"Nine years, my dear," he said after thinking for a little while, "have passed since I received a letter from a lady living in seclusion, written with a stern passion and power that rendered it unlike all other letters I have ever read.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

“Well,” he answered, “Iʼll try to bear with it for a little longer, in spite of the daily agony.
— from Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest. Vol. 2 (of 3) by R. D. (Richard Doddridge) Blackmore

There is a mile between the first and last letters in smiles.”
— from Dick Merriwell's Trap; Or, The Chap Who Bungled by Burt L. Standish

"I thank you," he said, "for your kind caution, but having nearly finished a long life, I set but little value on what remains of it.
— from Benjamin Franklin by John Torrey Morse

I begin to think my uncle is quite right—that the best thing we could do would be to make a truce—to draw the game—for some twenty or thirty years, and try if the new generation might not prove wiser in expedients than their fathers.” “A luckless land, indeed!” said Mark, who, coming up at the moment, had overheard the last words.
— from The O'Donoghue: Tale of Ireland Fifty Years Ago by Charles James Lever

And if on the contrary, he lives for a little longer, I shall find him still alive, if I start to-morrow.
— from The Substance of a Dream by F. W. (Francis William) Bain

The answer to the first question, and partly to the second, is that a more magnificent and more richly significant Oxford than the present once occupied the isle of Osney and the river quarter now so degraded; [1] but all that proper fortune of the river, all that beauty and history, has been incredibly blotted out, leaving only its first and last links in St. Frideswide’s and Worcester, together with a few names and inconsiderable fragments.
— from Rivers of Great Britain. The Thames, from Source to Sea. Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial by Various

The brick house known as Salona stands solidly on a portion of the original grant known as "Langley," a tract named by Thomas Lee for ancestral Lee lands in Shropshire, England.
— from Salona, Fairfax County, Virginia by Ellen L. Anderson

It was a faint, metallic rattle, and he leaned forward a little, listening in strained attention.
— from A Prairie Courtship by Harold Bindloss

Pound them together; add ale for a liquid, let it stand for a night, and add fifty libcorns
— from Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles by Daniel Hack Tuke

So was I fain to weep for very joy at all this that had come to me, and must turn away for a little lest it should be seen.
— from A Thane of Wessex Being a Story of the Great Viking Raids into Somerset by Charles W. (Charles Watts) Whistler