In fact, almost anything put in rotation looks like one, if the rotation is rapid enough; for instance, the sling that a primeval slinger revolved around his head.
— from Invention: The Master-key to Progress by Bradley A. (Bradley Allen) Fiske

Another day's ride, extended far into the second night, found me at Springfield.
— from Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field: Southern Adventure in Time of War. Life with the Union Armies, and Residence on a Louisiana Plantation by Thomas Wallace Knox

Besides the rare exhilaration felt in treading soil virgin to alien feet, it acts like mental oxygen to look upon and breathe in a unique civilization like that of Japan.
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 29, August, 1873 by Various

Shakespeare ridicules “element”; Fulke, in the seventeenth century, objects to such ink-horn terms as “rational,” “scandal,” “homicide,” “ponderous,” and “prodigious”; Dryden censures “embarrass,” “grimace,” “repartee,” “foible,” “tour,” and “rally”; Swift denounces “hoax” as low and vulgar; Pope condemns “witless,” “welkin,” and “dulcet”; and Franklin, who could draw from the clouds the electric fluid which now carries language with the speed of lightning from land to land, vainly struggled against the introduction of the words “to advocate” and “to notice.”
— from Words; Their Use and Abuse by William Mathews

The loftiest variety of cirrus appears in the afternoon in very hot weather, sometimes quite late in the evening; and in autumn it is by no means a rare event for it to suddenly form just when the sunset colours are fading, or even after they have paled into twilight.
— from Cloud Studies by Arthur William Clayden

I am afraid I was rather excited, for I took Sperry’s hat from him, and placed it on the head of a marble bust which I had given my wife on our last anniversary, and Sperry says that I drew a smoking-stand up beside Elinor Wells with great care.
— from Sight Unseen by Mary Roberts Rinehart

To these might be added didactic and rhetorical exercises for improving the student in the practice of writing—not merely accurately, but elegantly and perspicuously.
— from The American Quarterly Review, No. 18, June 1831 (Vol 9) by Various

The river Eden flows into the Solway Firth, possibly so named because the Westering Sun must daily have been seen to create a golden track or sun-way over the Solway waters.
— from Archaic England An Essay in Deciphering Prehistory from Megalithic Monuments, Earthworks, Customs, Coins, Place-names, and Faerie Superstitions by Harold Bayley

She had gone to reside in France with a respectable English family in the situation of housekeeper.
— from The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney by Samuel Warren

Colonel Conwell opened a law office, and while waiting for clients acted as agent for a real estate firm in the sale of land warrants.
— from Russell H. Conwell, Founder of the Institutional Church in America The Work and the Man by Agnes Rush Burr