Then he staggered away; but another of the assassins fired, and he went down sidewise, kicking and clawing among a heap of clinkers.
— from The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle

Moreover, it happened that the day was lengthened 7 that the night might not come on too soon, and be an obstruction to the zeal of the Hebrews in pursuing their enemies; insomuch that Joshua took the kings, who were hidden in a certain cave at Makkedah, and put them to death.
— from Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus

(ll. 11-24) So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two.
— from Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica by Hesiod

I have, since my knowing this story of John and his brother, inquired and found that there were a great many of the poor disconsolate people, as above, fled into the country every way; and some of them got little sheds and barns and outhouses to live in, where they could obtain so much kindness of the country, and especially where they had any the least satisfactory account to give of themselves, and particularly that they did not come out of London too late.
— from A Journal of the Plague Year Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London by Daniel Defoe

A treatise on the Sacred Letters seen at Babylon; another on the Sacred Letters seen at Meroe; the Voyage round the Ocean; a treatise on History; a Chaldaic Discourse; a Phrygian Discourse; a treatise on Fever; an essay on those who are attacked with Cough after illness; the Principles of Laws; Things made by Hand, or Problems.
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

I am not so astonished by all of this as you seem to be.
— from The Trial by Franz Kafka

At the head of a small body of troops, which seldom exceeded three thousand five hundred men, the Roman general advanced, with a steady prudence, devoid of rashness or of fear, into the heart of a country, where he was sometimes attacked by armies of twenty thousand Moors.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

The crews raced for the beach, but the boat I was in, having some start and being at once the lighter and the better manned, shot far ahead of her consort, and the bow had struck among the shore-side trees and I had caught a branch and swung myself out and plunged into the nearest thicket while Silver and the rest were still a hundred yards behind.
— from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I need not bring any Proofs of what I advance, viz. that there are Multitudes of Seamen at this Day unemploy’d; it is but too evident by their straggling, and begging all over the Kingdom.
— from A General History of the Pyrates: from their first rise and settlement in the island of Providence, to the present time by Daniel Defoe

One evening the sentry ran below to report that, seeing a glare in the sky, he had climbed high up the mountain side, and by aid of the night-glass could see that fires were lighted on the brow of every low hill on the enemy’s island, and that savages in rings were wildly dancing around them.
— from Annie o' the Banks o' Dee by Gordon Stables

The thunder, which seemed in fact much nearer, and to shiver and break almost over their heads, having subsided, Monks, raising his face from the table, bent forward to listen to what the woman should say.
— from Cruikshank's Water Colours by William Harrison Ainsworth

Such recognition entails upon the country according the rights which flow from it difficult and complicated duties, and requires the exaction from the contending parties of the strict observance of their rights and obligations; it confers the right of search upon the high seas by vessels of both parties; it would subject the carrying of arms and munitions of war, which now may be transported freely and without interruption in the vessels of the United States, to detention and to possible seizure; it would give rise to countless vexatious questions, would release the parent Government from responsibility for acts done by the insurgents, and would invest Spain with the right to exercise the supervision recognized by our treaty of 1795 over our commerce on the high seas, a very large part of which, in its traffic between the Atlantic and the Gulf States and between all of them and the States on the Pacific, passes through the waters which wash the shores of Cuba.
— from State of the Union Addresses (1790-2006) by United States. Presidents

Supported by a stick on one side, and by Atherley on the other, I crawled down the long gallery at home and halted before a high wide-open window to see the sunlit view of park and woods and distant downland.
— from Cecilia de Noël by Lanoe Falconer

If you should see a buck antelope on the way, you might kill him, if you can, and we'll put him on one of the packs and take him along."
— from Jack Among the Indians; Or, A Boy's Summer on the Buffalo Plains by George Bird Grinnell

Mrs. Douglas put on her large tortoiseshell spectacles and began at once to read, but presently her eyes strayed from the printed page to her daughter's face, and she said, "Why are you sitting looking at me, Ann?" "Because you're such a queer little mother sitting there, with your owlish spectacles and your devotional books." Mrs. Douglas sighed, and then she smiled.
— from Ann and Her Mother by O. Douglas

Besides all of their work that can be told by statistics, and besides all of that in building up character among the Negroes and awakening their intellect and their aspiration for thrift in every sense, they have exerted a profound unconscious influence upon the white people of that Southland.
— from The American Missionary — Volume 42, No. 10, October, 1888 by Various

Gamecock tries it bravely, and leaping high into the air just lands on t’ further bank, but short a bit, and on t’ soft edge, and pecks forward badly on his head, sending Cunliffe somersaulting over like a shot rabbit.
— from Tales of Northumbria by Howard Pease