We haven’t done one in a while. Rules are simple; identify the work by the opening lines. Add new ones if you wish. As a hint, all of the ones in this post are public domain works originally written in English. The works vary from fairly well-known to pretty obscure.
1 - Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth, - a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self. If anything could have driven me from Gladys, it would have been the thought of such a father-in-law.
2 - It was 2 p.m. on the afternoon of May 7, 1915. The Lusitania had been struck by two torpedoes in succession and was sinking rapidly, while the boats were being launched with all possible speed. The women and children were being lined up awaiting their turn. Some still clung desperately to husbands and fathers; others clutched their children closely to their breasts.
3 - The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.
4 - Harold March, the rising reviewer and social critic, was walking vigorously across a great tableland of moors and commons, the horizon of which was fringed with the far-off woods of the famous estate of Torwood Park.
5 - It is sad enough at any time for a man to be compelled to confess himself a failure, but I think it will be admitted that it is doubly so at that period of his career when he is still young enough to have some flickering sparks of ambition left, while he is old enough to be able to appreciate at their proper value the overwhelming odds against which he has been battling so long and unsuccessfully.
6 - “If a female figure in a white shroud enters your bedchamber at midnight on the thirteenth day of this month, answer this letter otherwise, do not.” Having read this far in the letter, I was about to consign it to the wastebasket, where all my crank letters go; but for some reason I read on.
7 - It had lately become common chatter at Brightwood Hospital - better known for three hundred miles around Detroit as Hudson’s Clinic - that the chief was all but dead on his feet. The whole place buzzed with it.
8 - Dusk - of a summer night. And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants - such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.
9 - On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach.
10 - When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape.
