Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires.
"Benjamin Franklin"
John Torrey Morse, Jr.
Transforming myself into a mouse, I have entered the escritoires of the ladies holding your notes of hand, and have eaten every single one of them.
"Jack and the Check Book"
John Kendrick Bangs
Amante proposed that we should carry the letters back to my salon, collecting them as well as we could in the dark, and returning all but the expected one for me; but I begged her to return to my room, where I kept tinder and flint, and to strike a fresh light; and so she went, and I remained alone in the room, of which I could only just distinguish the size, and the principal articles of furniture: a large table, with a deep, overhanging cloth, in the middle, escritoires and other heavy articles against the walls; all this I could see as I stood there, my hand on the table close by the letters, my face towards the window, which, both from the darkness of the wood growing high up the mountain-side and the faint light of the declining moon, seemed only like an oblong of paler purpler black than the shadowy room.
"The Grey Woman and other Tales"
Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell