Have you never thought of being engaged?" "You might know I should think of it," answered the hair brush; "I am engaged to the boot-jack.
— from Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen by H. C. (Hans Christian) Andersen

“Well, here I am, proving at once that I am really neither the one nor the other, by entreating you to keep your promise on that score.”
— from The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas

“Being this day become once again a free man in every respect, I mean but that of my obligation to you and the rest of my friends, to whom I stand indebted for my being so, I think it but a reasonable part of my duty to pay you and them my thanks for it in a body; but know not how otherwise to compass it than by begging you, which I hereby do, to take your share with them and me here, to-morrow, of a piece of mutton, which is all I dare promise you, besides that of being ever, “Your most bounden and faithful humble servant, “S. P.” He employed the enforced idleness caused by being thrust out of his employment in the collection of the materials for the valuable work which he published in 1690, under the title of “Memoirs of the Navy.”
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

In the commercial world it was a Juggernaut car; it wiped out thousands of businesses every year, it drove men to madness and suicide.
— from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

It's a real old-fashioned place, between Westbourne Grove and Notting Hill—one of the very last of the old taverns, with a tea-garden behind it, and a bar-parlour of a very comfortable sort, where various old fogies of the neighbourhood gather of an evening and smoke churchwarden pipes and tell tales of the olden days—I rather gathered from what I saw that it was the old atmosphere that attracted Mr. Ashton—made him think of bygone England, you know, Mr. Viner."
— from The Middle of Things by J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

Now there is such a demand for them that one country alone—France—makes sixty thousand tons of bottles every year.
— from Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy by Frank Richard Stockton

Let me give her a personal statement direct from one of these manufacturers himself—a 'doctor' to whom thousands of women are writing to-day, and whose medicines they are buying by the hundreds of thousands of bottles each year.
— from The Great American Fraud The Patent Medicine Evil by Samuel Hopkins Adams

Its public bath-houses give hundreds of thousands of baths every year.
— from A Woman for Mayor: A Novel of To-day by Helen M. (Helen Maria) Winslow

s, who now sits so smiling here Shall come to our Benefits every year.
— from The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 1788-1821 by Penelope Pennington