The borders were brilliant with vast sunflowers, white lilies, and blazing “red-hot pokers” tangled together in splendid profusion, a very type of richness and glory of life.
— from The Daughters of Danaus by Mona Caird

Certainly it looked decidedly warlike on board of the little steamer Maud; and Felix, who was never inclined to be very serious over anything, declared that she was like a bantam rooster ready for a pitched battle in a farmyard.
— from Asiatic Breezes; Or, Students on The Wing by Oliver Optic

Other difficulties presented themselves, and the scheme was laid aside because Robison left Glasgow to go to sea.
— from Stories of Invention, Told by Inventors and their Friends by Edward Everett Hale

Some years ago, when a new railway cutting was made in East Norfolk, you could trace it through the next summer, winding like a blood-red river through the green fields.
— from Parables of the Christ-life by I. Lilias (Isabella Lilias) Trotter

"Stephen Richards, of Natchez, has inlisted in the Spanish service, was lately at Baton Rouge with his father, in the quality of a citizen—belongs to the troops at Nagadoches."
— from The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike, Volume 1 (of 3) To Headwaters of the Mississippi River Through Louisiana Territory, and in New Spain, During the Years 1805-6-7. by Zebulon Montgomery Pike

Think not that I shall be satisfied with lamentations and barren recriminations, or that, to explain my conduct as Queen-Regent of the realm, I shall attempt to excite your passions; on the contrary, I have done everything to calm them and would gladly see them at rest.
— from Memoirs of the Duchesse de Dino (Afterwards Duchesse de Talleyrand et de Sagan), 1836-1840 by Dino, Dorothée, duchesse de

The Countess seemed to her to have no soul; she was like a bright rare shell, with a polished surface and a remarkably pink lip, in which something would rattle when you shook it.
— from The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 2 by Henry James

She had been prepared for a sharp rebuke, and had yielded to her lover's entreaties to under take this service amid tears, and with great anxiety; for if her act should be betrayed, she would lose, amid bitter reproaches, the place she so greatly prized.
— from In the Fire of the Forge: A Romance of Old Nuremberg — Volume 02 by Georg Ebers