The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers.
— from Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville

The inflammation continued to increase, and had now reached his first rib; and he said: 'Sister, my end is near.
— from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

He had reckoned without his host: Pulcheria Alexandrovna fairly rushed at him, seized him by both hands and was almost kissing them.
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When Sindbad had done speaking his guests withdrew, Hindbad having first received a hundred sequins, but all returned next day to hear the story of the seventh voyage, Sindbad thus began.
— from The Arabian Nights Entertainments by Andrew Lang

‘Put your foot on mine, David,’ says Llewellyn to one of the company; his own foot was on the outward edge of a fairy ring as he spoke.
— from British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes

The stubborn lines of his face relaxed, and he said, with an abrupt drop to docility: "You WOULD see, if you'd be as merciful as you used to be: and heaven knows I've never needed it more!"
— from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

As she busied herself in arranging seats of mouldering wood, covered with leaves, for Reuben and her son, her voice danced through the gloomy forest in the measure of a song that she had learned in youth.
— from Mosses from an Old Manse, and Other Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne

For the payment of his feeble and mutinous troops, Constantine was compelled to despoil the churches with the promise of a fourfold restitution; and his sacrilege offered a new reproach to the enemies of the union.
— 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

At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles, he showed his weariness from the night's effort so unmistakeably that Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his common-sense did not approve, that his inclination had compromised his dignity when reason slept, again deterred her.
— from Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy

But his first remembrance as he stared towards the oblong of eight lights was not the girl, not all the grape-dark kissing; it was a sudden stab of contrition—"The letter!
— from Forward from Babylon by Louis Golding

He was good-looking, entirely of her kind, had been, after a fashion, raised at her side; and Sylvia's wealth would be agreeable to the Dalrymple bank account.
— from The Guarded Heights by Wadsworth Camp

Such insight fascinated Ralph, and he strayed off into wondering why it did not qualify every financier to be a novelist, and what intrinsic barrier divided the two arts.
— from The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

In 1458, at Strassburg, the Burgermeister, Hans Drachenfels, and his colleagues refused at first to burn the Hussite missionary Frederic Reiser and his servant Anna Weiler, but their resistance was overcome and they were finally forced to execute the sentence.
— from A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume I by Henry Charles Lea

“It will be well for you to understand how happily we have solved this question of property, but of course we could not have found such a solution until we had first reached a high spiritual plane and learned the lesson of true brotherhood.
— from Daybreak; A Romance of an Old World by James Cowan

While Pedro’s father reluctantly accepted his son’s emphatic declaration, the most trusted advisers and counsellors of the King, Diego Lopez Pacheco, Pedro Coello, and Alvaro Calvarez, did not, because they were afraid lest the influence of the beautiful and accomplished Iñez de Castro—no matter whether she was legally married to Pedro or not—would be dangerous and possibly fatal to their own preëminence at the court, as soon as Pedro should succeed his father on the throne.
— from Famous Assassinations of History from Philip of Macedon, 336 B. C., to Alexander of Servia, A. D. 1903 by Francis Johnson

Neither the horse dung, nor the sweepings from the few rabbits and hens she kept, made a sufficient supply.
— from The Soil (La terre): A Realistic Novel by Émile Zola