But now she instantly caught the sound of the modest knocking and opened the back door herself for Abramka.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

While safe, well-tested personalities were enlivening the tea in this way, the sound of the fiddle approaching within a distance at which it could be heard distinctly, made the young people look at each other with sympathetic impatience for the end of the meal.
— from Silas Marner by George Eliot

The submission of the Eastern empire to the pope, the succor of the Holy Land, and a present contribution of two hundred thousand marks of silver.—"These conditions are weighty," was his prudent reply: "they are hard to accept, and difficult to perform.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

This present type of party was made possible by the surging together of the class after club elections—as if to make a last desperate attempt to know itself, to keep together, to fight off the tightening spirit of the clubs.
— from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott (Francis Scott) Fitzgerald

Thus we say the temple is the archetype of the lodge, because the former is the symbol whence all the temple symbolism of the latter is derived.
— from The Symbolism of Freemasonry Illustrating and Explaining Its Science and Philosophy, Its Legends, Myths and Symbols by Albert Gallatin Mackey

The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the open hatchway; the Carpenter caulking its seams; the string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his frock.—Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip following him.
— from Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville

The king having thus expressed himself, we are told, the fair Scheherazade resumed her history in the following words: “Sinbad went on in this manner with his narrative to the caliph—‘I thanked the man-animal for its kindness, and soon found myself very much at home on the beast, which swam at a prodigious rate through the ocean; although the surface of the latter is, in that part of the world, by no means flat, but round like a pomegranate, so that we went—so to say—either up hill or down hill all the time.’
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

190 When they meet together, and the world sits down at an assembly, or in a court of law, or a theatre, or a camp, or in any other popular resort, and there is a great uproar, and they praise some things which are being said or done, and blame other things, equally exaggerating both, shouting and C clapping their hands, and the echo of the rocks and the place in which they are assembled redoubles the sound of the praise or blame—at such a time will not a young man’s heart, as they say, leap within him?
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato

Well aware of the vanity of our foe, I knew they would attach vast importance to the entrance on the 4th of July into the stronghold of the great river, and that, to gratify their national vanity, they would yield then what could not be extorted from them at any other time."
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

From any work, manual or intellectual, the man with a happy taste for books comes in tired and soured and falls into the arms of some great author, who raises him from the ground and takes him into a new heaven and a new earth, where he forgets his bruises and rests his limbs, and he returns to the world a fresh and happy man." "Who," asks Professor Atkinson, "can overestimate the value of good books, those strips of thought, as Bacon so finely calls them, voyaging through seas of time, and carrying their precious freight so safely from generation to generation?
— from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden

“Is not Strongarm the Feather-foot’s father an’ does not the son owe the father his life?” Moh-Kwa saw this was true talk, so he let the Big Medicine Elk go free.
— from The Black Lion Inn by Alfred Henry Lewis

Had this state of things continued a little longer, absolute ruin would probably have ensued, as the total suspension of trade would certainly have occasioned the removal of all the yet remaining monied men.
— from Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred in and near Leipzig Immediately Before, During, and Subsequent to, the Sanguinary Series of Engagements Between the Allied Armies of the French, from the 14th to the 19th October, 1813 by Frederic Shoberl

But they regarded Jesus as a great prophet (though not quite as great as Mohammed), and they did not interfere with the pilgrims who wished to pray in the church which Saint Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, had built on the spot of the Holy Grave.
— from The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem Van Loon

For various reasons a development of work in that direction, although it commanded the sympathy of the heads of the Salvation Army, could not be undertaken just then; and while he was praying upon the subject, it seemed to him as though a definite voice
— from In Answer to Prayer by Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard) Cuyler

I do not mind telling you that the smallness of that proportion does away with the argument that the agreement was the ordinary ‘rotas’ of the Baleares.
— from The Grey Lady by Henry Seton Merriman

It is a fact beyond all question that, unvaryingly, there are fewer persons belonging to the staff of the Metropolitan Railway, in proportion to their numbers, absent from duty on account of illness, than on other railways.
— from Rambles on Railways by Roney, Cusack P., Sir

A fine kistvaen, formerly in a cairn, lies to the south of the southern pair of rows.
— from A Book of Dartmoor Second Edition by S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

And He put forth the form of a hand, and took me by a lock of mine head; and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the door of the inner gate that looketh toward the north; where was the seat of the image of jealousy, which provoketh to jealousy.
— from Studies in the Scriptures, Volume 7: The Finished Mystery by C. T. (Charles Taze) Russell

" The next morning, when the dawn broke soft and rosy over the fair plain of Jericho, the sea that is called the Dead Sea, yet seems, in its glorious wealth of colour and sparkling brilliance to be rather the emblem of Life, glowed and flashed like a huge sapphire in the sun's rays, and at its calm edge, that meets the shore without a ripple, swayed gently the ship of the pilgrims from the Jewish Colony.
— from Six Women by Victoria Cross