He hadn't the remotest idea of doing either.
— from Blazing Arrow: A Tale of the Frontier by Edward Sylvester Ellis

It is very pitiable in me, that instead of speaking of the poetry of spring, I only talk of the economy she brings in wood, light, and overshoes, and how much sweeter everything smells, and how many more good things there are to eat, and that the ladies have resumed their bright {390} gay-coloured dresses, and that the steamboats are going down the Rhine, instead of diligences, etc. etc.
— from Letters of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy from 1833 to 1847 by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

Royd and I both took a long turn round in opposite directions, each returning to the puesto about three o'clock; but it was all in vain: we could learn nothing which would help us from anybody.
— from Blanco y Colorado: Old Days among the Gauchos of Uruguay by William C. Tetley

The school to which Robert Evans' "little lass" used to ride in on donkeyback every morning, as the farmers' daughters ride still, is The Elms on Vicarage Street,—a plain bit of a place, with its bare walls and hard forms, to have been the scene of the awakening of that keen intelligence.
— from From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England. by Katharine Lee Bates

[36] No less is the unresisting subjection of women in this relation indirectly or directly enforced by the Protestant and the Greek churches as the law of the Bible and God.
— from Woman, Church & State The Original Exposé of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex by Matilda Joslyn Gage

Though regular in its period of inundation, which begins in June, its height varies from year to year; 40 to 45 feet constitutes a good Nile—anything less than this implies a shortage of water and more or less scanty crops; while should the Nile rise higher than 45 feet the result is often disastrous, embankments being swept away, gardens devastated, while numbers of houses and little hamlets built on the river-banks are undermined and destroyed.
— from Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt by R. Talbot (Robert Talbot) Kelly

It can never be the interest or the policy of the nation to wring from its own citizens the reasonable profits of their industry and enterprise by holding them to the rigorous import of disastrous engagements.
— from State of the Union Addresses (1790-2006) by United States. Presidents