| 1. | I was experiencing an ordeal a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. - from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte |
| 2. | It was his humour to have people know what an ordeal a concert was to him. - from Dubliners by James Joyce |
| 3. | My heart sank within me, for I felt that there was some fearful ordeal before us. - from Dracula by Bram Stoker |
| 4. | I had--for my sins, I suppose--to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. - from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad |
| 5. | Gabriel glanced right and left nervously and tried to keep his good humour under the ordeal which was making a blush invade his forehead. - from Dubliners by James Joyce |
| 6. | During this festival it was customary for shepherds to ignite a mass of straw, through which they rushed with their flocks, believing that this ordeal would purify them from sin. - from Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E.M. Berens |
| 7. | The very law that condemned her--a giant of stern features but with vigour to support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm--had held her up through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. - from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| 8. | He listened to the Rhetor in silence, feeling from all he said that his ordeal was about to begin. - from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy |
| 9. | It was a genuine relief to the whole congregation when the ordeal was over and the benediction pronounced. - from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Complete by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) |