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More "Foothold" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cause by impracticable demands. Make no claim which could not be won in a reasonable time. Take one step at a time, get a good foothold in it and advance carefully. Suffrage in municipal elections for property holders who could read, and had never been connected with crime, was the place to strike for the ballot. Say nothing about suffrage elsewhere until it proved ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... jogging. Just as I was leaving, my heart felt kind a down-pressed to think what gorgeous territory he had spread out to a feller's eyes, without the slightest chance of making an operation for a small portion of it—say just enough to get a foothold. ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... who was vainly striving to find foothold below the edge of the shelf, let go with one hand and quick as thought flung it over the speaker so that he got hold tightly by the tunic, growling fiercely ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... best were barbarians; at their worst, slaves. The average intelligence among them was low; and the idea that they were such a wonderful people has gained a foothold simply because they are so far off. The miracle of it all is that such sublimely great men as Pericles, Phidias, Socrates and Anaxagoras should have sprung from such a barbaric folk. The men just named were as exceptional as was Shakespeare in the reign of Elizabeth. That the masses had small appreciation ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the next floating log. Turner beckoned him on. It was difficult to make the foreman hear above the noise of the water and the continual grinding of the logs, but Rafe yelled some warning and pointed toward the timber now almost upon Turner's foothold. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... least enviable time of it. Their foothold in the hive is very precarious. They look like the giants, the lords of the swarm, but they are really the tools. Their loud, threatening hum has no sting to back it up, and their size and noise make them only the more conspicuous marks for the birds. They are all candidates for the favors of ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... a foothold in North America until the direful hour that witnessed its dissolution amid the shock of embattled arms, learning was the forbidden fruit that no Negro dared taste. Positive and explicit statutes everywhere, as fiery swords, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... this movement in the bud. Education is a dangerous matter to deal with; England is beginning to find this out for herself. For on the heels of education socialism ever treads. When at last education makes a foothold in Russia, that foothold will be on the very step of the autocratic throne. The Charity League had, as Steinmetz put it, the primary object of preparing the peasant for education, and thereafter placing education within his reach. Such proceedings were naturally held by those in high places ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... as they passed, the creek meandered between the hills, now turning almost upon itself around a mossy, grassy stretch of meadow-land, skirting a chestnut-grove, or slipping beneath great rocks that cropped out on the hillside, where moss had crept in a lovely carpet, and graceful hemlocks found a foothold and leaned over to dip in the water and brush the faces of those who passed. Up, up, and up, through the frantic little rapids that bubbled and fought and were conquered, into the stiller waters above, between banks all dark and green and quiet, most brilliantly and cunningly ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... whom the dog's baleful glance was fastened. There was now no ring of mastery in his voice, as there had been on the mail-boat, but the shiver of panic; and this, it may be, the dog detected, for he settled more alertly, pawing the floor with his forefeet, as though seeking firmer foothold from which to leap. As once before, I wished the beast well in the issue; indeed, I hoped 'twould be the throat and a fair grip! But Jagger caught a billet of wood from the box, and, with a hoarse, stifled cry—frightful to hear—drew back to throw. Then the doctor's light ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... saw at last that they had fallen behind the furious onset of the flood, but Roger was still swimming with it, desperately throwing up his head from time to time, and snorting the water from his nostrils. All his efforts to gain a foothold failed; his strength was nearly spent, and unless some help should come in a few minutes it would come in vain. And in the darkness, and the rapidity with which they were borne along, how ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... disloyalty should find no foothold to mar his military plans, or to disaffect the soldiery or citizens, General Jackson, on the day previous to his declaration of martial law, issued the following ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... bleached lighter through sun and wind, and covered with low, white-capped chimneys, it looked even more stark and chilly than the drifts which had climbed its low roadside fence, and yet seemed hopeless of gaining a foothold on the glancing walls, or slippery, wind-swept roof. The storm, which had already heaped the hollows of the road with snow, hurled its finely-granulated flakes against the building, but they were whirled along the gutters and ridges, and disappeared in smokelike puffs ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... said his battleships could not fight through without help, there was no foothold left for the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... 'wickedest man in New York' and in a short time he was the most notorious character in the country. The aim of the article in question was evidently to shame John Allen into a change of life, and thus to obtain a foothold among his vile neighbors and companions in sin. The stroke was a bold one, but it utterly failed in its purpose to soften John's heart. The result, however, was that thousands of religious persons—clergymen ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... right there," he agreed. "But you must allow for it. He's very uncertain of his foothold, and that's his ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... manual training and domestic science were brought into our city schools, because these studies emphasize the fact that the schools must do something to train workers. And finally we have at present the idea gaining a strong foothold that the schools must train the child to fill its place in the world of men; to see all the relations of life; to be fitted to live in human society. This idea really embraces all of the other ideas. It implies that the schools ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... however, that the works must be stormed. Still Sweetheart had made no motion to resist, except that, still seated on the broad board of the swing, she had gradually pushed herself back as far as she could go without losing her foothold on the ground. ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... themselves and of themselves alone. Their resolve was inexorable not to allow the mother-country, or the whole outside world combined, to interfere with them. And it was equally inexorable not to suffer dissent or any discordant element to get foothold among them. Sir Christopher Gardner's rank and title could not save him: he was not of the sort they wanted, and they shipped him back. Roger Williams's virtues, learning, apostolic piety, could not save him; and they drove him into a wintry wilderness, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... less pleasant results of sexual abandonment, preventing the coarsening and destruction of the emotional life; in his Magda Sudermann has described a type of woman who, from the standpoint of strict morality, is open to condemnation, but in her art finds a foothold, the strength of which even ill-will must unwillingly recognize." In his Sex and Character, Weininger has developed in a more extreme and extravagant manner the conception of the prostitute as a fundamental and essential part of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... houses, laid out with streets, and thronging with inhabitants. Among the Spaniards wild enthusiasm prevailed. But it was quickly checked by the hostile demonstrations with which they were met, when they attempted to gain a foothold on the soil of the Incas. It was useless to make front against such numbers as opposed them. Divided counsels and a violent quarrel between the two captains ensued, and the expedition sailed back northward. Once ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... the plant be immersed in glycerine the preservative takes the hue of the flower. Nature having ordained that the plants should be elusive, they appear in remote spots and unlikely situations with foothold among loose and gritty fragments of rock, and with cessation of the sustaining rains disappear, each having borne but a single leaf and produced but a solitary flower. The leaf does not seem to be attractive ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... leaders—whom the people had been accustomed to obey and follow, and by whom they had been protected. It was equally important that the legislation should come from such sources, when we consider the effect upon the enemy, still having a foothold in the State. They might reasonably apprehend that the laws springing from such a body would be marked by a stern directness and decision of purpose which would leave nothing to be hoped by disaffection or hostility; and their ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... especially that, according to the apparently well-grounded assertions of Mueller-Beeck, the going of the Chinese to the Philippines was developed about the end of the fourteenth century, and chiefly after the Spaniards had gotten a foothold and were using the Mexican silver in trade. At any rate, the apprehension of Semper, which rests on somewhat superficial physiognomic ground, is not confirmed by searching investigations. So the head-hunting of the mountain tribes, so far as it hints at relations with ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... evident that no impression could be made upon the power of the rebellion in the West, until a firm foothold could be gained in Kentucky and Tennessee, and until the Mississippi could be wrested from the conspirators' control. It was clear that the whole seaboard might be regained, even to Florida, and yet the rebellion remain ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... pick-a-pack safely to the further shore. He considered himself an athlete and wished to show "young England how they do things in Yankeeland," and with a shout he darted forward. Headlong he came to the spot above the water where no foothold was—a space too wide for even his long legs to cover, and all the watchers shivered ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... based on the principle that might makes right, has in a measure excluded women from the profitable industries of the world, and where she has gained a foothold her labor is at a discount. Man occupies the ground and holds the key to the situation. As employer, he plays the cheap labor of a disfranchised class against the employe, thus in a measure undermining his independence, making wife and daughter ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... it is only a thin veneering just to give a secure and comfortable foothold," remarked the professor. He paused at what looked like a trap-door in the deck ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... had a sudden feeling of uncertainty as if he had kicked away a foothold upon which she had rashly attempted ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... surprise the worker in the course of her labours; when, with the rostrum buried deep in the acorn, her feet suddenly lose their hold. Then the unhappy creature, unable to free herself, finds herself suspended in the air, at right angles to her proboscis, far from any foothold or point of vantage, at the extremity of her disproportionately long pike, that "fatal ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... have invariably failed. Will Mr. Wells succeed any better? Is it not apparent in the foregoing discussion that, even if the word had no other demerits, it leads us into regions in which the mind can find no firm foothold? I have done my best to accept Mr. Wells's definitions, but I am sure he feels that I have constantly slipped from the strait and narrow path. Has he himself always kept to it? I think not. And, waiving ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... started and, after travelling several miles, entered a narrow valley with very steep sides, with trees and brushwood growing wherever they could get a foothold. He now adopted a careless and indifferent carriage and, although he kept a sharp lookout, no one who saw him would have supposed that he had ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... not covered with foliage. Many are rugged and bare. Some of these are too precipitous to sustain vegetation, others are masses of quartz and granite. On the hillsides most exposed to the wind, only grass and small shrubs are able to obtain a foothold. ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman's position in the world—the meagre realities of such freedom as it permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual man under which she must labor for even a foothold in the world. She had flung away from her father's support with the finest assumption of personal independence. And here she was—in a mess because it had been impossible for her to avoid leaning ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... States the movement has not found a firm foothold because there has been no dominant, enslaving tradition to protest against. Not a few of the ideas, not a little of the spirit of the movement may be recognized in the work of individual architects and decorative artists in the United States, executed years before the movement took ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... worked himself up a little and at last got a foothold. But, scarcely had he done so, when his strength left him and he fell on the ground as one dead. But he soon revived. He opened his eyes and looked around. He saw above him the blue sky, and under him the solid brown earth, ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison
... best part of one's life in toiling for that first foothold which money could at once purchase. To have money is becoming of more and more importance in a literary career; principally because to have money is to have friends. Year by year, such influence grows of ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... have occasion to note how Descartes, having thus secured one firm foothold and solid resting-place, outwent the farthest stretch of Archimedean ambition by using it, not as a fulcrum from whence to move the world, but as a site for logical foundations whereon he might, if he had persevered, have raised the superstructure of an universe at once ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... of Juliers; in the neighborhood of Maestricht, by the 20th April. His force, infantry and cavalry, amounted to nearly three thousand men. The object of the enterprise was to, raise the country; and, if possible, to obtain a foothold by securing an important city. Roermonde was the first point of attack, but the attempts, both by stratagem and by force, to secure the town, were fruitless. The citizens were not ripe for revolt, and refused the army ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ask you fellows to go into this," said Chip, straightening from his stooping over the map and looking from one sober face to another, "just to help the outfit. But it'll be a good thing for you boys. It'll give you a foothold—something better than wages, if you stay with your claims and prove up. Of course, I can't say anything about us buying out your claims—that's fraud, according to Hoyle; but you ain't simple-minded—you ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... town beside. There all unbridled Mars we saw, the Danaans driving wide 440 Against the house; with shield-roofs' rush the doors thereof beset. The ladders cling unto the walls, men by the door-posts get Some foothold up; with shielded left they meet the weapons' rain, While on the battlements above grip with the right they gain. The Dardans on the other side pluck roof and pinnacle From off the house; with such-like shot they now, beholding well The end anigh, all death at hand, make ready for the play: And ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... not every creed too soon become a secure retreat to the spirit of man to which God has denied the repose of certainty. We crave knowledge which is withheld more earnestly than we desire faith or hope, and we eagerly make even its semblance a foothold. It appears to me, my friend, with whom I am grown bold, that you and I may find in our less material beliefs as false a haven as the pilgrim finds in ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... the edge of the orifice. As he hung there, Masin had held up the handle of a pickaxe as high as he could reach against the smooth wall, as a crossbar on which Malipieri had succeeded in getting a slight foothold, enough for a man who was not heavy and was extraordinarily active. A moment later he had drawn himself up and inward. At the imminent risk of his life, as he afterwards found, he had crawled on in total darkness ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... of musketry upon Boisot from the dyke, to which he responded with his cannon. The distance of the combatants, however, made the action unimportant; and the patriots retired down the river, after achieving a complete victory. The Grand Commander was farther than ever from obtaining that foothold on the sea, which as he had informed his sovereign, was the only means by which the Netherlands could ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... he leaned over the gunwale of the boat in a vain attempt to accomplish his malignant purpose. But in doing so, he lost his foothold, and was precipitated head foremost ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... nature:—With a mind at peace, and with a heart going out in love to all, go into the quiet of your own interior self, holding the thought, I am one with the Infinite Spirit of Life, the life of my life. I now open my body, in which disease has gotten a foothold, I open it fully to the inflowing tide of this infinite life, and it now, even now, is pouring in and coursing through my body, and the healing process is going on." "If you would find the highest, the fullest, and the richest ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... room in the attic had just one tiny window high up in the wall. The window was shut, but Angelita climbed up to open it in order to get a little air. The next afternoon she grew weary of the confinement of the little room, so she dug a foothold in the wall where she could stand and look out of the window. Her step-mother was leaning over the balcony all alone when two cavalheiros passed by. One said to the other, "Do you observe the beautiful woman in the balcony?" ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells
... choke us undiluted; but to define when we have once well swallowed is to unsettle, rather than settle, our digestion. Definitions, again, are like steps cut in a steep slope of ice, or shells thrown on to a greasy pavement; they give us foothold, and enable us to advance, but when we are at our journey's end we want them no longer. Again, they are useful as mental fluxes, and as helping us to fuse new ideas with our older ones. They present us with some tags and ends of ideas that we have already mastered, ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... the young men went to church. Nothing in the way of heresy found foothold at Jefferson. It was wholly orthodox; although it was suspected that Wade and Ranney had notions of their own in religion; or rather the impression was that they had no religion of any kind. Not to have the one and true, was to have none according ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... military basis, but its very existence was perpetuated by military form. The Dorian conquest brought these people in from the north to settle in the Peloponnesus, and by degrees they obtained a foothold and conquered their surrounding neighbors. Having established themselves on a small portion of the land, the Dorians, or Spartans, possessed themselves of superior military skill in order to obtain the overlordship of the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... wrangle round a carcass. On Cornhill there probably dwelt petty kings who warred with the kings of Ludgate; and in Southwark there lurked or burrowed other chiefs who, perhaps by intrigue or force, struggled for centuries to get a foothold in Thames Street. But of such infusoria History (glorying only in offenders, criminals, and robbers on the largest scale) justly pays no heed. This alone we know, that the early rulers of London before the Christian era passed away like the wild beasts they fought ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... shooting, but that being impossible, she made her effort in another way. Gliding forward, she tried to seize the African; but he eluded her grasp, just missing, in doing so, falling into the mysterious hole. As he swayed back to firm foothold, he turned his own gun on her and shot. Instinctively Adam leaped at his assailant; clutching at each other, they tottered ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... promises he could not fulfill to Aguinaldo; did not assume to speak for the President or the army of the United States, but gave guns and ammunition to the insurgents, who aided him in maintaining a foothold on the shore. The insurgents did not win Dewey's victory, but aided to improve it. Without the aid of the American army Manila might have been destroyed, but could not have been captured intact. General Merritt settled the question ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... beyond the mountains would retain their connection with the United States, which would not touch the Mississippi River at any point. Vergennes held that this was all the Americans could reasonably demand, and he agreed with Aranda that they had as yet gained no foothold upon the eastern bank of the great river, unmindful of the fact that at that very moment the fortresses at Cahokia and Kaskaskia were ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... charter of 1670 was legally unassailable, the earl was now ready for his subsequent line of action. He had resolved to get a foothold in the company itself. To effect this object he brought his own capital into play, and sought at the same time the aid of his wife's relatives, the Wedderburn-Colviles, and of other personal friends. Shares in the company had depreciated in value, ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... flood, as the result of torrential rains, French forthwith led out two brigades with their batteries to make a reconnaissance. In forcing the stream both French and his A.A.G. very nearly lost their lives. Losing its foothold the General's horse took fright and fell, flinging him into the raging torrent. As the animal strove to recover, it upset Colonel (now Sir Douglas) Haig, who was coming to the rescue, dashing rider and horse into an over-hanging willow tree. Both French and Haig ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... the left, and you will find no footprints or other marks anywhere. Go round there to the left, and you will be satisfied that the most experienced mountaineer that ever lived could not make a descent, or even anywhere get over the edge of the cliff. There is no ledge or foothold within fifty feet." ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... weakened Spanish towns. They settled on the west and north-west coasts of Hispaniola, compelling any Spanish settlers whom they found to retire to the east and south. The French and English had now a firm foothold in the Indies. Without assistance from their respective Governments they had won the right to live there, "maugre the King of Spain's beard." In a few years' time, they had become so prosperous that the Governments ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... after Spain had lost her foothold on the American continent, and she still held her West Indian empire. She misgoverned the islands as she had misgoverned the continent; and in the islands, as once upon the continent, her own children became her deadliest ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... found a home at last, one in which she would have to work early and late to retain a foothold—but still a home, and the word rang in her ears like a soothing song, after the anguish of the last year. Her youth and beauty, she had long since discovered, were only barriers to the surroundings she sought. There ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... regions was to make all the mammals become black; the result would be that they would all be eliminated by selection, and that no mammals would be able to live there at all. But in most cases a certain percentage of animals resists these strong influences, and thus selection secures a foothold on which to work, eliminating the unfavourable variation, and establishing a useful colouring, consistent with what is required for ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... daughter," he said. I accepted bravely that life of suffering that I might not lose you, and I suffered joyfully, seeing that we were called to bear the same yoke—My God! I have been firm, faithful to my husband; I have given you no foothold, Felix, in your kingdom. The grandeur of my passion has reacted on my character; I have regarded the tortures Monsieur de Mortsauf has inflicted on me as expiations; I bore them proudly in condemnation of my faulty desires. Formerly ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... were filled with heaviest toil, for they were conquering a new country. They were renters of the land, or had bought with heavy mortgages, and so their ceaseless struggle was to gain a foothold. Little time or thought had they for the claims ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... now even with the window on the third floor, and he succeeded by clever work in getting a foothold on the sill; and, still clinging to the rope, he stood erect. Inside, Chester saw the figure of a man. Inadvertently, the lad's foot crashed against the window pane, shattering the glass. There was a crash, followed by a guttural exclamation from ...
— The Boy Allies in Great Peril • Clair W. Hayes
... woodland: 0% other: 93% Irrigated land: 410 km2 (1989 est.) Environment: summer winds often raise large sandstorms and duststorms in interior; sparse natural freshwater resources Note: strategic location with small foothold on Musandam Peninsula controlling Strait of Hormuz (17% of world's oil production transits this point going from Persian ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... beating against it drove him away, but he found footing at another, next adjoining the building on the north. To reach him from below, with the whole building ablaze, was impossible. Other escape there was none, save a cornice ledge extending halfway to his window; but it was too narrow to afford foothold. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... the advancement man has made since the time when he was a cannibal cave dweller, shivering out of the glacial epoch, and contending with wild beasts for a foothold on the earth, till now that he enjoys the idealism of Berkeley, wields the quaternions of Hamilton, uses the lightnings for his red sandaled messengers, holds his spectroscope to a star and tells what elements compose it, or to an outskirting nebula and declares it a mass of incandescent ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... advance. The others followed his plan. All picked their way with anxious care. The traitorous rocks rolled from beneath the little man's feet and roared thunderously below him, lesser stone loosened by the men above him, hit him on the back. He gained seemingly firm foothold, and, turning halfway about, swore redly at his companions for dolts and careless fools. The pudgy man sat, puffing and perspiring, high in the rear of the procession. The fumes and smoke from four pine-knots were in his blood. Cinders and sparks lay thick in his eyes and hair. ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... all persons to the tremendous spectacle that was about to be exhibited. The streets through which the procession was to pass were crowded with the populace. The windows, the roofs, every place that could admit a face or a foothold, were alive with spectators. In the great square, a spacious scaffolding, like an amphitheatre, was erected, where the sentences of the prisoners were to be read, and the sermon of faith to be preached; and close by were ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... afforded a foothold to those who followed, but these could make but little way, for as but one could advance at a time, each as he came on was slain by the pikes. Finding that two were well able to hold the door, Malcolm with the ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... of the ship part of another group of penguins were quarrelling for the possession of a small pressure block which offered only the most insecure foothold. The scrambling antics to secure the point of vantage, the ousting of the bird in possession, and the incontinent loss of balance and position as each bird reached the summit of his ambition was almost as entertaining as the episode of the skua. Truly these little creatures ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... Village of Peace entertained more redmen than ever before. Day by day the faith gained a stronger foothold. A kind of religious trance affected some of the converted Indians, and this greatly influenced the doubting ones. Many of them half believed the Great ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... in the first place, answer generally that the Japanese policy should, I think, be that of keeping Americans and Europeans as much as possible at arm's length. In presence of the more powerful races your position is one of chronic danger, and you should take every precaution to give as little foothold as ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... ground falls suddenly from our very feet. Sheep scamper nimbly down their convenient little tracks, but there are places where water that overflows from the pools among the bent and ling has made blue-grey seams and wrinkles in the steep places that give no foothold ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... I thought you were jesting. [He gets up and speaks confidentially and half-humorously.] Now, you don't mean to say you're really capable of undermining the ground here where a friend of yours has been fortunate enough to get a firm foothold? ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... saw that one of his men who had lost his foothold had slipped down to the very edge of the precipice and was now hanging half over it. One leg and arm were over, and with the other he clung frantically to the edge ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... steps of the house itself, men prominent in the life of the city called for "Vivas" for the new President, for Senora Rojas, for the Rojas revolution. Below them, those who had been wounded in the fight just over were lifted high on the shoulders of the mob, and in it, struggling for a foothold, were many women, their cheeks wet with tears, their cries of rejoicing more frantic even than those ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... understand that in the Women's Missionary Societies and the afternoon clubs the comparative riding qualities of the various tonneaus about the city have about driven out teething and styles as a subject of debate. For a while during the Wilson campaign, it looked as if politics was going to get a foothold in the town, but some enthusiast organized a flying squadron of automobiles to propagate Democratic gospel, and then it was all off. Everybody rushed into the squadron, and the trips around the district became reliability runs, ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... while the English considered that their claim to its rule was pre-eminent. The French had established a line of military fortified posts from Canada to the southern part of the Mississippi, and they were fast securing a foothold in the ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... us, when we were met by a sheet of flame, a storm of lead and smoke and fire. We were raised as it were in the air and held there gasping for breath, and then we were swept back down the hill, struggling desperately to gain a foothold to make ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... a matter for a sure-footed mountaineer like Nick to make his way down to the ledge as one might imagine, for in a certain place the face of the cliff presented a series of jagged edges and projections which afforded him foothold. As he went along, too, he kept a strong grasp upon overhanging vines and bushes that ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and shouted to his companions to follow. Pierre scrambled up, but the ice was six feet out of the water, and Le Jeune's agility failed him. He saved himself by clutching the ankle of Mestigoit, by whose aid he gained a firm foothold at the top, and, for a moment, the three voyagers, aghast at the narrowness of their escape, stood gazing at each ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... Scott, "the whole team were sinking—two by two we lost sight of them, each pair struggling for foothold. Osman the leader exerted all his strength and kept a foothold—it was wonderful to see him. The sledge stopped and we leapt aside. The situation was clear in another moment. We had been actually travelling along the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... difficulty about the descent for the first eight or ten feet. Then the shrubs that had afforded foothold for his feet suddenly ceased, and the foot that he had thrust down for another perch touched nothing but the slippery side of the pit. Clinging firmly with his left hand to the network of vegetation which grew above his head, Colwyn flashed his electric torch into the blackness of ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... Convulsively he sought foothold for the thirtieth time, but, except for tweaking the agony in his chest, the effort was vain. Desperately he blinked the sweat ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... came here. He's only a tramp, and you can't make anything else out of him. Some folks are never satisfied unless they are trying to make gentlemen out of gutter snipes. If we let such fellows get a foothold, there won't be any respectable society after a while; it will be ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... observance; and they were the keepers of the hearth-fire of the city, not the intermediaries between it and its gods. But the Vestals have no parallel in Greek life. Asiatic rites and devotions, it is true, from an early period obtained a foothold among the populace; but they were either discountenanced, or by being made part of the civic ritual were disarmed of their mystic or monastic elements. An epitaph in the Anthology commemorates two aged priestesses as having been happy in their ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... rocks, was a sheet of liquid porphyry, an arrow of dark-red water slightly flecked with foam. The walls of the canon, scarcely fifty yards apart and more stupendous than ever, rose in precipices without a landing-place or a foothold. So far as eye could pierce into the twilight of the sublime chasm, there was not a spot where the boat could be arrested in its flight, or where a swimmer could find a shelf ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... of vocal challenge and bedevilment from his ancestral syringa bush on the other, and all between is a gap filled with a vista of rose-bushes—not marshalled in a garden together, but scattered here, there, and everywhere that a good exposure and deep foothold could ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... enabled him to do this, he never could say. His foothold was none too secure, and the only available leverage was a narrow piece of masonry that jutted from the side. Yet, working inch by inch, he accomplished it, and when Trevannion had been brought sufficiently near the top, he made the rope fast to a ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... ever know maturity. We have only to do what Darwin did—count the plants that throng a foot of sod in spring, count them again in summer, and at the summer's end, to find how great the inexorable carnage in this unseen combat, how few its survivors. So hard here is the fight for a foothold, for daily bread, that the playfulness inborn in every healthy plant can peep out but timidly and seldom. But when strife is exchanged for peace, when a plant is once safely sheltered behind a garden fence, then the struggles of the battlefield give place to the diversions of ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... on this side looked like a wall of granite in which there was no foothold; but above this inflexible wall was a crown of trees, the roots of which hung down it, mostly pines clinging to the rock with their forked feet like birds on ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... six hours' climb, to be at its best. After refreshment comes the hard work. To look at the face of the rock up which Joseph has swarmed; to say hopelessly, "I can't do it, I can't," and then gradually to find here a niche for one hand, here a foothold; to learn to cling to the rock, to use every bit of oneself, to work one's way up delicately as a cat so as not to send loose stones down on the climber below, until, panting, one lands on the ledge appointed by Joseph, there to ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... awakened, had swooped down upon that picturesque little Welsh watering-place, Lllgxtplll, and, despite desperate resistance on the part of an excursion of Evanses and Joneses from Cardiff, had obtained a secure foothold. While these things were happening in Wales, the army of Monaco had descended on Auchtermuchty, on the Firth of Clyde. Within two minutes of this disaster, by Greenwich time, a boisterous band of Young Turks ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... a plan to seize upon Manassas as the centre of railroads, the true defence of Washington, and the firm foothold in Virginia. Nobody, or only few enemies, were in Manassas. McDowell shows his genuine military insight. Scott, and, as I am told, the whole senile military council, opposed McDowell's plan as being too bold. Do these mummies intend to conduct a ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... in alarm, he clutched frantically at one of the hand-bars on the end of the coal car, caught it, and managed to draw himself up till he found foothold on the extension of the floor where he stood, hanging on for dear life, until the train stopped ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... whose value is, for the most part, estimated according to the development of their machine-like qualities. Beauty is not consulted here. In those places in or near the city, where Nature, reluctant to be driven utterly away, still tries to keep a foothold, she is parched and scorched by the feverish breath of forges and furnaces. Standing here, one may see the cloud of smoke, which waves in the wind like a pall over the city, slowly moving and settling down upon the land. One may almost hear the roar of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Sam-Chaong reached the borders of an immense lake, many miles in extent, spanned by a bridge of only a single foot in width. With fear and trembling, as men tremble on the brink of eternity, and often with terror in his eyes and a quivering in his heart as he looked at the narrow foothold on which he was treading, he finally crossed in safety, when he found to his astonishment that the pulsations of a new life had already begun to beat strongly within him. Beyond a narrow strip of land, which bounded ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... would ever come up or not. It was at this time that Tip O'Neill, a daring young buck of Freekirk Head, performed the highly dangerous feat of walking from her main to her forerigging along the weather run, which fact shows there was foothold on her uppermost side for a man crazy ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... mountaineer with caution. At any rate, most of our party dismounted, preferring to lead their mules around the point to having their heads turned in riding past it. Exposed to the full force of the winds, which are drawn through this river-valley as through a funnel, and with a foothold so narrow, it was easy to believe that neither man nor beast could pass here during the season of the northers, except at great risk of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... extremely delighted. I quite liked Pyecraft for the time. "Let me help you!" I said, and took his hand and pulled him down. He kicked about, trying to get foothold somewhere. It was very like holding a flag ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... she had been left scathless, it would not have been so bad: he was a man, who could have fought for his own hand, without being hindered by the obstacles which weigh so heavily on those of her own sex, who seek to win for themselves a foothold on the slippery inclines of life. She found herself hating him more for his prosperity than for the way in which he ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... overlooked a small courtyard, the latter being stoneflagged and surrounded by high walls. I could see that, even if I were able to squeeze my way out between the bars, I should be powerless to scale the walls. At a rough guess these were at least twelve feet high, and without a foothold of any sort or description. This being so I was completely at the mercy of the men in the house. Indeed, a rat caught in a trap, was never more firmly laid by the heels than I. At about half-past seven o'clock a small ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... thrust again and again through door and window; masses of argument had crashed from above; he had been on the alert day and night, repelling this, blindly, and denying that, endeavouring to keep his foothold on the slippery plane of the supernatural, sending up cry after cry to the Lord Who hid Himself. He had slept with his crucifix in his hand, he had awakened himself by kissing it; while he wrote, talked, ate, walked, and sat in cars, the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... fire the saurian dived, and Jack saw the huge dark form dart at him under water. He felt his legs swept from under him at the next instant, and down he went. He had not been seized, he had simply been knocked from his foothold by the rush of the great brute, and he landed full on the alligator's back. He felt plainly with his hand its rough scaly covering like knobs of horn. He had kept his eyes open, and saw clearly the horrid brute below him, ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... foothold. Now the ground beneath lent its aid to his endeavor; he was no longer altogether at the mercy of the water. He bounded forward toward the shore in such a direction that he could approach it without opposing himself entirely ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... Harpeth, coiled itself into a huge black spiral of thunder and lightning and was driving down the valley upon Goodloets with a velocity that defied the eyes to follow. For a long second every man and woman stood rooted to his foothold on the earth and watched the tornado strike the edge of the Settlement, smash down the saddlery as if it were a house of cards, and churn the little tannery into the river. Then as it grasped the roof of the Last Chance and began twisting ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Illinois in 1836 to pledge her good name in favor of the Illinois and Michigan Canal made Chicago a city of four thousand people by the panic year of 1837. So absorbed were these Chicago folk in the building of their canal and in wresting from their lake firm foothold for a city (reclaiming four hundred feet of lake bed in two years) that the panic affected their town less than it did many a rival. Although the canal enterprise came to an ominous pause in 1842, after the expenditure of five millions, the pledge of the ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... and Browning in poetry divide themselves into three separate schools. Nearest to them in temper is the school of Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same quick sensitiveness to the intellectual tendencies of the age, but their foothold in a time of shifting and dissolving creeds is a stoical resignation very different from the buoyant optimism of Browning, or Tennyson's mixture of science and doubt and faith. Very remote from ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... very long, made of the finest knitted silk. When firmly tied to the handle of the walking stick, the floating end of the scarf was within reach of Donnington. With its help he even managed to secure a foothold on the narrow one-brick ledge which terminated the deep underwater wall ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... sure some unasy divil drooped the port; and the lantern and me we had no foothold at all at all, and the lantern went into the say, bad luck to ut; and I went afther to try ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... the blow, and when I rallied my business was swept away, and the firm of Critchet was known only by its debts. I struggled for a time against the stream, but I could not gain a foothold, and at last yielded and gave up all thoughts of resuming business. My family was supported by a small settlement of one hundred pounds which had been left to my wife by an aunt, and by music lessons which my daughter was enabled to give, and thus we struggled along, until ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... Princeton. Clinton, aware at last of his danger, sailed with every vessel he could scrape together, and approached the bay on October 24 with twenty-five sail-of-the-line and 7,000 men; but it was too late. He could only retreat to New York, where he remained in the sole British foothold ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... not!" Mrs. Salisbury agreed with a short laugh, "inasmuch as they CANNOT, if they ever hope to get any foothold at all!" ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... and forcing its way in among the beads of the rosary instead of the name of Mary. But the worst thing of all was that his religion, like the outer world, seemed to be slipping away from him as the days went by. To this last foothold he clung with feverish tenacity, spending several hours of each day in prayer and meditation; but his thoughts wandered more and more often to Bolla, and the prayers ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... situation compelled him to the course he pursued. Having effected a lodgment upon the impaled loaf, he would of course cling to it when the others jumped so as not to be dislodged, thereby, willy nilly, helping them to secure a foothold. The cooperation was inevitable, and ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... firmly-knitted tribe. It was in Canaan, however, that the shepherd people hailing from Arabia showed the first signs of approaching disintegration. Various tribal groups, like Moab and Ammon, consolidated themselves. They took permanent foothold in the land, and submitted with more or less readiness to the influences exerted by the indigenous peoples. The guardianship of the sublime traditions of the tribe remained with one group alone, the "sons of Jacob" or the "sons of Israel," so named from the third Patriarch ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... these islands. The defeat of our common enemies imposes on us the sacred duty of feeding ourselves once more. 'There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to——Oh!" For in his desire to stir his audience, Mr. Lavender had reached out too far, and losing foothold on his polished bedroom floor, was slipping down into the lilac-bush. He was arrested by a jerk from behind; where Blink, moved by this sudden elopement of her master, had seized him by the nightshirt tails, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... perhaps hereafter have occasion to note how Descartes, having thus secured one firm foothold and solid resting-place, outwent the farthest stretch of Archimedean ambition by using it, not as a fulcrum from whence to move the world, but as a site for logical foundations whereon he might, if he had persevered, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... pressed within the besieged city, and Hasdrubal would not surrender. An attack, led by Laelius, on the market-place, gave the Romans a foothold within the city, and a great quantity of spoil. One thousand talents were taken from the temple of Apollo. Preparations were then made for the attack of the citadel, and for six days there was a hand-to-hand fight between the combatants amid the narrow streets which led to the Byrsa. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... walked out of it five years before. He had gone out a stern, unforgiving, young ascetic, accepting no compromise, demanding perfection of himself and of his fellow-men. The very sublimity of his dream doomed it to failure. Out of the crumbling ideals of his boyhood he had struggled to a foothold on life that had never been his in the old days. His marriage to Birdie Smelts had been the fiery furnace in which his soul had been softened to receive the final ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... that she did not talk. Listening in unsuspected places, she heard much that was said about her mother and herself, and the pathetic part of this experience was that she had never known enough of kindness to be wounded. She was only made to feel more fully how precarious was her foothold in her transient abiding place, and therefore was rendered more furtive, sly, and distant in order to secure toleration by keeping out of everyone's way. In her prowlings, however, she managed to learn and understand all that ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... This terrible precipice takes one entirely by surprise. Kaluna, who rode first, disappeared so suddenly that I thought he had gone over. It is merely a dangerous broken ledge, and besides that it looks as if there were only foothold for a goat, one is dizzied by the sight of the foaming ocean immediately below, and, when we actually reached the bottom, there was only a narrow strip of shingle between the stupendous cliff and the resounding surges, which came up as if bent on destruction. The path by which ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... moment those who stayed behind could distinguish the rays of their pocket flash-lights as they picked out their slimy foothold. Then the whirling night ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... decided me. It was a matter of history that famine, neither wide-spread nor local, ever gained a foothold where "Satsuma Emo" flourished. This year they were fatter and cheaper than ever before. I knew dozens of ways to fix them, natural and disguised; so I bought an extra supply and made up my ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... place has since been called, proved available, the horses finding foothold, while the ammunition was taken from the caissons and carried across by the horsemen. This done, the guns and empty caissons were pulled across by ropes, and soon all was in readiness to take up the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... there remained in them none of the vital quality of illusion which would make them wonder or speculate, else a religion might have grown up around these mysterious visitations. But the men of Fish were beyond all religion—the barest and most savage tenets of even Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock—so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only each night at seven the silent concourse by the shanty depot, a congregation who lifted up a prayer of ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... did its awful work. Some houses were bowled over like ninepins. Some floated to the surface and started with the flood; others stood their ground and were submerged inch by inch, the occupants climbing from story to story, from the top story to the roof, only to be swept away from their foothold sooner ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... her by her hair and her skirt, and gripped her tight, but it was not easy. Patty was a dead weight, and she had to keep her own foothold or both would have been carried away as the wave receded. Millie felt desperate. She could not raise Patty, heavy as she was in her water-soaked clothes, and Patty, still unconscious, could ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... his triumphal entry into Dublin, and was received with a pomp and homage equal to his dignity. But James did not go to Ireland merely to enjoy the homage and plaudits of the Irish people, but to defend the last foothold which he retained as King of England, trusting that success in Ireland would eventually restore to him the throne of his ancestors. And he was cordially, but not powerfully, supported by the French king, who was at war with England, and who justly regarded Ireland ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... between the flesh and the spirit is being decided for the universe, not only to win the battle ourselves but also to win it for others! To help a brother up the mountain while you yourself are only just able to keep your foothold, to struggle through the mist together—that surely is better than to stand at the summit and beckon. You will have a hard time of it, I know; and I would like to make it smoother and to 'let you ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... news come in, confused to sure, but still one finds something like a foothold. I am thunderstruck, annihilated. I listened to Hooker's best friends but can hardly help crying. Hooker is a failure as a commander of a large army. Hooker is good for a corps or two, but not for the whole command and responsibility. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... Jewish people. As we look back through history and allow our thoughts to run down the highway of the ages, we perceive the effects such struggles have had upon the Jew. We think of the time when ancient Babylonia stretched out its arm from the East to gain a foothold on the Mediterranean and to grasp the power of the world. What was the effect upon the Jews? The Babylonian captivity. Many hundreds of years after, Rome—the Babylonia of the West—lunged out toward the East in the same search ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... workmen with scaling ladders in the van. The moats they crossed in spite of the gaps that had been made in the ice to stop them, but the garrison had poured water over the walls that froze as it ran, until they were like slippery icebergs. A bird could have found no foothold on them. Showers of rocks and junk and clubs fell upon the laddermen. Three times Karl Gustav hurled his columns against them; as often they were driven back, broken and beaten. A few gained a foothold on the walls only to be dashed down to death. The burghers ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... was able to help himself. Although he crashed once against the side of the bluff and set a bushel of gravel rattling down, in a moment he gained foothold on a ledge. There he stood, wavering until she paid off a little of the line. Then he dropped down to get ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... danger. A man could walk up it without often using his hands, and a man could go down it slowly without any direct fall, though here and there he would have to turn round at each dip or step and hold with his hands and feel a little for his foothold. I suppose the general slope, down, down, to where the green began was not sixty degrees, but have you ever tried looking down five thousand feet at sixty degrees? It drags the mind after it, and I could not bear ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... there is a Council of Ministers, comprising the heads of nine executive departments established by the sovereign. Nominally the ministers are appointed and dismissed by the crown at will, but actually the parliamentary system has acquired sufficient foothold to impose upon the sovereign a considerable measure of restriction at this point. All decrees and orders must be countersigned by the head of one of the ministerial departments; and it is expressly stipulated that responsibility for all royal ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... with small foothold on Musandam Peninsula adjacent to Strait of Hormuz, a vital transit ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... great-grandsons—granting, of course, that the pusillanimous prig is not too epicene to provide himself with posterity. Day by day it becomes more evident that the purse-proud snobocracy of New York's old rat- catchers and sprat peddlers is fast getting a foothold in the West, that the social gulf between the House of Have and that of Have-Not, is steadily widening and deepening—that we have reached that point in national decay where gold suffices to "gild the straitened forehead of the fool," where WEALTH instead ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... monkeys and other animals dared not attempt to scale them. But he took his courage in his hands, climbed the steep slope, and by sheer energy reached the summit. Having cut the bamboos, he tried to descend, but the rocks rose like a wall in sharp points all round him, and he could not find a foothold anywhere. Then, though laden with the bamboos, he threw himself into the air, and was borne on the wings of the wind. He came to earth safe and sound at the foot of the mountain, and ran with the bamboos to his master. On account of this feat he was considered advanced enough ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... raised my head, with open mouth, and the most of the American cataract went down my throat. If I had sprung a leak now I had been lost. And at this moment I discovered that the bridge had ceased, and we must trust for a foothold to the slippery and precipitous rocks. I never was so scared before and survived it. But we got through at last, and emerged into the open day, where we could stand in front of the laced and frothy and seething world of descending water, and look at it. When I saw how much of it there ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hope of your abolitionists, not our fear, that I am rehearsing. Should your armies obtain a foothold on our soil, we know that you will put knives and guns into the hands of our slaves, and incite them to emulate the deeds of their race in San Domingo. You will parcel out our lands and wealth to your victorious soldiery, not so much as a reward for their past services, but to seal the bond ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... my brief. We recognise in you The mind judicial, the untroubled view; The critic who, without pedantic pose, Takes his firm foothold on the thing he knows; Who, free alike from passion or pretence, Holds the good rule of calm and common sense; And be the subject or perplexed or plain,— Clear or confusing,—is throughout urbane, Patient, persuasive, logical, precise, And only ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... sure hold of a ladder of rope, and, creeping down backward, she set her foot in the bateau. It was a large and steady open boat. Some of the men were standing. She had entered the bow, and as Colonel Fraser dropped in they cast off, and she sat down, finding a bench as she had found foothold. The Highland officer was beside her. They could not see each other's faces. She was not sure he had detected her. The hardihood which had taken her beyond the French lines in search of on whom she felt under her protection was no longer in ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... tempted. You should have helped!" Yes, God help me! it is true. I am more to blame than they. I should have helped and did not. What would I not give that I could unsay that now! Two of them died by their own hand, the third in Bloomingdale. I had been making several attempts to get a foothold on one of the metropolitan newspapers, but always without success. That fall I tried the Tribune, the city editor of which, Mr. Shanks, was one of my neighbors, but was told, with more frankness than flattery, that I was "too green." Very likely ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... rate of growth of these Coral Reefs? We cannot, perhaps, estimate it with absolute accuracy, since they are now so nearly completed; but Coral growth is constantly springing up wherever it can find a foothold, and it is not difficult to ascertain approximately the rate of growth of the different kinds. Even this, however, would give us far too high a standard; for the rise of the Coral Reef is not in proportion to the height of the living Corals, but to their solid parts which never decompose. Add ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... enviable time of it. Their foothold in the hive is very precarious. They look like the giants, the lords of the swarm, but they are really the tools. Their loud, threatening hum has no sting to back it up, and their size and noise make them only the more conspicuous ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... the advantage of a preferential tariff agreement and excellent shipping facilities. In Canada and Australia our cotton goods are popular but the tariff duties are in favor of Great Britain. In the Dutch East Indies there is at present a good opportunity for getting a foothold in the white goods trade. Argentina has lately been our best market for cotton goods, and as the imports of cotton products into that country amounted to $65,000,000 in 1916, this trade is worth the intensive efforts which are now being ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... death. Four foot out, broadwise, along the side of the Spit, there's a shelf of rock, about half fathom down under the sand. My question is—why didn't she strike that? If she slipped, by accident, from off the Spit, she fell in where there's foothold at the bottom, at a depth that would barely cover her to the waist. She must have waded out, or jumped out, into the Deeps beyond—or she wouldn't be missing now. No accident, sir! The Deeps of the Quicksand have got her. And they have got her by ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... to hesitate. The Pawnee had caught the signals from the other side of the stream, and hurried forward to intercept the enemy making his way in that direction. He advanced far enough from the spreading base of the tree to render his foothold firm, when he braced himself with drawn knife, to receive the youth. He had flung his blanket and rifle aside, before stepping on the trunk, so as not to ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... him to his studies for the bar. Scott was an excellent friend to him at that time; and so strong and prophetic was Wilson's admiration of his patron, that he publicly gave him the name of "The Great Magician" before the first "Waverley Novel" was published. Within ten years from his getting a foothold on Windermere banks, he had raised periodical literature to a height unknown before in our time, by his contributions to "Blackwood's Magazine"; and he seemed to step naturally into the Moral Philosophy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... up the incline, catching at rocks to steady their course, and often struggling for a foothold. Once Menard ordered a halt at a large rock, and ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... had developed round a medical school. It was the first of the universities, and, in connection with its medical school, feminine education obtained a strong foothold. It is not surprising, then, that with the further development of universities in Italy, feminine education came to be the rule. This rule has maintained itself all down the centuries in Italy, so that there has not been a single century since the twelfth in which ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... to obey, with as few words as possible; so she mustered all her strength, made a violent effort, and scrambled up to the end of the board, striking it with a force which sent it swinging far to the left. For one instant she balanced herself upon her slippery foothold; then she fell backward with a suddenness that carried her rescuer with her, and they both plunged head foremost down into the gray pool below, just as Grant and Ned came out at the chapel door, to look ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... of thinking and feeling, and the sure sequences on which we have depended vanish in a night. It is experiences like these which make the soul cry out with the psalmist, in bewilderment and fear,—"My foot slippeth!" His customary foothold had given way. The ground was shaking beneath him. The ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... way, up the winding staircase of the turret. The high, dark silhouette of Manette headed the procession; then followed the justice, carefully choosing his foothold on the well-worn stairs, the asthmatic old bailiff, breathing short and hard, the notary, beating his foot impatiently every time that Seurrot stopped to take breath, and finally ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... theoretical reason why alternations of the type fot: fet and mus: mis might not have become established as a productive type of number distinction in the noun. As a matter of fact, it did not so become established. The fot: fet type of plural secured but a momentary foothold. It was swept into being by one of the surface drifts of the language, to be swept aside in the Middle English period by the more powerful drift toward the use of simple distinctive forms. It was too late in the day for ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... the impact Stent wheeled from the abyss, then staggered back under the powerful shove from Von Glahn's nervous arm. Swaying, fighting frantically for foothold, there on the chasm's awful edge, he balanced for an instant; fought for equilibrium. Von Glahn, rigid, watched him. Then, deathly white, his young eyes looking straight into the eyes of his old classmate—Stent lost the fight, fell outward, wider, dropping back ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... Tennyson and Browning in poetry divide themselves into three separate schools. Nearest to them in temper is the school of Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same quick sensitiveness to the intellectual tendencies of the age, but their foothold in a time of shifting and dissolving creeds is a stoical resignation very different from the buoyant optimism of Browning, or Tennyson's mixture of science and doubt and faith. Very remote from them on the other hand is the backward-gazing mediaevalism of Rossetti and his circle, who ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... came; it was now only a matter of a few feet; Harry gave a cry of joy, and immediately afterward I heard his low gasp of terror and the sound of his wild scrambling to regain a foothold. In his excitement he had forgotten caution and had slipped to the edge of ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... government upon the fiercest and most unruly population in Asia; he availed himself of European inventions for strengthening his armament, while he sternly set his face against all innovations which, like railways and telegraphs, might give Europeans a foothold within his country. His adventurous life, his forcible character, the position of his state as a barrier between the Indian and the Russian empires, and the skill with which he held the balance in dealing with them, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... talking. Among the best speakers of the city was the orator De-mos'the-nes, a very clear-sighted man, who suspected Philip's designs. He therefore warmly advised the Athenians to do all they could to oppose the Macedonian king, so as to prevent his ever getting a foothold in Greece. Indeed, he spoke so eloquently and severely against Philip, and told the people so plainly that the king was already plotting to harm them, that violent speeches directed against any one have ever since been called "Philippics," ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... is easy to imagine the contempt with which John Allan would have perused it. Not so John Kennedy. Busy lawyer and successful man of letters and of the world though he was, he had gone out of his way to stretch a hand to the gifted starveling he had discovered struggling for a foothold on the bottommost rung of the ladder of literary fame, and had not only helped him up the ladder but had drawn him, in his weakness and his strength, into the circle of his friendship, and now he had no idea of letting him go. Mr. Kennedy was a great lawyer with a great ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... His real work, his essential labor in that untilled field, was no farther advanced. He made about the same progress as a missionary that he made as a cook. In so far as Lone Moose was concerned he accomplished nothing because, like Archimedes, he lacked a foothold from which to apply his leverage. He had the intelligence to perceive that these people had no pressing wants which they looked to him to supply, that they were apparently impervious to any message he could deliver. His power to deliver a message ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... for a time on that memorable Thursday afternoon, when all the laboratory force made high holiday and scrambled for foothold on the locomotive for a trip; but the friction gearing was not equal to the sudden strain put upon it during one run and went to pieces. Some years later, also, Daft again tried friction gear in his historical experiments ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... further shore. He considered himself an athlete and wished to show "young England how they do things in Yankeeland," and with a shout he darted forward. Headlong he came to the spot above the water where no foothold was—a space too wide for even his long legs to cover, and all the watchers ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... floundering into pools, breaking through bushes, and finally scrambled up the steep embankment. How to board the train seemed a problem which was insuperable, if the cars were moving at any speed. There was little foothold by the side of the track, and undoubtedly the train was moving quickly, for now the noise of it was a dull roar, and he, who was not wholly unacquainted with certain unauthorized forms of travel, could judge to within a mile an hour the rate ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... minutes the LADY ALICE had been settling rapidly by the bow. Already her stern loomed high in the air, and foothold on the deck was of the most precarious nature. She carried four boats, and these were all filled and lowered away in safety. As they pulled rapidly from the stricken little vessel Jane Porter turned to have one last look at her. Just then there came a loud crash and ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... life is easily seen, but there are many other sides or phases that are not as readily comprehended. We are here as a protest to the unnatural life of our crowded cities. We are here to build society anew on juster principles, believing that if we once get a fair foothold, the institution will be self-supporting, and so attractive that we shall have no need to seek for true, earnest workers; they will seek us, rather than we seek them, and we shall be able to choose of the best material for an eternal city where all will be rich in the ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... among the leaves and found the thick vine. A moment later he was silently scaling the wall of the house, feeling his way carefully, testing every precarious foothold, dragging himself painfully upwards by means of the most ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... you are right there," he agreed. "But you must allow for it. He's very uncertain of his foothold, and that's his ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... after awhile the urgent demands for the timber and other productions of these regions will cause roads to be constructed for their transportation to markets. We should not be backward in our efforts to secure permanent foothold for the truth as we hold and practice it. Many here cannot read for themselves; and it pains my heart to find how poorly they have been instructed in the things pertaining to the way of salvation. The small amount of preaching they hear is not often of an instructive ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... working independently. An added complication was the prejudice created by the efforts of the "militant" suffrage organization, then called the Congressional Union, to organize, this being the only center in the State in which they had secured a foothold. The large women's clubs of Philadelphia took no part in the constructive work of the campaign. Wilmer Atkinson of this city, editor and owner of the Farm Journal, was president of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage and gave unstintingly of his strength and means to secure victory. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... no protest. Indeed, she displayed a caution in lowering herself that surprised him. Every foothold she tested carefully with her weight. Once she asked him to place her shoe in the crevice for her. He had never seen her take so much time in making sure or be so fussy about ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... the interior of this vast cave, finding everywhere the walls rising sheer from the silent, dark waters, not a ledge or a crevice where one might gain foothold. Indeed, in some places there was a considerable overhang from above, as if a great dome whose top was invisible sprang from some level below the water. We pushed ahead until the tiny semi-circle of light through which we had entered was only faintly visible; ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... the gradual geographical development of that country out of the unlimited 'Terra Florida' of Juan Ponce de Leon, through the French planting and the Spanish rooting out of the Huguenot colony down to the successful foothold of the English in Wingandacoa under Raleigh's patent, I little suspected either the extent of the research I was drifting into, or the success that awaited ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... long ladders, through a fiery, burning rain To reach a pallid face that glares behind a crackling pane; Sometimes he feels his foothold shake with giddy swing and sway, And barely leaps to safety as the crashing roof gives way; Sometimes, penned in and stifling fast, he waits, with courage grim, And hears the willing axes ply that strive to rescue him; But sometime, somewhere, somehow, help may come a ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... otherwise there could be no reason why he should go on living. He applied himself doggedly to this attempt; but whenever he thought he had found a reason that his mind could rest in, it gave way under him, and the old struggle for a foothold began again. His two objects in life were his boy and his book. The boy was incomparably the stronger argument, yet the less serviceable in filling the void. Ralph felt his son all the while, and all through his other feelings; but he could not think about him actively and continuously, could ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... you will find posts driven into the mountain side, upon which branches of trees and earth are spread. This forms a trembling foothold for the traveler. 8. In the Andes, in South America, the sure-footed mule is used to carry travelers. Quite often a chasm must be crossed that is many feet wide and hundreds of feet deep. The mule will leap across this chasm, but not until it is ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the Goths who were engaged in garrison duty in Gaul he was unable to summon, through fear of the Franks. These Franks were called "Germani" in ancient times. And the manner in which they first got a foothold in Gaul, and where they had lived before that, and how they became hostile to the Goths, I shall now proceed ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... boarding nettings, and began hacking and slashing at them with their cutlasses, only to be thrust back, dead or dying, by our valiant crew, and the now blood-maddened natives. Nine or ten of them did succeed in gaining a foothold on the deck, by clambering up the bobstay on to the bowsprit, and led by a mere boy of sixteen, made a determined charge; a native armed with a club sprang at the youth and dashed out his brains, though at the same moment a Frenchman thrust him through the body with his ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... non-partisan and with one exception did so, but thousands of women rallied to the standard of the new party. As most of them were disfranchised they brought little voting strength but the other parties were forced to admit them and for the first time they gained a foothold in politics. The division in Republican ranks resulted in putting into power the Democratic party, with an unfavorable record on woman suffrage and a President who was opposed to it, but "votes for women" was now a national ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... slipped from under Teddy's feet, and, with the heavy burden bearing down upon him, he was unable to get sufficient foothold to save himself. ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... gun is just booming over the African hills as the steamer drops anchor off the wonderful city where the French have gained a foothold ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... sing. Ah! what a day was here, had the hope of the boy been still swelling in his bosom! But the decree had gone forth! no doubt remained! no refuge of uncertainty was left! The house must follow the land! Castle Warlock and the last foothold of soil must go, that wrong should not follow ruin! Were those divine women to spend money, time, and labour, that he and his father should hold what they had no longer any right to hold? Or in beggary, were they to hide themselves in the yet lower ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... again started and, after travelling several miles, entered a narrow valley with very steep sides, with trees and brushwood growing wherever they could get a foothold. He now adopted a careless and indifferent carriage and, although he kept a sharp lookout, no one who saw him would have supposed that he had any particular ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... established at a time when Deism and Naturalism were rampant in England, and it secured a foothold in most of the continental countries in an age noted for its hostility to supernatural religion. In the first article of the /Old Charges/ (1723) it is laid down that, "A mason is obliged by his tenure to obey the moral law, and if he really understands the art he will ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... lawyer, watchful, worried, careful; then for a couple of days he was a ragged young Mexican and the lover of Catalina—a different man. He was the product of a transition, and two beings warred in him. In town he was dominated by the desire to be like the Americans, and to gain a foothold in their life of law, greed and respectability; in the mountains he relapsed unconsciously into the easy barbarous ways of his fathers. Incidentally, this periodical change of personality was refreshing and a ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... next floating log. Turner beckoned him on. It was difficult to make the foreman hear above the noise of the water and the continual grinding of the logs, but Rafe yelled some warning and pointed toward the timber now almost upon Turner's foothold. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... however, had been shamming, and as soon as Peleg released his hold he quickly regained his foothold and in turn forced Peleg under the water. In the struggle which followed both contestants were carried into the current of the stream beyond their depth, and were compelled to let go their hold ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... Georgia will be within a few miles of us, the long-suffering and long-coveted East Tennessee on our left, Central Alabama to our front and right. A great struggle will undoubtedly soon take place, for it is not possible that the rebels will give us a foothold south of the Tennessee ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... destroy, miss, give up; — pie, to lose one's footing (or foothold); — de vista, to lose sight of; refl., to be lost; to disappear, vanish; ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... as successor to McClellan (who had been recalled to Washington for very high command) and with General Jacob D. Cox leading the force against Gauley. The Confederates did all they could to keep their precarious foothold. They sent political chiefs, like Henry A. Wise, ex-Governor of Virginia, and John B. Floyd, the late Federal Secretary of War, both of whom were now Confederate brigadiers. They even sent Lee himself in general commend. But, confronted by superior forces in a difficult ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... means of reaching Quill's Window save from the top of the rock. These niches or "hand-holds" were about two feet apart. He examined the lower ones. They were deeply chiselled, affording a substantial foothold as well as a grip for a strong, resolute climber. Most of them were packed with dirty, wind blown leaves from the trees nearby,—so tightly packed by the furious rains that beat against the rock that he had difficulty in removing the substance. Higher up they ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... property, the unfortunate victims of a shipwreck struggling to reach the shore? The very idea of such cruelty sickens the imagination. The proprietor, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, wards off with pike and musket the proletaire washed overboard by the wave of civilization, and seeking to gain a foothold upon the rocks of property. "Give me work!" cries he with all his might to the proprietor: "don't drive me away, I will work for you at any price." "I do not need your services," replies the proprietor, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... reinforcements of arms to said Islands for this purpose. If in this war, which I consider to be the last, we secure our independence, and with the opposition of our brothers in that region, with yourself at their head, we are successful in preventing the enemy from gaining a foothold, the grateful country will always render a tribute of homage and gratitude ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... offered of themselves little impediment to the traveller; at other times, it followed the course of a mountain stream that flowed round the base of some beetling cliff, leaving small space for the foothold; at others, again, where the sierra was so precipitous that it seemed to preclude all further progress, the road, accommodated to the natural sinuosities of the ground, wound round the heights which it would have been impossible to ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... just what make-up the grip germs will put on to break into the human system, but once they get a foothold in the epiglottis nothing can remove them except inward applications ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... across, pulling the roofed carts! That is strange," the Adjutant repeated. "It is, past any doubt, a new breed of bullock. Some day it will not be able to keep its foothold up yonder, and will fall as the men did. The old Mugger will then ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... Quebec that fated morning, I heard Fraser's Highlanders had climbed the cliffs, swinging from foothold to foothold like the wild cats of their native mountains, I said to myself, 'This is, indeed, my venture, and it is fitting my own people should carry it out.' But how odd it is that two Highland threads should come together in such a fashion, only we Celts ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... does possess some "secret virtue," for if the plant be immersed in glycerine the preservative takes the hue of the flower. Nature having ordained that the plants should be elusive, they appear in remote spots and unlikely situations with foothold among loose and gritty fragments of rock, and with cessation of the sustaining rains disappear, each having borne but a single leaf and produced but a solitary flower. The leaf does not seem to be attractive to insects, nor is ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... sight it was—now the one, now the other uppermost, both too intent for any noise beyond a low growl, a whimpered cry, or a snarl of hate—followed by a quicker scrambling of claws, as each, worrying and pushing and dragging, struggled for foothold on the pavement! The spotted leopardess was larger than the white, and I was anxious for my friend; but I soon saw that, though neither stronger nor more active, the white leopardess had the greater endurance. Not once did she lose her hold on the neck of the other. From ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... the coast of Spain Carthage also proved too obstinate a rival for the Greeks to gain much of a foothold. The city of Massilia (Marseilles), at the mouth of the Rhone, was their chief settlement in ancient Gaul. Two colonies on the southern shore of the Mediterranean were Cyrene, west of Egypt, and ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... squealed, and began to kick on his own account. Hiram was trying to get the noose over a bind foot. After several attempts he succeeded, and then threw the rope over the lowest branch. I gave a wild Indian yell of triumph. The next instant, before I could find a foothold, the branch to which I was hanging snapped like a pistol-shot, and I plunged down with a crash. I struck the bear and the lower branch, and then the ground. The fall half stunned me. I thought every ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... look as if the dust of documents had injured their health. The moustaches and beards on the lips of each, gave them also a manly appearance. They were all joyously ready to sacrifice themselves and their property for a great spiritual prize, yet looked as if they had a firm foothold in the midst of life; their hale, sensible faces showed no traces of enthusiasm; only the young Seigneur of Warmond's eyes sparkled with a touch of this feeling, while Janus Dousa's glance often seemed turned within, to seek things hidden ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the situation, I turned my back to the stream and commenced climbing the steep side of the gorge, choosing a spot where it was well wooded, for the sake of the foothold. For some distance the ground was green with moss and wood-sorrel; but the tug-of-war came when the vast banks of loose stones—hot, bare, and shale-like—were reached. On gaining the plateau, I threw myself down upon the heather and looked at the scene below. The mingling of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... coaches had been brought by barge across the Dovey from Ynyslas—there lay a still more formidable barrier to rapid progress. For the cliffs hereabouts, which, with their steep declivity down to the rock-strewn shore, left scarcely a foothold for the wandering mountain sheep, were enough to daunt the heart of any but the most courageous and determined engineer. Here, again, the problem rose as to whether they should be tunnelled or the line carried along their ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... cut perpendicularly on this side looked like a wall of granite in which there was no foothold; but above this inflexible wall was a crown of trees, the roots of which hung down it, mostly pines clinging to the rock with their forked feet like ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... man of delicate physique, had died prematurely, worn out by the struggle to find new foothold for himself and others; but something in his personality, and in the nature of his effort—some brilliant, tender note—had kept his memory alive in many hearts. There were many now, however, who thrilled ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said he, "that's my case, too; and I seemed to feel it in my bones that we was to be a pair; only, you know, I had to get a foothold first. I couldn't come to you with empty hands—though, faith! there's not much to speak of ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... to climb the elm, stimulated by memories of how I had entered Friar's Park. It afforded little foothold for the first six feet and proved an even tougher job than I had anticipated, but at last I reached a projecting limb, the bulk of which had been sawn off. Gatton's agility was not so great as mine, but at the moment that I half staggered and half fell into the room, I heard him ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... affirmed his accusation. "The wall was not very high—I kicked a foothold into it half-way up, and Tommy gave me ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... to the possession of North America.] In the year 1600 Spain was the only European nation which had obtained a foothold upon the part of North America now comprised within the United States. Spain claimed the whole continent on the strength of the bulls of 1493 and 1494, in which Pope Alexander VI. granted her all countries to be discovered to the west of a certain meridian which, happens ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... upon Huxley by the University of Oxford. The Universities of the sister kingdoms had been the first thus to recognise his work; and after Aberdeen and Dublin, Cambridge, where natural science had earlier established a firm foothold, showed the way to Oxford. Indeed, it was not until his regular scientific career was at an end, that the University of Oxford opened its portals to him. So, as he wrote to Professor Bartholomew ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... different materials is proposed by some, while one proposes to glaze the bottoms so that barnacles and grass would find a slippery foothold. ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... intrenched enemy whom they could not see generally and who could always see them. Behind them was only a strip of beach, the sea, and the more or less uncertain support of their ships. So narrow was their foothold that even if they had had more men, they could scarce find place to ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... already," answered Shep. "Let us pull those branches away. They might give him some sort of a foothold." ...
— Out with Gun and Camera • Ralph Bonehill
... that once this earth was entirely submerged in water, and during this period for many days a busy little muskrat swam about vainly looking for a foothold of earth wherein to build his house. In his search he encountered a turtle also leisurely swimming, so they had speech together, and the muskrat complained of weariness; he could find no foothold; he was tired of incessant ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... visited by Mr. Worcester in 1906. The Spanish Government never having succeeded in gaining a foothold in it. "During the insurrection Lieutenant Gilmore, of the United States Navy, and his fellow-captives were taken into the southern part of it and there abandoned." "So far as is known, no white man had ever penetrated the southern and central portions of Apayao until" Mr. Worcester, suitably ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... whirling first to one side, and then to the other, in a way to prove how much its headlong impetuosity was broken and checked by the land. It is not easy to describe the relief we felt at these happy chances. It was like giving foothold to some wretch who thought a descent ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... India!—how many Prussian sergeant-majors we shall want! Donnerwetter! Do you think we Germans will long be satisfied with this miserable section of East Africa that was all the English left to us on this coast? We use this for a foothold, that is all! We use this to gain time and get ready! You think perhaps I do not know, eh? I am only feldwebel—non-commissioned officer, you call it. Well and good. I tell you our officers talk all the time of nothing else! And they don't ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... Austrians charged the trenches in the Montenegrin center. Three times they were driven back with terrible losses. The Montenegrins, in the shelter of their trenches, fought stubbornly and tenaciously. Once the first line of Austrians succeeded in obtaining a foothold in the first ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes
... With such experience on our part, after two years of constant efforts to invade our territories successfully met and more than merely repelled, it would be evidence of gross inefficiency and weakness in us, to permit the enemy to gain even a temporary foothold in any one of the loyal States, or even to attempt it, without the complete overthrow and destruction of the invading force. Our manifest policy is to attack them in their own country, and to hold them there, until we can annihilate their military power. We have successfully ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... English considered that their claim to its rule was pre-eminent. The French had established a line of military fortified posts from Canada to the southern part of the Mississippi, and they were fast securing a foothold in the beautiful ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... structure built of undressed blocks of red Island sandstone, with a little peaked roof out of which peered two dormer windows, with quaint wooden hoods over them, and two great chimneys. The whole house was covered with a luxuriant growth of ivy, finding easy foothold on the rough stonework and turned by autumn frosts to most beautiful bronze and ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
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