“He had good schooling in his young days and can speak like a book when so minded; and brave—a lion's nothing alongside of Long John!
— from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I shrug my shoulders at the stupidity of Madame de L——; still you should show her your displeasure, and counsel her not to be so idiotic.
— from Napoleon's Letters to Josephine, 1796-1812 For the First Time Collected and Translated, with Notes Social, Historical, and Chronological, from Contemporary Sources by Emperor of the French Napoleon I

One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his mind, was that he had been quite wrong in supposing from the recollections of the circle of his young days at college, that religion had outlived its day, and that it was now practically non-existent.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

She also devoted herself to letters in her young days, and continued them as long as she lived, loving and conversing with, in the time of her greatness, the most learned folks of her brother’s kingdom, who honored her so that they called her their Maecenas.”
— from A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 4 by François Guizot

Cardinal Manning, though himself in his younger days a cricketer, took a stern view of a priest playing.
— from The Priestly Vocation A Series of Fourteen Conferences Addressed to the Secular Clergy by Bernard Ward

Have you despatched a courier with my final determination?'—I replied in the affirmative.—'Very well,' said the Emperor, 'then by this time your Court knows that she must break with England before the 1st of September.
— from The Life of Napoleon I (Complete) by J. Holland (John Holland) Rose

“At five minutes past six,” he wrote, “ranged up on the starboard side of the sternmost ship, about three hundred yards distant, and commenced the action by broadsides, both ships returning our fire with the greatest spirit for about fifteen minutes.”
— from Some Stories of Old Ironsides by Holloway Halstead Frost

Undoubtedly this feeling tended to make her morbid in her younger days, and consequently dwarf her power.
— from The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, April 1885 by Chautauqua Institution

Not in the folly and frivolity of his youth did Alderic come to the tower, but he studied carefully for several years the manner in which burglars met their doom when they went in search of the treasure that he considered his.
— from The Book of Wonder by Lord Dunsany

The high road was only a few hundred yards distant, and could be plainly seen as a white interminable line, like a white tape, at the foot of the distant hills.
— from Corea or Cho-sen: The Land of the Morning Calm by Arnold Henry Savage Landor

The following is to his youngest daughter:—] Athenaeum Club, May 17, 1892.
— from Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3 by Thomas Henry Huxley

Monseigneur Jarlin, the head of the French mission in Peking, described the China of olden times by saying that in his young days all Chinamen had a rooted contempt for everything Western.
— from Changing China by Cecil, Florence Mary (Bootle-Wilbraham), Lady