"Shoeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more than two for one. But this was unavoidable. The Southern army had been worn out by their long marching and fighting. Portions of the command were scattered all over the roads of Northern Virginia, wearily dragging their half-clothed limbs and shoeless feet toward Winchester, whither they were directed to repair. This was the explanation of the fact that, in spite of the ardent desire of the whole army to participate in the great movement northward, Lee had in line of battle at Sharpsburg "less ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Darby, with sad conviction, glancing anxiously at his soiled sailor suit, which a few hours before was white, his straw hat with the brim dangling by a thread; and, worst of all, at Joan's torn pinafore, scratched legs, and shoeless foot—for in the flurry and fervour of the chase one small slipper had ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... occupation. When doing so, he spent many hours walking up and down on the smooth sea sand, with shoeless feet, looking out every now and then on the blue ocean, and thinking what a beautiful world it is we inhabit, and how grievous that man should mar it by his evil temper and wicked deeds. Then he would occasionally sing all the ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... of ballads, and crying of news, With whitening of buckles, and blacking of shoes, Did Hartley set out, both shoeless and shirtless, And moneyless too, but not very dirtless; Two pence he had gotten by begging, that's all; One bought him a brush, and one a black ball; For clouts at a loss he could not be much, The clothes on ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... windowless, ragged wrecks. At the inhabited mining villages, either close to the strand or well up on hillside ledges, idle men were everywhere about. Women and boys and girls were stockingless and shoeless, and often dirty to a degree. But, when conversed with, we found them independent, respectful, and self-respecting folk. Occasionally I would, for the mere sake of meeting these workaday brothers of ours, with canteen slung on shoulder, climb the steep flight of stairs cut ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... the end. And by the by, did not the great Napoleon, who missed a voyage to the Indies for want of boots, say that, 'If a thing is easy, it is never done?' So everything went well—except the boots. I beheld a vision of thee, fully dressed, but without a hat! appareled in waistcoats, yet shoeless! and bethought me of sending a pair of moccasins given to Florine as a curiosity by an American. Florine offered the huge sum of forty francs, that we might try our luck at play for you. Nathan, ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes are ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... upheld by the three men groaned. Never was seen so destitute and demoralised an Afghan. He was turbanless, shoeless, caked with dirt, and all but dead with rough handling. Hira Singh started slightly at the sound of the man's pain. Dirkovitch took ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... could not guess. Averil was sound asleep, breathing deeply and regularly, so that it was; a pleasure to listen to her; and Mary did not fear wakening her by a shoeless voyage of discovery to the place whence ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on a day of cold and sleet, A little nomad of the street With tattered garments, shoeless feet, And face with hunger wan, Great wonder-eyes, though beautiful, Hedged in by features pinched and dull, Betraying lines so pitiful By ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... wife is putting back the daughter, unwilling to deprive the man she loves, of what, though a baneful consolation, is still one; while the little, shoeless boy with his hoop, is regarding his father with that strange wonder, with which children look at the unaccountable alteration in features and expression, that takes place under the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... severe reproach it is to human nature, to see a lovely child in rags and shoeless, running the streets, exposed to the pitiless weather, while a splendid equipage passes, in which a lady holds up her lapdog at the window to give it an airing!! Is not this a greater crime than sends many a poor wretch to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the stairs on shoeless feet the burglar entered the dining-room, picked the locks of the sideboard with marvellous celerity, unfolded a canvas bag, and placed therein whatever valuables he could lay hands on. Proceeding next to the drawing-room floor, ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... the roof was a well-equipped communications room. Brion had taken a quick look at it when he had first toured the building. The duty operator had earphones on—though only one of the phones covered an ear—and was monitoring through the bands. His shoeless feet were on the edge of the table, and he was eating a thick sandwich held in his free hand. His eyes bulged when he saw Brion in the doorway and he jumped into a flurry ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... inherent strength, military or political—went down with a terrible crash. Dissimilar as are the times and the circumstances, we are reminded of the collapse of the military systems of Austria and Prussia under the onset of the ragged Jacobins of France, shivering and shoeless, but full of demonic energy, when we read of the humiliating discomfiture of this stately Ostrogothic monarchy—doubtless possessing an ordered hierarchy of nobles, free warriors, and slaves—by the squalid, hard-faring and, so to ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless; the thing .. he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... seventeen, to overtake them—he by a good road, they by a new and half-worked one. Miles, therefore, counted for much that night, and though many of the men wore rags wrapped about their feet, for want of shoes, and the shoeless artillery horses had to be dragged or pushed along over the slippery places, to prevent their falling, the column pushed on with unflagging energy ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... striking scene of it at Twickenham. It was on a Sunday morning. Several boys surrounded two players, one of the latter being about 14 years of age, well dressed, and the other of about 10 years, all in tatters and shoeless. The younger urchin had a long run of good luck, whereat his antagonist exhibited much annoyance, swearing intemperately. At length, however, his luck changed in turn, and he went on winning until the former refused to play any longer, saying—'There, you've got back all I won ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... tongue stammers when he would bring beings before us who, though invisible, are awful personal existences, in whose stupendous presence we one day expect to stand. As long as the conviction survives that he is dealing with literal truths, he is safe only while he follows with shoeless feet the letter of the tradition. He dares not step beyond, lest he degrade the Infinite to the human level, and if he is wise he prefers to content himself with humbler subjects. A Christian artist can ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... chairs, and women and girls waited their turns. John Conroy and a negro from Mississippi were the additions to the profession, and during the incarceration of the premier artist, his sweetheart, a former hula danseuse, remained faithful to his brushes. When a shoeless man or woman regarded the new-fangled importations interestedly, the proprietors offered to beautify their naked feet, and, ridiculous as ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... friend behind the scenes, and even recommended her promotion to some of her little parts. But again the old man was reputed to be worth a world of money. He was supposed to have fifty pounds a year clear of the theatre. And then came staring upon her the figures of her little stockingless and shoeless sisters. And when she looked at her own neat white cotton stockings, which her situation at the theatre had made it indispensable for her mother to provide for her, with hard straining and pinching from the ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... could expect nothing but death. He remembered how his heart bounded with joy on the morning when he and his associates, in their leaky dug-out, had arrived in sight of the Mississippi. Then, he was ragged, hatless, and almost shoeless, weary with watching, and living in constant fear of recapture. Now, he was among friends, the Old Flag waved above him, and he was the second in command of one of the finest ...
— Frank on the Lower Mississippi • Harry Castlemon
... rain and sleet found their way upon the wretched cots where the patriots slept. By day the half-famished soldiers in tattered regimentals wandered through their camp, and the snow showed the bloody tracks of their shoeless feet. Mutinous mutterings disturbed the sleep of Washington, and one dark, cold day, the soldiers at dusk were on the point of open revolt. Nature could endure no more, and not from want of patriotism, but from want of food and clothes, the patriotic cause seemed likely to ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... another who is in need of shoes. But it is commendable, if indeed doing anything we ought to do can be spoken of as being commendable, it is commendable for me to give a good pair of strong shoes to the man who in the midst of a severe winter is practically shoeless, the man who is exerting every effort to earn an honest living and thereby take care of his family's needs. And if in giving the shoes I also give myself, he then has a double gift, and I a ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... order, the boy made no answer, but hatless—shoeless as he was, disappeared round the corner of the house. Strange to say, the Indians, although they had seemingly listened with attention to Mr. Heywood while issuing these directions, did not make the slightest movement to arrest the departure of the boy, or even to remark upon it—merely turning ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness that made me shudder. The windows were tight closed to keep out the cold winter air; and the condensed breath ran in streams down the panes, chequering the dreary outlook ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... showed us a copy of a New York illustrated newspaper of the same character as our 'Punch.' In it the President Davis and General Beauregard were depicted shoeless and in rags, contemplating a pair of boots, which the latter suggested had better be eaten. This caricature excited considerable amusement, especially when its merits were discussed ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... born of love and joy. The sorrows of Jewry are more apparent than real. After every Black Fast, when the congregations used to sit shoeless on the stone floors of the synagogues, weeping and wailing on account of the destruction of Jerusalem, the youngsters, and the grown-ups as well, were counting the hours before the Feast ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... and entering the house. She was at once recalled to the verandah by a juvenile voice that called "Mrs. Latchness!" The speaker soon appeared in the person of a small boy, about twelve years old, who, hatless, coatless, and shoeless, ran up from the river bank. "Vat you vant vis me, Tommee?" asked Madame. "I come from Widder Toner's—Ben's dyin', she says, and can't move a stir. She wants to know if they's anybody here as knows anything about doctorin', and, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... set deep beneath brows bristling like a wire-haired terrier's—were on the boy in the farther corner, who sat on his backer's knee, shoeless, stripped to the buff, with an angry red mark on the right breast below the collar-bone; a slight boy and a trifle undersized, but lithe, clear-skinned, and in the pink of condition; a handsome boy, too. By his height ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the latest and most enlivening paradox. But I propose to leave it clad in its own sobriety. Its appeal in the last analysis must be to a sense for reality, and to an enlightened practical wisdom. Morality is that which makes man, "naked, shoeless, and defenceless" in body, the master of the kingdom of nature. Morality in this sense has never been more simply and eloquently justified than in the words which Plato puts into the mouth of Protagoras. He first describes ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... boat had drifted once more across the schooner's bows. I pulled it round until its nose touched the anchor chain, and made the painter fast. Then slipping my hand up the chain, I stood with my shoeless feet upon the gunwale by the bows. Still grasping the chain, I sprang and swung myself out to the jib-boom that, with the cant of the vessel, was not far above the water: then pressed my left foot in between the stay and the brace, while I hung for ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... later the corporal, too, was signalling, he and his men at a halt. They, too, had made discoveries: the track, as it later developed, of two shod horses pursued by shoeless Indian ponies. Southeastward this trail went up a long, shallow ravine, then veered round to the south. It told of fugitives and, for a time, of pursuers. Ten minutes after the first discovery, down in the sandy bottom and close to the stream, the officers caught sight of a brace of prairie wolves, ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... hint he fired, making an incurable wound in the "porcupig," which, nevertheless, tried harder than ever to escape. I lay listening, when, close on the heels of the report of the gun, came excited shouts for a revolver. Snatching up my Smith and Wesson, I hastened, shoeless and hatless, to the scene of action, wondering what was up. I found my companion struggling to detain, with the end of the gun, an uncertain object that was trying to crawl off into the darkness. "Look out!" said Orville, as he saw my ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... reasonably inferred that she was a "Heeland" woman. We were painfully struck by the number of paupers and intoxicated females in the streets; and some of our party saw, for the first time in their lives, white women shoeless, and shivering in scanty rags, which scarcely concealed their nakedness, with the thermometer at the freezing point. Whitaker's British Almanac publishes, statistically, the drinking propensities of the population of the three kingdoms, ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... is preceded by a vowel, it is sometimes omitted; as in duly, truly, awful, argument; but much more frequently retained; as in dueness, trueness, blueness, bluely, rueful, dueful, shoeless, eyeless. 2. The word wholly is also an exception to the rule, for nobody writes it wholely. 3. Some will have judgment, abridgment, and acknowledgment, to be irreclaimable exceptions; but I write them with the e, upon the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... their way towards a rill of very clear water, that ran down from a little hill, amid great rocks and green herbage, into a valley overshaded with many trees and there, going about in the water, bare-armed and shoeless, they fell to taking various diversions among themselves, till supper-time drew near, when they returned to the palace and there supped merrily. Supper ended, the queen called for instruments of music and bade Lauretta lead up a dance, whilst Emilia sang a song, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Strand yet without seeing a starving woman and child. The children are indeed dreadful; they run unguarded and unwatched out of the side courts into the broader and more lively Strand—the ceaseless world pushes past—they play on the pavement unregarded. Hatless, shoeless, bound about with rags, their faces white and scarred with nameless disease, their eyes bleared, their hair dirty; little things, such as in happy homes are sometimes set on the table ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... run, and she lay shrieking at the bottom, for she was much hurt, while he pitched down headforemost after her, a whole army of ants following. The deck literally swarmed with them; the creatures came creeping forward, attacking our shoeless feet and biting in a most frightful manner. For the instant I thought that they would have driven me and my crew overboard; the men at the warp quickly recovering hauled away as before, though they were unable to withstand stamping ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... was the guilt, and they are responsible for the bloodshed. France trembled for a moment. She aimed at the traitors within her borders, and struck down many a gallant friend in error. But she recovered from the panic. Then her sons, half-starved, ragged, shoeless, ill-armed, marched to the frontier, hurled back her enemies, and swept the trained armies of Europe into flight. They would be free, and who should say them nay? They were not to be terrified or deluded ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... river, across which Nature, the first of bridge-builders, many a generation ago afforded an easy, dry passage by throwing down a huge tree. It spans from bank to bank, and the wood is worn to slippery smoothness by the passing of shoeless feet. Thence it leads through forest and jungle and mangrove belts to another river, and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the story of her father's weaknesses, and as philosophically accepted by the townsfolk. She wrangled with and fought the schoolboys with keener invective and quite as powerful arm. She followed the trails with a woodman's craft, and the master had met her before, miles away, shoeless, stockingless, and bareheaded, on the mountain road. The miners' camps along the stream supplied her with subsistence during these voluntary pilgrimages, in freely offered alms. Not but that a larger protection had been previously extended to M'liss. The Rev. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... pinned several of his favourite ballads: "The Land we live in," "Oh, the Roast Beef of Old England!" "May we all live the days of our life." In John Bull Done Over, a very different picture is presented to our notice. The whole of John's fat is gone; he sits, a lean, starving, tattered, shoeless object in a bottomless chair, the embodiment of human misery. In place of his invoices lie the Gazette, which announces his bankruptcy, and a number of tradesmen's bills; on the back of his chair is coiled a rope, and on the table before him a razor lies on a treatise on suicide,—John ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... stain these tiny hands That now lie still and white? What shadows creep across the face That shines with morning light? These wee pink shoeless feet—how far Shall go their lengthening tread, When they no longer cuddled close ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... over them." Not only were houses deserted, but growing crops were left and heavier household articles abandoned, and the roads leading to the south and through Salt Lake City were crowded day by day with loaded wagons, their owners—even the women, often shoeless trudging along and driving their animals before them. These refugees were, a little later, joined by Young and most of his associates, and by a large part of the inhabitants of Salt Lake City itself. It was estimated by the army officers at the time that 25,000 of a total population of 45,000 in ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... were taken in the very act; and their shoeless feet, their confession of a guilty conscience, ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... by the prowess of Charles XII. Instead of 30,000 men Mazeppa brought to the King of Sweden only himself as a fugitive with 40 or 50 attendants; but in the spring of 1809 he procured for the wayworn and part shoeless army of Charles the alliance of the Saporogue Cossacks. Although doubled by these and by Wallachians, the army was in all but 20,000 strong with which he then determined to besiege Pullowa; and there, after two months' siege, he ventured to give battle to a relieving ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of the breathless morning On the thin, tin, crackling roofs, To the haze of the burned back-ranges And the dust of the shoeless hoofs— To the risk of a death by drowning, To the risk of a death by drouth— To the men of a million acres, To the Sons of ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... the sun and tinged for once with joy, Marriage, the street, the factory, farm, the house-room, lodging-room, Labor and toll, the bath, gymnasium, playground, library, college, The student, boy or girl, led forward to be taught, The sick cared for, the shoeless shod, the orphan father'd and mother'd, The hungry fed, the houseless housed; (The intentions perfect and divine, The ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... corner; it could not be long before the shelves were broken in, and if he did not escape now there would be no possibility later. Then he unslid the inside bolt, and the portrait swung open; he closed it behind, and sped on silent shoeless feet down the polished floor ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... the sea aren't the land, and here on these wild wastes o' waters there's chancy things beyond any man's wisdom as any mariner'll—ha, what's yon?" says he under his breath and whipping round, knife in hand. "'Twas like a shoeless foot, Mart'n ... creeping murder ... 'Tis there again!" Speaking, he tore open the door and I saw his knife flash as he sprang into the darkness beyond; as for me I quaffed my ale. Presently back he comes, claps to the door (mighty careful) and sinking upon the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... shoeless, he was inspired with lofty ideas of freedom such as many reared in cities never dream about. The father had to make a long journey to some far-away place for the shoes. The day before starting all the children were made to put their feet on the floor, while the parents measured ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... yesterday. I can recall the view from the windows distinctly, as though time had stood still ever since. There are no gardens under our windows in Buckingham Street. Buckingham Gate stands the entrance to a desert of mud, on which the young Arabs—shoeless, stockingless—are disporting themselves. It is low water, and the river steamers keep towards the middle arches of Waterloo. Up aloft the Hungerford Suspension rears itself in mid air, and that spick-and-span new bridge, across which trains run now ceaselessly, has ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... damask robe, with a train-bearer behind him, and every now and then turning up his old withered face, first to one of his visitors, and then to the other; then whisking round on one foot, and treading without ceremony on the shoeless foot of his perspiring partner, then marching slow, with solemn gait, like the autocrat of all the Russias in a polonnaise, then, not exactly leading gracefully down the middle, but twining the hands of his visitors in his, which ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... because the B.-bonnet is within a hair's breadth's less danger of falling down her back, or is decorated with lace made by a poor bonnetless girl in one town of Europe, at a time when fashion has declared that it should bloom with flowers made by a poor shoeless girl in another: it instigates Mrs. C. to make a friendly call on Mrs. D. for the purpose of exulting over the inferior style in which her house is furnished: it tempts F. to overreach his business friend, or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... This lady, it seems, once had occasion to go by night for water to a stream. In her hand she carried an empty calabash. Stumbling in the dark over stones and the roots of trees she hurt her shoeless feet and began to abuse the moon, then hidden behind clouds, hurling at it some such epithet as "You old tattooed face, there!" But the moon-goddess heard, and reaching down caught up the insulting Rona, calabash and all, into the sky. In vain the frightened woman ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... Mamma goes down to bathe with her daughters and the little ones; they take two machines at least; the pater comes to smoke his cigar; the young fellows of the family-party come to look at "the women," as they irreverently speak of the sex. So the story runs on ad infinitum, down to the shoeless ones that turn up everywhere. Every seat is occupied; the boats and small yachts are filled; some of the children pour pebbles into the boats, some carefully throw them out; wooden spades are busy; sometimes they knock ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... of two hundred miles, from the south side of the Catawba to the north side of the Dan, in which the whole State of North Carolina was crossed by the ragged and largely shoeless army, was the salvation of the Southern States. In Greene's camp there was only joy and congratulation. Little did the soldiers heed their tattered garments, their shoeless feet, their lack of blankets and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... joined them, and they stood talking together upon the state of affairs in Spain, and of the advance of the Spanish army on Madrid, which was then just taking place. As they did so two very ragged, unkempt Spanish boys, shoeless and wretched-looking, limped up, and began to beg. General Hill shook his head, and the Spaniard impatiently ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... extraordinary influence over the population of one of the worst slums in London. Mr. Thomas Wright, the "Journeyman Engineer," has already told in print elsewhere the story of Runciman's descent into the depths of Deptford, how he set about humanising the shoeless, starving, conscience-little waifs who were drafted into his school, and how, before many months had passed, he never walked through the squalid streets of his own quarter without two or three loving little fellows all ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... them. There is no measuring the benefit it would have been to the Southern cause if all the hundreds of tanners and shoemakers in the Stockade could have, been persuaded to go outside and labor in providing leather and shoes for the almost shoeless people and soldiery. The machinists alone could have done more good to the Southern Confederacy than one of our brigades was doing harm, by consenting to go to the railroad shops at Griswoldville and ply their handicraft. The ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... inclined to sit in the "parlour" with a very motley company, I accompanied the hostess into the kitchen, and sat by the fire upon a chopping-block, the most luxurious seat in the apartment. Two shoeless Irish girls were my other companions, and one of them, hearing that I was from England, inquired if I were acquainted with "one Mike Donovan, of Skibbereen!" The landlady's daughter was also there, a ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... General Castillo, lined up to welcome us to their beautiful island, and to guide and guard our way to the Spanish strongholds. To call it a ragged army is by no means a misnomer. The greater portion of those poor fellows were both coatless and shoeless, many of them being almost nude. They were by no means careful about their uniform. The thing every one seemed careful about was his munitions of war, for each man had his gun, ammunition and machete. Be it remembered that this portion of the ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... My first work was peddling newspapers. I remember my first night in the streets. Food was scarce in the home, and I begged to be allowed to do what other boys were doing. But I was not quite so well prepared. I began in the winter. I was shoeless, hatless, and in rags. My contribution to the family treasury amounted to about fifty cents a week; but it looked very large to me then. ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... The shoeless, capless, unwashed boy, with his ragged trousers hitched to his shoulders by one suspender, frowned up at the judge through a fringe of ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... the grey cock crew, she heard The sound o' shoeless feet; Whan the red cock crew, she heard the door, And a ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Confederate soldiers had endured every privation; one-half were in rags, and thousands barefooted had marked their path with crimson. Yet shoeless, hatless, and ragged, they had marched and fought with a heroism like that of the Revolutionary times. But they met their equals at Antietam. Jackson's and Hooker's men fought until both sides were nearly exterminated, and when the broken ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... Ludovicka extended toward the Prince her shoeless little foot. He took it between his hands and breathed on it with his glowing breath, and pressed upon ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... lying there in the weeds, — a flat, muddy, shoeless shape sprawling grotesquely in the ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... tide over five months for a family of eight. These five months had to be caught up in some way, so every month his salary, depreciated ten per cent by the change, had gone across the waters. He wore camisas and no shoes, he stole bananas. And his value, shoeless, camisa-clothed, was sixty dollars a month. He was just so much capital. He had to be ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... German, tall, padded, smart, and stout, had held their ground. It was not until Thursday, and by noon, that they were slowly driven up the hill by the ragged lads, the Gauls, shoeless, some not in uniform at all, half-mutinous, drunk with pain and glory. And I remembered, as the scene returned to me, that this battle, like so many of the Revolution, had been a battle of men against boys; how grey and veteran ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... his shoeless horse around to face Aaron. "Haruna, who was my friend, whom I thought to stand with me in Mother's light, I would be merciful; but I cannot be weak. It is not me whom you must beseech, but the Mother who feeds us all. Make amends to Her, then ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... the night was bitter, And his mansion yet two blocks away! No wonder either that the wanderer Neither saw nor heard the banker, Though his tread was swift and heavy, For a mighty storm was raging! Yet above the noise and howling Of the wind and rain and tempest, The outcast heard the shoeless footfall Of a little homeless brother, Lost amid the blinding shadows. And soon they slept, secure and thankful, Though the maddening storm grew fiercer,— Slept, but dreamed: The window rose a richer mansion Than ever ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... almost asleep when my door opened, and the pattering of shoeless feet announced a visitor. Aleck was groping in the dark, and, guided by my voice, reached the bottom of my bed, discovered the mound raised by my feet, felt his way along the ridge of my person, and having arrived at my head, flung his arms around my neck, and kissing ...
— The Story of the White-Rock Cove • Anonymous
... infectious was it, that after the briefest conflict, consternation fled the field, a little smile appeared, and then a merrier, and in a moment she was laughing with him. And certainly for a man commonly most careful of his appearance, he cut a comical enough figure, with his shoeless feet and tangled hair, and the great ill-fitting sheep-skin coat huddled round him to hide the ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... becoming unpleasant towards evening, one by one the passengers went below; and the Prince, turning gradually pale, showed unequivocal symptoms of being affected by a malady which, like death, is no respecter of persons, but fastens indifferently on the sceptred monarch and the shoeless cowherd, when either ventures to go "ploughing the billows of ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... cared to look again on the scenes of his early struggle. He never found the means to revisit mother or home, friends or country. Between Patrick Bronte, proud of his Greek profile and his Greek name, the handsome undergraduate at St. John's, and the nine shoeless, hungry young Pruntys of Ahaderg, there stretched a distance not to be measured by miles. Under his warm and passionate exterior a fixed resolution to get on in the world was hidden; but, though cold, the young ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... of the sufferings of our army during the Revolution,—how they were hatless, ragged, starved, and badly armed. We have shuddered at the pictures of the snow at Valley Forge, tracked by the blood from the feet of shoeless soldiers. Yet, in the year 1861, with abundant means and with all the sympathy and aid of a wealthy country, there has been more suffering in the army than the Revolution witnessed, and it was due in a great measure to men who hastened to the spoil like vultures to their prey. ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... And when we try to lead back these misguided souls, neither threats nor promises, neither gentleness nor violence, nor anything else is now successful. The Penguin clergy pine in desolation; our country priests, reduced to following the humblest of trades, are shoeless, and compelled to live upon such scraps as they can pick up. In our ruined churches the rain of heaven falls upon the faithful, and during the holy offices they can hear the noise of stones falling ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... upon the just-mentioned poem, in a careless tone I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, "What is good for a bootless bene?" [3] To which, with infinite presence of mind (as the jest-book has it) she answered, "A shoeless pea." It was the first joke she ever made. Joke the second I make. You distinguish well, in your old preface, between the verses of Dr. Johnson, of the "Man in the Strand," and that from "The Babes in the Wood," I was thinking whether, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... He learned so much in that first week that when Sunday came it seemed as though aeons had passed over his head. He learned that the crime of murder was as nothing compared to the crime of allowing a customer to depart shoeless; he learned that the lunch hour was invented for the purpose of making dates; that no one had ever heard of Oskaloosa, Iowa; that seven dollars a week does not leave much margin for laundry and general recklessness; that ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... spoke did I remember that I was shoeless. Now I sat down beside Godfrey, got fumblingly into my shoes again, and then followed him and Simmonds slowly ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... speaker to indulge his love of speech, which was again interrupted by a terrific thundering at the door, which opened,—not to a deputation, but to a whole platform of rejected humanity, presenting the most grotesque appearance. Falstaff's invincibles would convey no comparison. Some were hatless and shoeless; some had sleeveless coats and tattered trousers: others had collars but no shirts; all had faces immersed in massive beards. Two-and-two abreast, they walked, in with an independent air, each provided with a Saunder's circular, and took ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... since I had seen him last. His clothes hung in tatters about his body, while his large feet were shoeless and bleeding profusely: but the fire of his black eyes was unquenched, and the bony form, still upright in spite of the hard labor to which he had been subjected, gave assurance, to my dismay, that he still possessed ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... sto'es!" murmured the girl. Negroes—the men in dirty dusters, the women in smart calicoes, girls in dowdy muslins and boy's hats—and mountain whites, coatless men, shoeless women—hung about the counters ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... city-gate stands a sentry—the strangest thing I ever saw in the guise of a soldier—a brown Indian of the coast, dressed in some rags that were a uniform once, shoeless, filthy in the extreme, and armed with an amazing old flint-lock. He is bad enough to look at, in all conscience, and really worse than he looks, for—no doubt—he has been pressed into the service against his will, and hates white men and their ways with all his heart. Of course he ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... indulged in study, and often read in bed during the winter evenings, because I could not afford a fire." Travelling on foot to Bath, he there obtained an engagement as a cellarman, but shortly after we find him back in the metropolis again almost penniless, shoeless, and shirtless. He succeeded, however, in obtaining employment as a cellarman at the London Tavern, where it was his duty to be in the cellar from seven in the morning until eleven at night. His health broke down under this confinement in the dark, added ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... careful mother does not let her child run barefoot, no matter how they clamor to do it. If they wish to go shoeless, let them wear bathing sandals without stockings, is the advice of the writer, who adds, the germ of tetanus, better known as lockjaw, is frequently found in the soil and a child with even a small scratch or ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... facing the district, the side of a mountain, two thousand feet high and above one thousand feet broad, had two years ago given way to the subterranean action of the waves. The rock consists of a tough calcareous breccia, full of fragments of mussels and corals; but, being shoeless, I could not remain on the sharp rock sufficiently long ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... the breathless morning On the thin, tin, crackling roofs, To the haze of the burned back-ranges And the dust of the shoeless hoofs — To the risk of a death by drowning, To the risk of a death by drouth — To the men of a million acres, To the Sons ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... took leave in ten minutes—to find good influences in a Kelly pool-parlor on Third Avenue. He returned to his room at ten, and, sitting with his shoeless feet cocked up on his bed, read a story in Racy Yarns. While beyond the partition, about four feet from him, Una Golden lay in bed, her smooth arms behind her aching head, and worried ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... came about in the most natural way. We catch our first glimpse of the boy when he sat in a little log school-house, without windows or floor, one of a humming score of shoeless boys, where a good-natured, irritable, drinking English schoolmaster taught him to read, write, and cipher as far as Practice. This was the only school he ever attended, and that was all he learned at it. His widowed mother, with her seven young children, her little farm, and two or three slaves, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... me great inconvenience and much pain, has begun to conduct itself amiably. I can now again walk my ten miles in the morning without inconvenience, but am absurdly obliged to sit shoeless all the evening—a very slight penalty, as I detest going out to dinner (which killed ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... least as regarded wayfaring; for mother's cousin, the worthy tanner (with whom we had slept on the way to London), was in such indignation at the plight in which I came back to him, afoot, and weary, and almost shoeless—not to speak of upper things—that he swore then, by the mercy of God, that if the schemes abrewing round him, against those bloody Papists, should come to any head or shape, and show good chance of succeeding, he would risk a thousand pounds, as ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... hearty squeeze, he disappeared with the same cautious creak upon the stair, crept shoeless over the pavement of the yard, and, locking the gates behind him, passed out into the front where he had left his shoes. If the same way had been paved with burning ploughshares, it is not at all improbable that John would have traversed ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... lay in their camps on the Rapidan, in that cold winter of 1863—a little army of ragged and hungry men, with gaunt faces, wasted forms, shoeless feet; with nothing to encourage them but the cause, past victories, and Lee's presence. That was much; what was enough, however, was the blood in their veins; the inspiration of the great race of fighting men from whom they derived their origin. Does any ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... driven quickly without risk of danger. Over this road, with one shoe gone, I was forced to gallop at my utmost speed, my rider meanwhile cutting into me with his whip, and with wild curses urging me to go still faster. Of course my shoeless foot suffered dreadfully; the hoof was broken and split down to the very quick, and the inside was terribly cut by the ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... Israel was in his right mind. He was sitting by the door of his house, with a dejected air, a hopeless look, but the slow sad eyes of reason. His clothing was one worn and torn kaftan; his feet were shoeless, and his head was bare. But so grand a head the Mahdi thought he had never beheld before. Not until then had he truly seen him, for the poverty and misery that sat on him only made his face stand out the clearer. It was the face of a man who for good ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... battered, Shoeless, and knocked about; From under their ragged forelocks Their hungry ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... desolate and swampy plains, holding no walls, nor cities, nor tilled fields, but living by pasturage and hunting and a few fruit trees. The fish, which are inexhaustible and past computing for multitude, they do not taste. They dwell coatless and shoeless in tents, possess their women in common, and rear all the offspring as a community. Their form of government is mostly democratic and they are very ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... actually unrolled before his eyes, of the part they will perform in life. They will all become leading members of Dorcas societies; they will find perpetual delight in carrying to the poor bundles of tracts and packages of tea; they will scour the highways and by-ways for dirty, ragged, hatless, shoeless, and godless children, whom they will hale into the Sunday-school; they will shine with unsurpassed skill in the manufacture of slippers for the rector; they will exhibit a fiery enthusiasm in the decoration ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... Teach, hatless and shoeless, and, says his biographer, "a little flushed with drink"—as a man might be who spent most of his waking hours swigging pure rum—stumbled up on deck and made a proposal ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... travelled over the picturesque figure on the bed, noting everything—the shoeless foot, the stockings wet to some inches above the small ankles, the mud-stained skirt, the bedraggled cloak saturated for quite a foot of its length. Her hair had lost its comb and had fallen about her shoulders. Mrs. Fenton frowned as she saw ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... to be raked out, and the still to stand unused until it was repaired, the Colonel turned his horse to go, when he observed that the third negro was shoeless, and his feet chapped and swollen with the cold. 'Jake,' he ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... were still drinking "chicha;" and I shall not forget the solemn satisfied look of the shoeless corporation, as they sipped their drink in sight of their townspeople, now and then singling out some friend, to whom they signed to come and quaff at the big bowl. The warm drink had loosened the tongue of the solemn alcalde. He came, and with many compliments, wished us a good journey. ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... to love her, though as yet I knew not that I had regained my liberty only to lose my heart. My feelings at the moment oscillated between admiration of her and a painful sense of my own disreputable appearance. Bareheaded and shoeless, covered with the dust of the desert, clad only in a torn shirt and ragged trousers, my arms and legs scored with livid marks, I must have seemed a veritable scarecrow. Angela looked like a queen, or would have done were queens ever so charming, or so becomingly ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... I may add—that I know them to be good. Apropos—when I first opened upon the just mentioned poem, in a careless tone I said to Mary as if putting a riddle "What is good for a bootless bean?" to which with infinite presence of mind (as the jest book has it) she answered, a "shoeless pea." It was the first joke she ever made. Joke the 2d I make you distinguish well in your old preface between the verses of Dr. Johnson of the man in the Strand, and that from the babes of the wood. I was thinking whether taking ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... neighborhood of Vesterbro—narrow, poor-men's streets, which sprang up round the scattered country-houses, and shut out the light; and poor people, artistes and street girls ousted the owners and turned the luxuriant summer resort into a motley district where booted poverty and shoeless intelligence met. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... camp of insurgents—little, thin, brown fellows, ragged, dirty, shoeless—each with a sugar-loaf straw hat, a Remington rifle of the pattern of 1882, or a brand new Krag-Jorgensen donated by Uncle Sam, and the inevitable and ever ready machete swinging in a case of embossed leather on the left hip. Very young they were, and very old; and wiry, quick-eyed, intelligent, ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... glory of France: her old NOBLESSE. Their ancestors had oppressed the people, had crushed them under the scarlet heels of their dainty buckled shoes, and now the people had become the rulers of France and crushed their former masters—not beneath their heel, for they went shoeless mostly in these days—but a more effectual weight, the knife of ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Rome, to lay himself at the feet of the great Pope Innocent the Third, and to ask from him some formal recognition. The pontiff, so the story goes, was walking in the garden of the Lateran when the momentous meeting took place. Startled by the sudden apparition of an emaciated young man, bareheaded, shoeless, half-clad, but—for all his gentleness—a beggar who would take no denial, Innocent hesitated. It was but for a brief hour, the next ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... more than victor, in the counsel's mind. To-day everything is ready for the carrying-out of their skilful scheme. At the right moment the counsel gives the signal, and the boy darts in, hatless, shoeless, ragged, and dusty, for the occasion, and tragic to the counsel's heart's content, and is put at once upon the stand to tell ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... looking in upon him with dark, luminous eyes; round the small wet face tangles of raven hair fell limp and streaming; dark raiments clung to her form, diapered with sand and sea-foam, sodden with the moisture that dripped from them to the floor; under the hem of her skirt one foot peered forth, shoeless in ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Bontoc, after following Aguinaldo into the heart of the Quiangan area, he left in the pueblo some sixty shoeless men under a volunteer lieutenant. The lieutenant promptly appointed an Ilokano presidente, vice-presidente, secretary, and police force in Bontoc and also in Sagada, and when the soldiers left in a few weeks he gave seven guns to the "officials" ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... delightful afternoon I had ever spent in my life. We seemed to become old friends in a few minutes, and in an hour or two she was the closest friend I had on earth. Not all the little shoeless friends in Raxton, not all the beautiful sea-gulls I loved, not all the sunshine and wind upon the sands, not all the wild bees in Graylingham Wilderness, could give the companionship this child could give. My flesh tingled ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton |
