Why did he always feel as though “that woman” were fated to appear at each critical moment of his life, and tear the thread of his destiny like a bit of rotten string?
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The child becomes a well grown boy before he paces the length and breadth of rooms so as to compare their areas and add to his mensuration lesson an example from home.
— from Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery by George Iles

“My two cocoa-nut trees were evidently the outlying sentinels, or advance-guards of these; for they stood alone on the beach a hundred yards or more in front of the jungle and brushwood, which extended back from the shore in a mass of green that stood well out, in pleasant relief to the gleaming sand, as far away as the eye could reach, clothing the slopes of the high mountains which rose up in the centre of the island running like a backbone or rocky spine all along its length from its extreme nor’-easterly point down far away to the south.
— from The Penang Pirate and, The Lost Pinnace by John C. (John Conroy) Hutcheson

It was twisted twice around Kedsty's neck, and the loose end rippled down over his shoulder, glowing like a bit of rich sable in the lamplight .
— from The Valley of Silent Men: A Story of the Three River Country by James Oliver Curwood

"Canek ordered his vassals to bring from the canoes birds, fishes, cakes, honey, and gold (though only a little of the latter), and beads of red snail-shells, which the Indians value highly.
— from History of the Spanish Conquest of Yucatan and of the Itzas Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Hard University. Vol. VII. by Philip Ainsworth Means

Adjoining U——'s chamber, which is in the tower, there is a little oratory, hung round with sacred prints of very ancient date, and with crucifixes, holy-water vases, and other consecrated things; and here, within a glass case, there is the representation of an undraped little boy in wax, very prettily modelled, and holding up a heart that looks like a bit of red sealing-wax.
— from Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 2. by Nathaniel Hawthorne

It was little and built of rough stone.
— from The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I held the piece of skin (it looked more like a bit of rat skin than the remains of a monkey) out to her
— from The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes: A Study of Ideational Behavior by Robert Mearns Yerkes