Never by look or word did she betray the slightest trace of strain or guilt.
— from The Lani People by Jesse F. (Jesse Franklin) Bone

The form of the Huron trembled in every fibre, and he raised his arm on high, but dropped it again with a bewildered air, like one who doubted.
— from The Last of the Mohicans; A narrative of 1757 by James Fenimore Cooper

A crazy old staircase I found it to be, feebly lighted on each landing by a club—headed little oil wick, dying away in a little dungeon of dirty glass.
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Shall I drive down to Hilton now and get leave?” “Oh, we don’t want leave.”
— from Howards End by E. M. (Edward Morgan) Forster

Of his boyhood and youth we know nothing, unless it be from the glimpse he gives us in the preface to his "Comedies" of himself as a boy looking on with delight while Lope de Rueda and his company set up their rude plank stage in the plaza and acted the rustic farces which he himself afterwards took as the model of his interludes.
— from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

The scorching heat and lack of water destroyed a great part of the army, and especially the beasts of burden; most of which perished from thirst and some of them even from the depth and heat of the sand, because it had been thoroughly scorched 356 by the sun.
— from The Anabasis of Alexander or, The History of the Wars and Conquests of Alexander the Great by Arrian

The son of Guiscard trod in the footsteps of his father; and the two destroyers are compared, by the Greeks, to the caterpillar and the locust, the last of whom devours whatever has escaped the teeth of the former.
— 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

Our laws of war do also ever inflict capital punishment on those that in the least break into good order, while at this time they have seen an entire army run into disorder.
— from The Wars of the Jews; Or, The History of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Flavius Josephus

Cervantes—what was the Date of his Death? —In the Life prefixed to a corrected edition of Jarvis's translation, published by Miller, 1801, it is stated to be April 23, 1616; and it is added: "It is a singular coincidence of circumstances, that the same day should deprive the world of two men of such transcendent abilities as Cervantes and Shakspeare, the latter of whom died in England on the very day that put an end to the life of the former in Spain."
— from Notes and Queries, Vol. IV, Number 94, August 16, 1851 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. by Various

All that day and all the next the flames smouldered, and the people, faint with hunger and sick with misery, looked on with dull eyes, unregarding.
— from Outlines of Jewish History from B.C. 586 to C.E. 1885 by Magnus, Katie, Lady

“Dr. Morgan Owen, Bishop of Llandaff, who died at Glasallt, parish of Myddfai, in 1645, was a descendant of the Meddygon, and an inheritor of much of their landed property in that parish, the bulk of which he bequeathed to his nephew, Morgan Owen, who died in 1667, and was succeeded by his son Henry Owen; and at the decease of the last of whose descendants, Roberts Lewis, Esqr., the estates became, through the will of one of the family, the property of the late D. A. S. Davies, Esqr., M.P., for Carmarthenshire.
— from Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales by Jonathan Ceredig Davies

I can pardon a man who wishes to make a collection of eggs and birds for his own private use, if he will content himself with one or two specimens of a kind, though he will find any collection much less satisfactory and less valuable than he imagines, but the professional nest-robber and skin collector should be put down, either by legislation or with dogs and shotguns.
— from Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes, and Other Papers by John Burroughs

Then Timon told them that he had a tree, which grew near his cave, which he should shortly have occasion to cut down, and he invited all his friends in Athens, high or low , of whatsoever degree, who wished to shun affliction, to come and take a taste of his tree before he cut it down; meaning that they might come and hang themselves on it and escape affliction that way.
— from Tales from Shakespeare by Charles Lamb

No sooner did the bumpkin feel himself at ease, than he launched out, as usual, into tremendous laudations of whalemen; declaring that whalemen alone deserved the name of sailors.
— from White Jacket; Or, The World on a Man-of-War by Herman Melville