In some of the houses over which my eyes roam so coldly guilt is entering into hearts that are still tenanted by a debased and trodden virtue; guilt is on the very edge of commission, and the impending deed might be averted; guilt is done, and the criminal wonders if it be irrevocable.
— from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"No, but Monsieur cannot make me believe that my ears resemble shells, coloured in pink and silver.
— from Annette, the Metis Spy: A Heroine of the N.W. Rebellion by J. E. (Joseph Edmund) Collins

As England must make every regular soldier count, and as she depended upon the efficiency of the few rather than on numbers, she had trained her men in musketry.
— from My Year of the War Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete Form by Frederick Palmer

I am alluding to M. Eugène Rouher, sometimes called the vice-emperor.
— from An Englishman in Paris: Notes and Recollections by Albert D. (Albert Dresden) Vandam

Hurt by the many harsh things he said, she told him, "the possession of ten times the estate could convey no pleasure to her bosom, while it was tortured with the idea, that he, who had the best right to it, was secluded from every comfort of life; and that, whenever it should be in her power, she would not fail to make every reparation she could, for the violence offered to an innocent, injured, man."
— from The Sylph, Volume I and II by Cavendish, Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire

Mr. Tulane entered the grocery business twenty-five years ago, a business that any ambitious man of his race may enter, requiring small capital but unlimited patience and close attention to business.
— from Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization by Lyman Beecher Stowe

As England must make every regular soldier count and as she depended upon the efficiency of the few rather than on numbers, she had trained her men in musketry.
— from My Year of the Great War by Frederick Palmer

His features, of the most exquisite regularity, seemed chiselled in marble, owing to his intense pallor, for he had just discovered in Nyssia, although she was veiled with the veil of a young bride, the same woman whose face had been betrayed to his gaze by the treachery of Boreas under the walls of Bactria.
— from King Candaules by Théophile Gautier