She uttered no cry of surprise, no exclamation of terror, but staggered backward and clung for support to the ivied buttress of the archway.
— from Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

The calms here are unlike those in most parts of the world, for there is always such a high sea running, and the periods of calm are so short, that it has no time to go down; and vessels, being under no command of sails or rudder, lie like logs upon the water.
— from Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana

But as for a union or marriage, let us not conceive of such a thing, since that is the incredible and paradoxical trifling of the poetic Muse.
— from The Works of the Emperor Julian, Vol. 1 by Emperor of Rome Julian

There warn’t a pickpocket in all London as didn’t take a pull at that chain, but the chain ‘ud never break, and the watch ‘ud never come out, so they soon got tired of dragging such a heavy old gen’l’m’n along the pavement, and he’d go home and laugh till the pigtail wibrated like the penderlum of a Dutch clock.
— from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

It appears, from the foregoing evidence, that we cannot determine what classes of bailees are subject to the strict responsibility imposed on common carriers by referring to the Praetor's Edict and then consulting the lexicons under Nautoe, Caupones, or Stabularii.
— from The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is well understood that under no circumstances of sale, however favorable, can they pay five in the pound of the original debt; and that if the whole are now forced into sale, at what they will bring, they will not pay one in the pound; and being the only fund from which a single dollar of [396] the debt can ever be recovered, (on account of the bankruptcy of all the purchasers,) of $25,000 which the lots may bring if offered for sale from time to time pari passu with the growing demand, $20,000 will be lost by a forced sale.
— from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 5 (of 9) Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private by Thomas Jefferson

Conquest, therefore, succeeded to conquest, until nothing capable of subjugation was left to be subdued.
— from English Caricature and Satire on Napoleon I. Volume 2 (of 2) by John Ashton

At the first scent of “nigger” his ears would prick forward, and if left to himself, he would carry his rider into an unsuspected nigger camp, or stand peering into the bushes at a discomfited black fellow, who was busy trying to think of some excuse to explain his presence and why he had hidden.
— from We of the Never-Never by Jeannie Gunn

All the motifs of his work are the near, the vital, the universal; nothing curious, or subtle, or far-fetched.
— from Whitman: A Study by John Burroughs

Let us not cast our spears at random, but let six come on together, if perchance we may prevail against them.”
— from Stories of the Old World by Alfred John Church

As I had just come from Japan, as my contract is to write travel stuff around the world—not two-thirds around and back over the same ground—and as I had picked up numerous cases of stuff 232 coming across India, all of which were under consular invoice, said invoice reciting the fact that the goods it described were to leave India on this same ship, for entry at New York (it being a requirement of our tariff laws to name the ship, port of departure, and port of arrival of goods for entry into United States), I told our Consul and my Calcutta friend that I was going to take a chance and sail on this ship.
— from A Yankee in the Far East by George Hoyt Allen

And now he was adrift among them, under notorious circumstances of superlative villainy, at last dragged to light; and yet he blandly smiled, politely offered his cigar-holder to a perfect stranger, and laughed and chatted to right and left, as if springy, buoyant, and elastic, with an angelic conscience, and sure of kind friends wherever he went, both in this life and the life to come.
— from White Jacket; Or, The World on a Man-of-War by Herman Melville

The United States has a supply of domestic monazite of lower grade than the imports, but is dependent under normal conditions on supplies from Brazil and India.
— from The Economic Aspect of Geology by C. K. (Charles Kenneth) Leith

Many times I said: "If the good people who have ordained and sustained this work until now could only see it and know it as it actually is, our distressing debt would vanish within half a year.
— from The American Missionary — Volume 50, No. 04, April, 1896 by Various

Its emergence under neared conditions only served to accentuate its relative inconspicuousness, for it showed now notably inferior to the northern canals, and this not only in the matter of general visibility, but in the character it displayed.
— from Mars and Its Canals by Percival Lowell