My first impulse was one of despair, but my second was towards joy.
— from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

My first impulse was one of despair, but my second was toward joy.
— from Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 by Charles Herbert Sylvester

Then down the roughest track, only smoothed by the blocks, the marble is dragged by teams of oxen, driven by men sitting backward, to the railroad or the harbor.
— from Joseph Pennell's Pictures of the Wonder of Work Reproductions of a Series of Drawings, Etchings, and Lithographs, Made by Him about the World, 1881-1915, with Impressions and Notes by the Artist by Joseph Pennell

“Now we have got some of our old dried bear meat,” said he.
— from The Young Alaskans by Emerson Hough

A few puny mill-wheels have indeed revolved for thirty years or so, but these were of no greater significance than the thousands of others driven by mountain streams or by the currents of ordinary rivers.
— from Every-day Science: Volume 6. The Conquest of Nature by Edward Huntington Williams

"Le Roi Ferdinand" might almost be an enlarged reproduction of some little girl's Doll-King, dressed up in silver tinsel and left out of doors, by mistake, some rainy evening.
— from Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions by John Cowper Powys

[178] My first impulse was one of despair, but my second was towards joy.
— from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson