Incipits : CONAN DOYLE, The Great Shadow

It is strange to me, John Calder of West Inch, to feel that though now, in the very centre of the nineteenth centurey, I am but five-and-fifty years of age, and though it is only once in a week perhaps that my wife can pluck out a little grey bristle from over my ear, yet I have lived in a time when the thoughts and the ways of men were as different as though it were another planet from this.

(The Great Shadow)

In all the great hosts of France there was only one officer towards whom the English of Wellington's army retained a deep, steady, and unchangeable hatred.

(The Crime of the Brigadier)

It was in the days when France's power was already broken upon the seas, and when more of her three-deckers lay rotting in the Medway than were to be found in Brest harbour.

(The "Slapping Sal")

Arthur CONAN DOYLE, The Great Shadow And Other Napoleonic Tales, 1892.