Those were the good old days, eh, your Holiness!
— from A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 2 (of 2) by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

And you will go on diminishing every year until your tribes are extinct.
— from The Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens, Volume 1 (of 2) by Hazard Stevens

I must tumble down headlong into the Gulph of dangerous error; yet notwithstanding I have forced myself to send these few lines, if so be I may clear to you a truth, you now seem to be offended at, because of the ill consequences, which (you think) lately have and again may be drawn from it, by the ill conduct of some Men.
— from The Witchcraft Delusion in New England: Its Rise, Progress, and Termination (Vol. 2 of 3) by Robert Calef

It was a group which had gone on diminishing each year, and now, by the casualties of death, sickness, and exile, had dwindled down at last to scarcely a dozen; and even of these few, it was plain to see, some were offering the last homage they were ever like to render on earth.
— from Gerald Fitzgerald, the Chevalier: A Novel by Charles James Lever

H2 anchor CHAPTER IX: THE WHITE SQUALL On deck, beneath the awning, I dozing lay and yawning; It was the grey of dawning, Ere yet the sun arose; And above the funnel's roaring, And the fitful wind's deploring, I heard the cabin snoring With universal nose.
— from Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo by William Makepeace Thackeray