“Sir,” I replied, “I can vouch for this not being a shave, and that his Majesty, the Emperor Nicholas the First of Russia, expired yesterday; and what is more, I will lay you a wager of it.”
— from Soyer's Culinary Campaign: Being Historical Reminiscences of the Late War. With The Plain Art of Cookery for Military and Civil Institutions by Alexis Soyer

“It was because of a young heifer,” said Joseph Antony, “that I was after buying at the fair of Rosnacree ere yesterday, the wickedest one I ever seen.
— from Priscilla's Spies by George A. Birmingham

Think of it, Dr. Weilen, the father of Rabbi Eliezer, your grandfather and my wife's as well, that is, your great-grandfather, Rabbi Akiba, was married three times, and had nine children.
— from Simon Eichelkatz; The Patriarch. Two Stories of Jewish Life by Ulrich Frank

And now, fragments of ruinous enclosure, yawning window-gap and crazy wall, deserted houses, leaking wells, broken water-tanks, spectral cypress-trees, patches of tangled vine, and the changing of the track to a long, irregular, disordered lane where everything was crumbling away, from the unsightly buildings to the jolting road—now, these objects showed that they were nearing Rome.
— from Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens