A creature of air and flame, the most excitable that ever lived, composed of more ethereal and more throbbing atoms than those of other men; none is there whose mental machinery is more delicate, nor whose equilibrium is at the same time more shifting and more exact.
— from The Ancient Regime by Hippolyte Taine

The fire on the wide hearth had been replenished during our round of the rooms; it was now blazing cheerily and doing its best to drive out the chill and the damp from the library; and it was a relief to get back to the easy leather chairs once more.
— from The Paternoster Ruby by Charles Edmonds Walk

"You don't need to trouble about the electric lights," called out Mr. Henry.
— from A Boy of the Dominion: A Tale of Canadian Immigration by F. S. (Frederick Sadleir) Brereton

"The next objection I have to the amendment is this: that it enables a State, consistently with its provisions, by making the right to vote depend upon a property qualification, to exclude large classes of men of both races.
— from History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States by William Horatio Barnes

I just waited until he came close to me, and then I jumped on his back, and put those eighteen little claws of mine to good use as I crept over his great spiny body, and finally found a snug resting-place beneath it.
— from Eye Spy: Afield with Nature Among Flowers and Animate Things by W. Hamilton (William Hamilton) Gibson

rtistic in such parts as Minerva in Ixion , Hassarac in The Forty Thieves , the Widow Twankey in Aladdin , Maid Marian in Robin Hood , and Queen Elizabeth in Kenilworth long before he became the established low comedian of Mr. Lester Wallack’s company, and won such well-merited popularity by his clever representations of characters as divergent as Tony Lumpkin, Harvey Duff, in The Shaughraun , and Mark Meddle.
— from Curiosities of the American Stage by Laurence Hutton

Thus ends our visit to what was once the grand earthly home and possessions of ' the extravagant Lord Cheney '—one more strange, but not altogether uncommon phase of human life.
— from The Strife of the Roses and Days of the Tudors in the West by W. H. Hamilton (William Henry Hamilton) Rogers