Alexis gained the slash which adorns his face in a tavern, and the man who gave the blow had just lost to him a large sum of money, and considered his opponent’s success to be rather the result of dexterity than fortune.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

[Pg 290] to more arbitrary and corrupt changes of pronunciation, within a few years, than had before taken place in a century; and in Perry's Dictionary, not to mention the errors in what he most arrogantly calls his " Only sure Guide to the English Tongue," there are whole pages in which there are scarcely two or three words marked for a just pronunciation.
— from Dissertations on the English Language, with Notes, Historical and Critical; to Which is Added, by Way of Appendix, an Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling, With Dr. Franklin's Arguments on that Subject by Noah Webster

There are several kinds of Bahia, natives of western North America, Mexico, and Chile, herbs or shrubs, more or less woolly.
— from Field Book of Western Wild Flowers by Margaret Armstrong

It seemed as if he regarded it merely as confirming his own suspicions that something was wrong, even though it shed no real light on the matter.
— from The Treasure-Train by Arthur B. (Arthur Benjamin) Reeve

To make a cold Hash of Sturgeon.
— from The accomplisht cook or, The art & mystery of cookery by Robert May

And in more than one of the larger towns you may see in the court of some great miya a countless host of stone foxes, of all dimensions, from toy-figures but a few inches high to the colossi whose pedestals tower above your head, all squatting around the temple in tiered ranks of thousands.
— from Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan: First Series by Lafcadio Hearn

In places the bounding wall runs on the very edge of a precipice, and many a crazy house, overhanging, seems ready to topple into the abyss.
— from By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy by George Gissing

And she often seeing him without any collar on, and needing a shave mebbe, and cherishing her own secret romantic dreams, while like as not he's prosily figuring out how he's going to make the next payment on the endowment policy.
— from Somewhere in Red Gap by Harry Leon Wilson