And if anybody said you was full of romance who heard you, wouldn't you have pitied his ignorance, and said there are other enjoyments we are capable of besides corporeal ones?
— from Nature and Human Nature by Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Nearly every form of religion which has yet been known to man seems at some time or other to have struck root in the soil of Mesopotamia; and there are but few of the number that have left no stumps or fossils to remind us of the days when they were yet flourishing in their pride.
— from The Cradle of Mankind; Life in Eastern Kurdistan by Edgar Thomas Ainger Wigram

The house, with her income, passed from her to the hospital endowed by Edmond Bland in a fit of rage with his youngest daughter; and the old lady's canary and the cheque, which fluttered some weeks later from the lawyer's letter, were the only possessions of hers that reached her niece.
— from The Romance of a Plain Man by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow