a Canoe, thro the waves, which is verry high and role with great fury—They made Signs to us that they Saw the 3 men we Sent down yesterday.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

It must not be forgot here that the city and suburbs were prodigiously full of people at the time of this visitation, I mean at the time that it began; for though I have lived to see a further increase, and mighty throngs of people settling in London more than ever, yet we had always a notion that the numbers of people which, the wars being over, the armies disbanded, and the royal family and the monarchy being restored, had flocked to London to settle in business, or to depend upon and attend the Court for rewards of services, preferments, and the like, was such that the town was computed to have in it above a hundred thousand people more than ever it held before; nay, some took upon them to say it had twice as many, because all the ruined families of the royal party flocked hither.
— from A Journal of the Plague Year Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London by Daniel Defoe

Wearing a threadbare old petticoat, with her feet bare and her sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, she was scrubbing the stairs in the entry and singing in a silvery little voice, and when she brought out a big tub of dirty water and looked up at the sun with her childlike smile it seemed as though she, too, were a lark.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Perhaps we imagined it, but someway it seemed to us that the serious look that crept over his boyish face that afternoon never left it again.
— from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

Young people are often more sensitive than one supposes, and by shutting them up thus too soon, far from those they love, we may develop to an exaggerated extent a sensitiveness which is overwrought and may become sickly and dangerous.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

He wore a pair of gold spectacles, and walked slowly, with an odd shambling gait, with his face sometimes turned up to the sky, and sometimes bowed down towards the ground, seemed to wear a perpetual smile; his long thin arms were swinging, and his lank hands, in old black gloves ever so much too wide for them, waving and gesticulating in utter abstraction.
— from Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

He was sure to go to the railway station just as the train was coming in, and cabs and carriages, carts and omnibuses were all trying to get over the bridge together; that bridge wanted good horses and good drivers when the railway bell was ringing, for it was narrow, and there was a very sharp turn up to the station, where it would not have been at all difficult for people to run into each other, if they did not look sharp and keep their wits about them.
— from Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

Now Schoolcraft tells us that they say that at death, they take their original form again; each becomes a bear or deer, according to the clan to which he belongs.
— from The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life by Émile Durkheim

The voice of the speaker died away, but the echo of his words reverberated in the hearts of the hearers as they pressed silently round to offer the last honours to the dead, bathed in the reflection of the rosy glow which the sun, now set, threw up to the sky, and which the sky lovingly returned to the earth.
— from The Breaking of the Storm, Vol. III. by Friedrich Spielhagen

The story tells us that the shape of a wolf was assumed by the mother of the child herself, and that when she was alone, she placed her wolf-disguise upon a rock, and appeared as a naked woman to give milk to her child.
— from Zoological Mythology; or, The Legends of Animals, Volume 2 (of 2) by Angelo De Gubernatis

Nothing was more surprising to us than to see a sloop come along the coast, carrying Portuguese colours, and come in directly to us, after we were assured he had discovered both our ships.
— from The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe

The nature of the revenue system in this Government is to the last degree important; for want of the soul, the late Government was found utterly incapable of invigorating and protecting industry, or securing the Union; therefore these seem to be the great objects which we are to accomplish.
— from Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856, Vol. 1 (of 16) by United States. Congress

I felt a little glow of excitement, for here was a clue which might lead me out of the labyrinth—a loose end, which, grasped firmly, might serve to unravel this tangled skein.
— from That Affair at Elizabeth by Burton Egbert Stevenson

In fact, it seemed to us that the strong but lyric tenor voice singing of love down the lane might well belong to him.
— from Imperfectly Proper by Peter Donovan

And now then, my countrymen, I bring this letter to a close, imploring you to give no vote which will subject the Union to the slightest peril.
— from The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 Devoted To Literature And National Policy by Various