They had sacrifices and prayers and made a kind of lottery about whether they should eat me; when, as luck would have it, the chief had lost his eldest son a year before, and the priests said I was him come back.
— from A Colonial Reformer, Vol. 1 (of 3) by Rolf Boldrewood

From the examples given of some of the questions that come up for decision in the courts of Weihaiwei it may be seen that in this outlying part of the British Empire, no less than in India and the rest of our Asiatic possessions, the chief qualifications necessary for a judge or magistrate are not so much a knowledge of law and legal procedure as a ready acquaintance with the language, customs, religious ideas and ordinary mode of life of the people and an ability to sympathise with or at least to understand their prejudices and points of view.
— from Lion and Dragon in Northern China by Johnston, Reginald Fleming, Sir

“If you’ll wait here, I’ll go and fetch my man; we’ll make a kind of litter and carry her to the hut—p’r’aps we could fix up something out of the things lying about here,” and he looked round.
— from Just a Girl by Charles Garvice

You strike me as kind of lonely, as the Americans say—rather cut off and isolated in your grandeur.
— from The Tragic Muse by Henry James

He had brought a present too, a bertha of Belgian lace, and when I saw him and Father Hogan and Rev. Mr. Hughson and the bank president and the artists so near together it gave me a kind of lion and lamb feeling that smacked of the millennium.
— from Minerva's Manoeuvres: The Cheerful Facts of a "Return to Nature" by Charles Battell Loomis

Say, mine are kind of loose around the wrists!
— from The Motor Rangers' Wireless Station by John Henry Goldfrap

On this day the evidence of Ciotto and Bertano, the booksellers who had known Bruno at Frankfort as well as at Venice (Bertano was also at Zürich), was taken; it was in the main favourable, only Bertano recalled the prior of the Carmelite monastery at Frankfort having said of Bruno that he spent most of his time in writing, and went about dreaming dreams and meditating new things, that he had a fine mind and knowledge of letters, and was a universal man, but that he had no religion so far as the prior knew, and he quoted a saying of Bruno’s to the effect that the apostles did not know everything, and that he had the mind, if he wished, to make all the world of one religion; while Ciotto reported the common belief in Frankfort that Bruno was a man of no religion .
— from Giordano Bruno by J. Lewis (James Lewis) McIntyre

I'm older 'n you: the plough, the axe, the mill, All kinds o' labor an' all kinds o' skill, Would be a rabbit in a wile-cat's claw, Ef't warn't for thet slow critter, 'stablished law; Onsettle thet , an' all the world goes whiz, A screw is loose in everythin' there is: Good buttresses once settled, don't you fret An' stir 'em: take a bridge's word for thet!
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 52, February, 1862 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

But to have so mature a knowledge of life and of art, so wide an outlook on experience and [Pg viii] so philosophic a control of it, as to find consistently the meaning of any book, classic or modern, is to be among the few great critics, the few in whom criticism is a function and not an event.
— from Pre-Raphaelite and other Poets by Lafcadio Hearn