We steamed again for Santa Barbara, where we only lay an hour, and passed through its canal and round Point Conception, stopping at San Luis Obispo to land my friend, as I may truly call him after this long passage together, Captain Wilson, whose most earnest invitation to stop here and visit him at his rancho I was obliged to decline.
— from Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana

Certain speculations followed, referring to a poor relation of the family—one Miss Clack, whom I have mentioned in my account of the birthday dinner, as sitting next to Mr. Godfrey, and having a pretty taste in champagne.
— from The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

This was one of the first good effects of my having learnt a little to scribble; another was, that the leading men, seeing a newspaper now in the hands of one who could also handle a pen, thought it convenient to oblige and encourage me.
— from Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

But the discovery came too late; the report of the calumny, and the hasty seizure of his estate, had already provoked the indignant chief to the rebellion of which he was so unjustly accused.
— 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

Major Hilton pricked up his ears to listen; but it was drowned immediately in another blast outside that sealed the mouth of the dugout like a blow from a gigantic hammer and plunged them into complete darkness thick with dust and sand.
— from Walking Shadows: Sea Tales and Others by Alfred Noyes

Send him to me to-morrow by five o’clock; I will have Derville here and put them in communication.”
— from The Works of Balzac: A linked index to all Project Gutenberg editions by Honoré de Balzac

He took her up in his arms, put the invisible cap into his pocket, also picking up the wicked dwarf, whom he carried along with him.
— from Polish Fairy Tales by A. J. (Antoni Józef) Gliński

The Romans may have added little to abstract philosophy or to metaphysics, but they made the somewhat barren abstractions of Zeno the Stoic into something more than a philosophy, into a faith which had a power to influence conduct far beyond the power of the State system of half-Greek Olympian Gods.
— from The Grandeur That Was Rome by J. C. (John Clarke) Stobart

The general who has given him a permit to inspect Christophe's stronghold sends a messenger secretly in advance with instructions reversing his order: the commandant refuses lodgings to "the American who has come to take the fort."
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 25, April, 1873 by Various

It has been said that Mlle de Tricotrin had a pretty taste in costume, and it was her delight to devise modifications of the Eastern attires, which surrounded her amongst the lower orders, and dress her pretty maid in them.
— from Kophetua the Thirteenth by Julian Stafford Corbett

When I thought further of the matter, I judged, from the meanness of his rank and his apparent poverty, that I could not have [234] chosen better.
— from St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century by William Godwin

She lived back in the scenes of her courtship, with the new bitter consciousness of what had been in Grandcourt’s mind—certain now, with her present experience of him, that he had a peculiar triumph in conquering her dumb repugnance, and that ever since their marriage he had had a cold exultation in knowing her fancied secret.
— from Daniel Deronda by George Eliot