In the country or at the sea-side a straw hat or wide-awake may take the place of the beaver, and the nuisance of gloves be even dispensed with in the former.
— from The Gentlemen's Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness Being a Complete Guide for a Gentleman's Conduct in All His Relations Towards Society by Cecil B. Hartley

They seemed to swarm over the place all at once, till the lamplight, shining on their moving dark bodies and glittering, baleful eyes, made the place look like a bank of earth set with fireflies.
— from Dracula by Bram Stoker

summit-growers, a term applied to the ferns, mosses, and lichens (cryptogams), as growing by extension upwards, in contradistinction to endogens and exogens.
— from The New Gresham Encyclopedia. A to Amide Vol. 1 Part 1 by Various

POLL, strip, plunder, gain by extortion.
— from Epicoene; Or, The Silent Woman by Ben Jonson

The cloud grew blacker every minute, heavier and more silent.
— from The History of a Crime The Testimony of an Eye-Witness by Victor Hugo

10 When, a little time ago, a New Zealand chief showed his high appreciation of a learned German by eating his eyes to improve his own intellectual vision, the case seemed to some to call for more and better protected missionaries; but the chief might find in the sacramental communion of the missionaries the real principle of his faith.
— from Demonology and Devil-lore by Moncure Daniel Conway

It proved also that a judge could set aside the right of a citizen to a trial by jury, supposed to be guaranteed by every safeguard which could be thrown around it by this same Constitution.
— from The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years by Ida Husted Harper

Dr. W. E. Ekblaw has sent me some very full notes on the habits of the knot in northwestern Greenland in which he says: The knot is one of the commoner shore birds of northwest Greenland, but even so, not numerous anywhere.
— from Life Histories of North American Shore Birds, Part 1 (of 2) by Arthur Cleveland Bent

It rests on their mild forwards in a sort of a halo that shines off on the hard things of this life and makes 'em endurable, takes the edge kinder off of the hardest, keenest sufferin's, and goes before 'em throwin' a light over the deep waters that must be passed, and sort o' melts in and loses itself in the ineffible radiance that streams out from acrost the other side.
— from Samantha at the World's Fair by Marietta Holley

Here is a table which shows how American cotton left the Southern ports for England and the Continent in the alternate decennial years beginning in 1790, three years before the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney.
— from The Fabric of Civilization A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States by Guaranty Trust Company of New York

I like Graydon better every day; he's a dear old boy, and though he's in the clouds half the time when he's supposed to be coaching me, I can see that he knows more than half the tutors in London put together.
— from The Quiver, 11/1899 by Anonymous

Count Rumford and Josiah Willard Gibbs , by E.E. Slosson; Alexander Wilson and Audubon , by Witmer Stone; Silliman , by Daniel C. Gilman; Joseph Henry , by Simon Newcomb; Louis Agassiz and Spencer Fullerton Baird , by Charles F. Holder; Jeffries Wyman , by B.G. Wilder; Asa Gray , by John M. Coulter; James Dwight Dana , by William North Rice; Marsh , by Geo.
— from Socialism and Democracy in Europe by Samuel Peter Orth

They all agreed that it was "perfectly awful and dreadful," and that it made you shudder to look into it; and that they were glad baby Eddo was safely out of the way.
— from Jimmy, Lucy, and All by Sophie May

Berreo affirmed that there fell an hundred riuers into Orenoque from the North and South, whereof the least was as big as Rio grande, that passed betweene Popayan and Nueuo reyno de Granada (Rio Grande being esteemed one of the renowmed riuers in all the West Indies, and numbred among the great riuers of the world:) but he knew not the names of any of these, but Caroli onely; neither from what nations they descended, neither to what prouinces they led: for he had no meanes to discourse with the inhabitants at any time: neither was he curious in these things, being vtterly vnlearned, and not knowing the East from the West.
— from The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation — Volume 14 America, Part III by Richard Hakluyt

There life went on in a dull way from year to year, without gaiety, bustle, enterprise.
— from The Expositor's Bible: Judges and Ruth by Robert A. (Robert Alexander) Watson

[Pg 353] To George Borrow, Esq., Oulton Hall.
— from George Borrow and His Circle Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters of Borrow and His Friends by Clement King Shorter