Almost immediately the door of the carriage was opened, the young man sprang lightly out and presented his hand to Milady, who leaned upon it, and in her turn alighted with tolerable calmness.
— from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Sara looked on attentively, playing the part of astonishment to perfection, and when I had finished she said, with the utmost simplicity, “Do it again.”
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

I had liefer to have been torn with wild horses, than any varlet had won such loos, or any page or priker should have had prize on me.
— from Le Morte d'Arthur: Volume 1 by Malory, Thomas, Sir

She gazed at him dumbly with the same look of agonising perplexity, with a painful idea in her poor brain, and she still seemed to be trying to reach some conclusion.
— from The Possessed (The Devils) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But, when he saw the assiduity with which the bystanders exerted themselves in his behalf, one raising his head from the pillow, while another exhorted him to swallow a little wine which was warmed for the purpose; when he beheld the sympathising looks of all present, and heard himself accosted in the most cordial terms by the person whom he recollected as his deliverer, all the severity vanished from his countenance; he took Renaldo's hand, and pressed it to his lips; and, while the tears gushed from his eyes, “Praised be God,” said he, “that virtue and generosity are still to be found among the sons of men.” Everybody in the apartment was affected by this exclamation; and Melvil, above all the rest, felt such emotions as he could scarcely restrain.
— from The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom — Complete by T. (Tobias) Smollett

Dick, who has more vivacity than judgment, tried more than once to enliven the conversation; sometimes making an effort at wit, sometimes letting off a pun, and sometimes discharging a conundrum; nay, at length he started a dispute upon the hackneyed comparison betwixt blank verse and rhyme, and the professors opened with great clamour; but, instead of keeping to the subject, they launched out into tedious dissertations on the poetry of the ancients; and one of them, who had been a school-master, displayed his whole knowledge of prosody, gleaned from Disputer and Ruddiman.
— from The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by T. (Tobias) Smollett

And the short life of a pope is also a cause of weakness; for in the ten years, which is the average life of a pope, he can with difficulty lower one of the factions; and if, so to speak, one people should almost destroy the Colonnesi, another would arise hostile to the Orsini, who would support their opponents, and yet would not have time to ruin the Orsini.
— from The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

This “therefore” would be absurdum itself as a criterion of truth.—But let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (— not merely hoped for, and not merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest): even so, could blessedness—in a technical term, pleasure —ever be a proof of truth?
— from The Antichrist by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

His son, a sharp boy of nine years old, paid us a visit, and repeated some lines of a Persian poet which he was reading at school.
— from Travels Into Bokhara (Volume 1 of 3) Being the Account of A Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary, and Persia; Also, Narrative of a Voyage on the Indus, From the Sea to Lahore, With Presents From the King of Great Britain; Performed Under the Orders of the Supreme Government of India, in the Years 1831, 1832, and 1833 by Burnes, Alexander, Sir

Those bound up-stream, under full sail, like ourselves, are piled with European boxes and bales, from stem to stern; and on top of the freight, in the midst of the freight, sitting on it, stretched out on it, peeping from it, is another cargo of human beings, men, women and children, black, yellow, clothed in all the hues of heaven and the rags of earth.
— from My Winter on the Nile Eighteenth Edition by Charles Dudley Warner

His resident at Venice, who is devoted to the Duchess his mother, came two days ago to the Sieur de Pinchesne to ask, on the part of his master, whether I was about to despatch an extraordinary courier to Paris, because his highness would be glad to make use of him to convey there a packet of consequence: he answered him, that affairs were so little of a pressing nature here, that 128 I always wrote by the usual conveyance, and that I had not at present any reason for sending a courier; but that, if the Duke of Mantua wished it, I would send one on his account.
— from The True History of the State Prisoner, commonly called the Iron Mask Extracted from Documents in the French Archives by Dover, George Agar Ellis, Baron

So suddenly did we leave behind us the rough and uneven tract of country and enter a level valley, and so instantaneous was the transition, that the change of scenery in a theatre was brought forcibly to our minds; it was turning from the bold and wild scenery of Salvator Rosa to dwell upon the smiling landscape of a Poussin or Claude Lorrain.
— from Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet by Frederick Marryat

Photo by Flournoy, Virginia State Chamber of Commerce Four Mile Tree—Surry County A seventeenth-century home was the basis for this present structure located on a portion of a 2250 acre grant to Henry Browne in 1637.
— from Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century by Annie Lash Jester

As there was a city ordinance against discharging firearms "in any street, lane, or alley, park, or square of the said city," the trustees were obliged to go first to the Mayor and get a suspension of the ordinance for this special purpose, which was readily granted.
— from Phaeton Rogers: A Novel of Boy Life by Rossiter Johnson

—A measurement of the total amount of snow lying over a particular area, especially with a view to determining the total amount of water it will yield, when melted, for purposes of irrigation, etc.
— from Meteorology: The Science of the Atmosphere by Charles Fitzhugh Talman

Breechings were loosed and gun-tackles unlashed, rammer and sponge laid out, and pike and pistol and cutlass placed where they would be handy when the time came to rush the enemy's decks.
— from Project Gutenberg Complete Works of Winston Churchill by Winston Churchill

It was at this time that the police discovered the plot to release the doomed men, and one day Detective Schuettler learned of a place where numerous secret conferences were being held from time to time.
— from Anarchy and Anarchists A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe; Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and in Deed; The Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators by Michael J. Schaack