The Shepherdsons and Grangerfords used the same steamboat landing, which was about two mile above our house; so sometimes when I went up there with a lot of our folks I used to see a lot of the Shepherdsons there on their fine horses.
— from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here.
— from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

IN WHICH IS CONTINUED THE ADVENTURE OF THE KNIGHT OF THE GROVE, TOGETHER WITH THE SENSIBLE, ORIGINAL, AND TRANQUIL COLLOQUY THAT PASSED BETWEEN THE TWO SQUIRES The knights and the squires made two parties, these telling the story of their lives, the others the story of their loves; but the history relates first of all the conversation of the servants, and afterwards takes up that of the masters; and it says that, withdrawing a little from the others, he of the Grove said to Sancho, "A hard life it is we lead and live, senor, we that are squires to knights-errant; verily, we eat our bread in the sweat of our faces, which is one of the curses God laid on our first parents."
— from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

But when these bad traits have an opportunity of showing themselves later on, our first impression generally receives its justification.
— from Essays of Schopenhauer by Arthur Schopenhauer

Interspersed about the room, crossing and recrossing in endless irregularity, were innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time-worn, piled desperately with much-bethumbed books, and so beseamed with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

prepare oneself; serve an apprenticeship &c. (learn) 539; lay oneself out for, get into harness, gird up one's loins, buckle on one's armor, reculer pour mieux sauter[Fr], prime and load, shoulder arms, get the steam up, put the horses to.
— from Roget's Thesaurus by Peter Mark Roget

111 and got his red objects in good focus, the blue and green portions of his picture would necessarily be more or less out of focus.
— from How it Works Dealing in simple language with steam, electricity, light, heat, sound, hydraulics, optics, etc., and with their applications to apparatus in common use by Archibald Williams

He ended at Constantinople his long and glorious life; and if the prerogative was personal, the title was used by his successors till the middle of the fourteenth century, with the singular, though true, addition of lords of one fourth and a half of the Roman empire.
— 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

At noon home to dinner, and my wife and Harman and girl abroad to buy things, and I walked out to several places to pay debts, and among other things to look out for a coach, and saw many; and did light on one for which I bid L50, which do please me mightily, and I believe I shall have it.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

The focal attention is centred on the Infanta, with the figures on either side more or less out of focus, those on the extreme right being quite blurred.
— from The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed

Yea, I will set it forth in words, and thou thy tale shalt hear: Lo ye, the youth that yonder leans upon the headless spear, 760 Fate gives him nighest place today; he first of all shall rise, Blent blood of Troy and Italy, unto the earthly skies: Silvius is he, an Alban name, thy son, thy latest born; He whom thy wife Lavinia now, when thin thy life is worn, Beareth in woods to be a king and get a kingly race, Whence comes the lordship of our folk within the Long White Place.
— from The Æneids of Virgil, Done into English Verse by Virgil

To be thrust back abruptly into the very life of our forebears was magical, and the excitement and delight of it kept us whispering together long after we should have been asleep.
— from A Son of the Middle Border by Hamlin Garland

And even these resembled those pleasant avocations which fill up the elegant morning leisure of our fashionable ladies at home.
— from Typee: A Romance of the South Seas by Herman Melville

It is not one of the worst tricks to burn a thread handsomely and make it whole again, the manner whereof is this: take two threads or small laces, of one foot length a piece, roll up one of them round, which will be then about the bigness of a pea, put the same between your left fore-finger and your thumb, then take the other thread, and hold it forth at length betwixt your fore-finger and thumb of each hand, holding all your fingers daintily, as young gentlewomen are taught to hold up a morsel of meat; then let one cut asunder the same thread in the middle; when that is done, put the tops of your two thumbs together, and so shall you, with less suspicion, receive the piece of thread which you hold in your right-hand, into your left, without opening of your left finger and thumb; then holding those two pieces as you did before it was cut, let these two be also cut asunder in the midst, and they conveyed again as before, until they be very short, and then roll all those ends together, and keep that ball of thread before the other in the left hand, and with a knife thrust the same into a candle, where you may hold it until the said ball of thread be burnt to ashes; then pull back the knife with your right-hand, and leave the ashes with the other ball betwixt your fore-finger and thumb of your left hand together, take pains to rub the ashes till your thread be renewed, and draw out that thread at length which you had, all this while, betwixt your fore-finger and thumb.
— from Hocus Pocus; or The Whole Art of Legerdemain, in Perfection. By which the meanest capacity may perform the whole without the help of a teacher. Together with the Use of all the Instruments belonging thereto. by Henry Dean

Hereupon St. Bernard considers how this fourth grade of love will be attained in the resurrection, and “perpetually possessed, when God only is loved and we love ourselves only for His sake, that He may be the recompense and aim ( praemium ) of those who love themselves, the eternal recompense of those who love eternally.”
— from The Mediaeval Mind (Volume 1 of 2) A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages by Henry Osborn Taylor

After some days of wandering, during which he eat pieces of his |142| worn-out boots in lieu of other food, he struck the Nile, and, wandering along, ignorant of the direction he was taking, he came upon a party of dervishes, whom he tried to communicate with, and after, by gesticulations, showing them that he wanted bread or food, he commenced to “soothe the savage breast” with strains from his violin.
— from A Prisoner of the Khaleefa: Twelve Years Captivity at Omdurman by Charles Neufeld

The lads—"poor children" they were called by a white-haired man who watched them—were keeping up the valour of their hearts by noisy demonstrations; but having seen the death-carts pass through the darkness between lines of silent and dejected onlookers, I could not bear to look into the faces of those little ones of France who were following their fathers to the guns.
— from The Soul of the War by Philip Gibbs