The next morning the whole village was excited by the story of the robbery, and Godfrey, like every one else, was occupied in gathering and discussing news about it, and in visiting the Stone-pits.
— from Silas Marner by George Eliot

Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste.
— from Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

He also thought in conic sections, squares and roots and ratios, and geometrized like Euclid.
— from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James

P. S. Just at this moment I have received a good letter, enclosing a bill of exchange, which I will go and have paid . . . .”
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

He ruled at first with his half-brother Ivan, and had reason to dread the power of Ivan's sister, Sophia Miloslavski, who was Regent, and gave lavish emoluments to Galitzin, { 138} her favourite minister.
— from Heroes of Modern Europe by Alice Birkhead

Electricity is the bane of the craft; you light a wire that rings a gong loud enough to wake the dead and then some chap jumps out of bed and turns on all the lights in the house and very likely opens up with a gun before you can say Jerusalem.
— from Blacksheep! Blacksheep! by Meredith Nicholson

You wish to make up all at one run: and so you double the venture: but you should know by this time, that one out of four pays very well, and we have seldom failed to do one out of two or three; but the more money people get the more greedy they are of it; so that because you put three times as much as enough on one freight, you must needs put five times on the other, and ten times on the third, risking a greater loss every time for a greater gain.
— from The Smuggler: A Tale. Volumes I-III by G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) James