One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Quite naturally, I led our conversation around to the giant unicorn, and I weighed our expedition's various chances for success or failure.
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World by Jules Verne

But if the only criticism to which material objects were obnoxious were a dialectical criticism, such as that contained in Kant's antinomies, the royal road to idealism coveted by Berkeley would be blocked; to be an idea in the mind would not involve lack of cognitive and representative value in that idea.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

It took nearly two months, but finally, under the impersonal lenses of cameras and recorders, the entrance port of the God-Egg swung open and revealed the dark interior.
— from The Lani People by Jesse F. (Jesse Franklin) Bone

Formerly the false system prevailed of encircling a city by a whole army, which buried itself in lines of circumvallation and contravallation.
— from The Art of War by Jomini, Antoine Henri, baron de

The Letter Of Condolence Intimate letters of condolence are like love letters, in that they are too sacred to follow a set form.
— from Etiquette by Emily Post

I LLUSTRATIONS of China and its People.
— from British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes

Mr. Utterson’s nerves, at this unlooked-for termination, gave a jerk that nearly threw him from his balance; but he recollected his courage and followed the butler into the laboratory building through the surgical theatre, with its lumber of crates and bottles, to the foot of the stair.
— from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Mr. Utterson's nerves, at this unlooked-for termination, gave a jerk that nearly threw him from his balance; but he re-collected his courage 55) and followed the butler into the laboratory building and through the surgical theatre, with its lumber of crates and bottles, to the foot of the stair.
— from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

If a general attack were delivered, and the army were once more repulsed, it risked its line of communication and its retreat on Madrid.
— from A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. 2, Jan.-Sep. 1809 From the Battle of Corunna to the End of the Talavera Campaign by Charles Oman

To mere ‘bellettristic triflers’ the existence of genuine abnormal and unexplained facts seems to have been the object of inquiry, and we must penitently admit that if genuine communications could really be opened with the dead, we would regard the circumstance with some degree of curious zest, even if the dead were on the intellectual level of curates and old women.
— from Cock Lane and Common-Sense by Andrew Lang

It occurs as the normal beginning of the inner life of children, and accompanies its development in such a manner as to become accessible to research, as an experimental fact.
— from Spontaneous Activity in Education by Maria Montessori

[Footnote: Cf. Poinsett to Monroe, May 10, 1822, Monroe MSS., in Library of Cong.; Adams, Memoirs, V., 315, VI., 57.]
— from Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 by Frederick Jackson Turner

3192 A low, indistinct murmur is heard, and reverberates from sale to sale, the muttering of private probity protesting against public probity, declaring to the new proprietor that his title is defective; it lacks one clause and a capital one, that of the surrender and cession, the formal renunciation, the authentic withdrawal of the former owner.
— from The Modern Regime, Volume 1 by Hippolyte Taine

“In London, of course: all people of that kind come back to London,” said Mr. Gotobed.
— from What Will He Do with It? — Complete by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron

I leaped off Cricket and went into the saloon after them.
— from The Rocky Mountain Wonderland by Enos A. Mills

Wrist, arms, shoulders, back, and legs of the angler were strained and pained by the efforts necessary to keep the taut line free of the boat, but A. ducked his head deftly once when the fish shot to the left of me at right angles, and lay low until I had it back in line of communication again.
— from Lines in Pleasant Places: Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler by William Senior

I believe I could have killed the whole pack, but it just then occurred to me that I was wasting our precious ammunition, and that, considering the value of powder and shot to us just now, the birds were hardly worth a load apiece; so I left off cracking at them.
— from The Young Voyageurs: Boy Hunters in the North by Mayne Reid