While walking near the wood of Monsieur le Prince, I laid a few snare in the runs; and while reclining on the banks of his Highness’s pieces of water, I slipped a few lines into his fish ponds.
— from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Some of the troopers did give chase, but it had soon to be abandoned; for the bird, in its effort to escape, speedily put a long interval between itself and its pursuers; plying its legs at full speed, and using its wings the while like a sail.
— from Anabasis by Xenophon

In the evening, after the performance, which was to be the last, I took the bank according to my promise: I lost a few sequins, but was caressed by everybody, and that is much more pleasant than winning, when we are not labouring under the hard necessity of making money.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

The population is large, and for some distance round the town stretched rows and rows of native houses built
— from From Jungle to Java The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India by Arthur Louis Keyser

Some school children not far from New York, receiving their inspiration from Mrs. Ewing's little book, "Mary's Meadow," have spread the gospel of beauty, like the true missionaries they are, by systematically planting in lanes and fields sweet violets, golden coreopsis, hardy poppies, blue corn-flowers, Japanese roses, orange day-lilies, larkspurs, and many other charming garden flowers that need only the slightest encouragement to run wild.
— from Wild Flowers An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors by Neltje Blanchan

"This place is like a furnace," she cried, irritably throwing the sheet which covered her down on to the floor.
— from Little Folks (July 1884) A Magazine for the Young by Various

She was a fragile woman, still clad in the mourning she had worn for her husband for seven years,—a sweet and gentle creature, who, one felt at once, had been properly placed by Providence in luxury, and fortunately shielded from hardship; for the Wyndhams were wealthy.
— from The Wyndham Girls by Marion Ames Taggart

A ring of a denser kind, whether solid, liquid, or composed of small discrete masses (as Saturn's rings are now concluded to be), we can expect will be formed only near the body of a planet when it has reached so late a stage of concentration that its equatorial portions contain matters capable of easy precipitation into liquid and, finally, solid forms.
— from Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3 Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions. by Herbert Spencer

The proprietors prepared a didactic introduction to their treatise, phrased in long and flowery sentences, in which modesty was not the governing tone.
— from Old English Patent Medicines in America by James Harvey Young