Nathaniel Hawthorne

“ But there was an empty chair at table; one cup, one little jug of milk, and another of pure water, with no guest to partake of them.
"Where is the schoolmaster?" said Ned, pausing as he was going to take his seat.
"Yes, Doctor Grim?" said little Elsie.
"He has overslept himself for once," quoth Doctor Grim gruffly; "a strange thing, too, for a man whose victuals and drink are so light as the schoolmaster's. The fiend take me if I thought he had mortal mould enough in him ever to go to sleep at all; though he is but a kind of dream-stuff in his widest-awake state. ”

“ Schoolmaster melted away!"
"Vanished like a bubble!" quoth the Doctor.
"The great spider caught him like a fly," quoth crusty Hannah, chuckling with a sense of mischief that seemed very pleasant to her strange combination.
"He has taken a morning walk," said little Ned; "don't you think so, Doctor Grim?"
"Yes," said the grim Doctor. "Go on with your breakfast, little monkey; the walk may be a long one, or he is so slight a weight that the wind may blow him overboard." ”

“ In fact, having no advantage of female intercourse, she could not well have learnt them unless from crusty Hannah, who was such an anomaly of a creature, with all her mixtures of race, that she struck you as having lost all sex as one result of it. Yet this little girl was truly feminine, and had all the manners and pre-eminently uncriticisable tenets proper to women at her early age.
She had made respectable advancement in study; that is, she had taught herself to write, with even greater mechanical facility than Ned ”

“ Shells there were, also, in the baskets that they carried, minerals, rare things, that a magic touch seemed to have created out of the rude and common things that others find in a homely and ordinary region. ”