But Georgiana had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant suffered a blight, its leaves turning coal-black as if by the agency of fire.
— from Mosses from an Old Manse, and Other Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The puzzle is to replace the five dogs and discover in just how many different ways they may be placed in five kennels in a straight row , so that every kennel shall always be in line with at least one dog.
— from Amusements in Mathematics by Henry Ernest Dudeney

Next morning, Miss Scatcherd wrote in conspicuous characters on a piece of pasteboard the word “Slattern,” and bound it like a phylactery round Helen’s large, mild, intelligent, and benign-looking forehead.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

Azuma-zi had come, clad in white but insufficient raiment, out of the stoke-hole of the Lord Clive , from the Straits Settlements and beyond, into London.
— from The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

It was clear to me that she was trembling, and trembling so much that she could not speak, and could not unfold her manuscript, and that she was incapable of acting her part; and I was already on the point of going to her and saying something, when she suddenly dropped on her knees in the middle of the stage and broke into loud sobs.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“My grandfather intends leaving this house,” said she, “and Barrois is looking out for suitable apartments for him in another.”
— from The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas

In it was three or four inches of golden maple syrup, which danced and steamed and broke in little mountains of yellow bubbles, something the color of sunlight.
— from Black Bruin: The Biography of a Bear by Clarence Hawkes

they are not very many) who have deserved and obtained such a blessing in life.
— from The Prairie-Bird by Murray, Charles Augustus, Sir

Some years since a bow was thus discovered, whose once heavy yew wood was so altered by its long soaking that it was as light as cork.
— from In the West Country by Francis A. (Francis Arnold) Knight

So at Bottesford in Lincolnshire a decoction of mistletoe is supposed to be a palliative for this terrible disease.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

"It was very well declaimed," said Alexandre, "but I like whist better myself."
— from Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac

Then, indeed, he perceived, with horror, that these globes were the skulls of human beings, the trophies of ages of superstition; and beheld, in like manner, that the towers which crowned the Golgotha, (or Huitzompan , as it was called in the Mexican tongue,) were constructed of the same dreadful materials, cemented together with lime.
— from Calavar; or, The Knight of The Conquest, A Romance of Mexico by Robert Montgomery Bird

One should always be in love.
— from Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde