From Charles Dickens' "Bleak House":
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much
in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an
lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from
, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of
in it as big as full-grown snowflakes-gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
From Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle":
It was four o'clock when the ceremony was over and the
began to arrive. There had been a crowd following all the way, owing to the
of Marija Berczynskas. The occasion rested heavily upon Marija's broad shoulders-it was her task to see that all things went in due form, and after the best home traditions; and, flying wildly
, bowling every one out of the way, and scolding and
all day with her tremendous voice, Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself. She had left the church last of all, and, desiring to arrive first at the hall, had issued orders to the coachman to drive faster.
From John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row":
"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a
, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and
and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and
, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps,
and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen," and he would have meant the same thing."
