We got up a handsome speed, and presently traversed a brick, and I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on the instructor's back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air between me and the sun.
— from What Is Man? and Other Essays by Mark Twain

“Take them to yonder shed, my friend,” said Aramis, pointing to a low building on the plain; “there you will find hay and straw for them; then come back here and clap your hands three times, and we will give you wine and food.
— from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas

For as Socrates advised people to abstain from food that made them eat when they were not hungry, and from drinks that made them drink when they were not thirsty, so ought we also to shun and flee from those objects of interest, whether to eye or ear, that master us and attract us when we stand in no need of them.
— from Plutarch's Morals by Plutarch

Borrow from men in the village one hundred sickles, and put them all at the foot of this tree at night.
— from Folk-Tales of Bengal by Lal Behari Day

He handed the field-glasses to the Doctor, who immediately took off his spectacles and put the apparatus to his eyes.
— from The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

This, as it exists in the United States, is something almost peculiar to Americans.
— from The Physical Life of Woman: Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother by George H. (George Henry) Napheys

Here's to your health, and may you allays have strength to look after your own dairy, and set a pattern t' all the farmers' wives in the country.”
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot

He broke off suddenly and pointed to a place where they might dig: and as soon as we have purified ourselves, he continued, we will fare forth in search of shepherds, who, on being instructed by us, will be watchful for a young man lost on the hills and will direct him to the Essene settlement above the Brook Kerith.
— from The Brook Kerith: A Syrian story by George Moore

No man who knows any thing at all upon the subject, will venture to say that, at such a price, the agriculture of the country can be maintained.
— from Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 by Various

The sea, losing its dead leaden colour, had become quite crisp and burnished, darkling into a deep sapphire blue against the horizon; beyond which, at about nine o'clock, there suddenly shot up towards the zenith, a pale, gold aureole, such as precedes the appearance of the good fairy at a pantomime farce; then, gradually lifting its huge back above the water, rose a silver pyramid of snow, which I knew must be the cone of an ice mountain, miles away in the interior of the island.
— from Letters from High Latitudes Being Some Account of a Voyage in 1856 of the Schooner Yacht "Foam" to Iceland, Jan Meyen, and Spitzbergen by Dufferin and Ava, Frederick Temple Blackwood, Marquis of

She tried, in this state of mind so favourable to the consideration of such a problem, to analyse Jack Glover's antagonism toward Jean Briggerland and her father.
— from The Angel of Terror by Edgar Wallace

Presently their host touched Redgrave on the shoulder and pointed to a four-wheeled car of light framework and exquisite design, containing seats for four besides the driver, or guide, who sat behind.
— from A Honeymoon in Space by George Chetwynd Griffith