“While,” the Report states, “a small minority of strict conservatives still maintain that the tāli-kettu is a real marriage intended to confer on the bridegroom a right to cohabit with the bride, an immense majority describe it as a fictitious marriage, the origin of which they are at a loss to explain.
— from Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 7 of 7 by Edgar Thurston

While he is away hunting, she may not let any one pass behind her or stand in front of her as she sits; and she must lie on her face in bed.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

The mountain, situated about six miles to the northwest, appeared to him to measure 3,500 feet above the level of the sea.
— from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

The fate of the Romans, Carthaginians, and Syrians, and many other nations and cities, which were both overturned and quite ruined by those standing armies, should make others wiser; and the folly of this maxim of the French appears plainly even from this, that their trained soldiers often find your raw men prove too hard for them, of which I will not say much, lest you may think I flatter the English.
— from Utopia by More, Thomas, Saint

Roger Bacon firmly believed in the philosopher’s stone, and spent much of his time in search of it.
— from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay

It would seem a simple matter to decide on these precautions; but in my dazed, not to say distracted, state, it took so long, that I did not get out to further them until two or three in the afternoon.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Tall cantered along the bridle-path through Sixteen Acres, Sheeplands, Middle Field, The Flats, Cappel's Piece, shrank almost to a point, crossed the bridge, and ascended from the valley through Springmead and Whitepits on the other side.
— from Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Signaling To obtain a merit badge for Signaling a scout must 1.
— from Boy Scouts Handbook The First Edition, 1911 by Boy Scouts of America

The sites of the settlements are still marked by scattered ruins, many of them covered by the encroaching tide.
— from Shores of the Polar Sea: A Narrative of the Arctic Expedition of 1875-6 by Edward L. (Edward Lawton) Moss

It is the work of the Holy Spirit to constantly bear witness of Christ and His finished work to the world of sinful and sinning men.
— from The Great Doctrines of the Bible by William Evans

no one passes here!' I stopped astonished, showed my safe-conduct, and the citoyenne allowed me to go to the foot of the barricade."
— from History of the Commune of 1871 by Lissagaray

'Tis honour to deprive dishonour'd life; The one will live, the other being dead: So of shame's ashes shall my fame be bred; For in my death I murther shameful scorn: My shame so dead, mine honour is new-born.
— from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare

He understood look and smile, for he said, hemming and hawing in an endeavour to conquer fresh confusion: "I live alone with my mother, but unfortunately I cannot take you to see her because she is sickly and since my father's death has withdrawn entirely from society.
— from The Song of Songs by Hermann Sudermann

When, playing with thy vesture’s tissued flowers, The violet, the pink, the jessamine, I pricked them into paper with a pin (And thou wast happier than myself the while, Wouldst softly speak, and stroke my head and smile), Could those few pleasant days again appear, Might one wish bring them, would I wish them here?
— from The Flower of the Mind by Alice Meynell

Something else had to be done: and to Sherman's sensible and soldierly mind the idea was not long in dawning upon him, not only that something else had to be done, but what that something else should be.
— from Project Gutenberg Edition of The Memoirs of Four Civil War Generals by John Alexander Logan