, this roadway white with frost, and brilliant as with metallic lustre.
— from The Fortune of the Rougons by Émile Zola

Full of this dim and temperate bliss, he went on to fling the ewe over upon her other side, covering her head with his knee, gradually running the shears line after line round her dewlap; thence about her flank and back, and finishing over the tail.
— from Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Thus, virtue cannot exist without free agency, because a free choice between good and evil is involved in the idea of virtue , so that the proposition means no more than this—that what contains freedom cannot be without freedom.
— from Theism; being the Baird Lecture of 1876 by Robert Flint