I carried in cobs and wood from the long cellar, and filled both the stoves.
— from My Antonia by Willa Cather

Which player should succeed in placing the last cigar, assuming that they each will play in the best possible manner?
— from Amusements in Mathematics by Henry Ernest Dudeney

The supervisor is sitting extremely comfortably with his legs crossed and his arm hanging over the backrest here like some layabout.
— from The Trial by Franz Kafka

After a few strokes of the clock, the reiterated impressions merge and cover one another; we lose count and perceive the quality and rhythm but not the number of the sounds.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

Then consider the garden of “my own,” so overgrown, entangled with roses and lilies, as to be “a little wilderness”—the fawn loving to be there, and there “only”—the maiden seeking it “where it should lie”—and not being able to distinguish it from the flowers until “itself would rise”—the lying among the lilies “like a bank of lilies”—the loving to “fill itself with roses,” “And its pure virgin limbs to fold In whitest sheets of lilies cold,” and these things being its “chief” delights-and then the pre-eminent beauty and naturalness of the concluding lines, whose very hyperbole only renders them more true to nature when we consider the innocence, the artlessness, the enthusiasm, the passionate girl, and more passionate admiration of the bereaved child— “Had it lived long, it would have been Lilies without, roses within.”
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

Thence with him to my Lord Chancellor at Clarendon House, to a Committee for Tangier, where several things spoke of and proceeded on, and particularly sending Commissioners thither before the new Governor goes, which I think will signify as much good as any thing else that hath been done about the place, which is none at all.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

This made the Tin Woodman very unhappy, for he was always careful not to hurt any living creature; and as he walked along he wept several tears of sorrow and regret.
— from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum

But let us leave that to its own time; see if thou hast anything for us to eat in those alforjas, because we must presently go in quest of some castle where we may lodge to-night and make the balsam I told thee of, for I swear to thee by God, this ear is giving me great pain.” “I have here an onion and a little cheese and a few scraps of bread,” said Sancho, “but they are not victuals fit for a valiant knight like your worship.”
— from The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Complete by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

For, as we affirm, a thing can only remain the same with itself, whole and sound, when the same is added to it, or subtracted from it, in the same respect and in the same manner and in due proportion; and whatever comes or goes away in violation of these laws causes all manner of changes and infinite diseases and corruptions.
— from Timaeus by Plato

It was at the bath that Tiberius, impotent through old age and debauchery, was made young again by the touch little children applied to his breasts; these children he called “‘little fishes,” they sucked his withered breasts, his infected mouth, his livid lips, and finally his virile parts.
— from The Satyricon — Complete by Petronius Arbiter

For, suppose that there were as fixed laws of national as of individual life, can any man predict the period of the life of any individual, much less his destiny?
— from Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity by Robert Patterson

She felt her face grow a little cold, as if it paled, and her under-lip drew itself tight across her teeth.
— from A Lady of Quality Being a Most Curious, Hitherto Unknown History, as Related by Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff but Not Presented to the World of Fashion Through the Pages of The Tatler, and Now for the First Time Written Down by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Frenchman trailed after at a steadily increasing distance, until finally I could no longer hear his forceful remarks (uttered in two languages) concerning a certain corn which he possessed.
— from The River and I by John G. Neihardt

FOR ONCE GET TOGETHER Mr. Eugene Wobbles, who tried to live down his American ancestry in London clubs and was, consequently, more British than any Englishman, came to Mr. Courtney lazily apologetic.
— from Five Thousand an Hour: How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress by George Randolph Chester

At last Constance awoke; she was better, and I could leave her.
— from How It All Came Round by L. T. Meade

He lived in the Palmer house (which was burned in September 1899), and he kept a store in the little community and also served as its postmaster from 1822 to 1824.
— from Early American Scientific Instruments and Their Makers by Silvio A. Bedini

A furnished cottage had been engaged for them a mile and a half out of the town; a pretty place, half villa, half farmhouse, with walls of white plaster chequered with beams of black wood, and well-nigh buried in a luxuriant and trimly-kept flower-garden; a pleasant place, forming one of a little cluster of rustic buildings crowded about a gray old church in a nook of the roadway, where two or three green lanes met, and went branching off between overhanging hedges; a most retired spot, yet clamorous with that noise which is of all others cheerful and joyous,—the hubbub of farmyards, the cackle of poultry, the cooing of pigeons, the monotonous lowing of lazy cattle, and the squabbling grunt of quarrelsome pigs.
— from Aurora Floyd, Vol. 1 Fifth Edition by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

Is it any wonder that at one of our numerous mid-day lunches "Colonel" Norton fired the following rhyming retort at Field?— TO EUGENE FIELD Forgive, dear youth, the forwardness Of her who blushing sends you this, Because she must her love confess, Alas!
— from Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions — Volume 1 by Slason Thompson

In order to appreciate the full ultimate effect of such an interposition, it must be remembered that the solution of the great difficulty by means of emigration carried out on the scale and in the manner proposed, offers to the promoters of it the attraction of accomplishing their object by a cheap and summary process; while the other remedy, of enabling the population to live comfortably at home, can be arrived at only by an expensive, laborious, and protracted course of exertion: and it therefore behoves the Government, which holds the balance between contending parties, to take care to which side it lends its influence on a social question of this description.
— from The Irish Crisis by Charles E. (Charles Edward) Trevelyan