"Bare-legged" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was hot for an hour or two in the middle of the day, but even then in the shadow dwelt a cold breath—of the winter, or of death—of something that humanity felt unfriendly. To Gibbie, however, bare-legged, bare-footed, almost bare-bodied as he was, sun or shadow made small difference, except as one of the musical intervals of life that make the melody of existence. His bare feet knew the difference on the flags, and his heart recognized unconsciously the ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... and cocks and hens flapped and fluttered promiscuously, as they mingled in a sort of yard divided from the house by a low dyke, possessing the accommodation of a crazy gate, which was bestrode by a parcel of bare-legged boys. ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... olive-branch in the morning, and consequently that business was not to be done that day. The angry-faced official communicated the intelligence to a large group of Anadolian, Caramanian, Bosniac, and Roumelian Turks,—sturdy, undersized, broad-shouldered, bare-legged, splay-footed, horny-fisted, dark-browed, honest-looking mountaineers, who were lounging about with long pistols and yataghans stuck in their broad sashes, head-gear composed of immense tarbooshes ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... undersized, some three feet six inches by the look of her,[4] and yet perfectly proportioned. She was most curiously dressed in a frock cut to the knee, and actually in nothing else at all. It left her bare-legged and bare-armed, and was made, as he puts it himself, of stuff like cobweb: "those dusty, drooping kind which you put on your finger to stop bleeding." He could not recognise the web, but was sure that it was neither linen nor cotton. It seemed to stick ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... shrill voice far above her. "I'm coming!" Lloyd gave a hasty glance upward to the top floor, and drew back against the wall. For down the banister, with the speed of a runaway engine, came sliding a small bare-legged boy. Around and around the dizzy spiral he went, hugging the railing closely, and bringing up with a tremendous bump against the newel ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Babs and Polter were under a tree on the Kent lawn. Babs, at fourteen, with long black braids down her back, bare-legged and short-skirted in a summer sport costume, was standing against the tree with Polter facing her. They were about the same height. To my youthful imaginative mind rose the fleeting picture of a young girl in a forest menaced ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... Lucca, and, in the hands of inferior men, the sky is merely encumbered with sprawling infants; those of Domenichino in the Madonna del Rosario, and Martyrdom of St. Agnes, are peculiarly offensive, studies of bare-legged children howling and kicking in volumes of smoke. Confusion seems to exist in the minds of subsequent ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... plant and made his way through the bare-legged, soft-eyed girls, looking for Dalon. He overheard a guard say in low, bitter tones to another: "... Maybe eight hours on Vogar, and we can't leave the ship, then on to the battle front for us while Y'Nor and ...
— The Helpful Hand of God • Tom Godwin
... and ivy, the little clock-tower over stables now converted to a garage, the dovecote, masking at the other end the conservatory which adjoined the billiard-room. Close to the red-brick lodge his two children, Kate and Harry, ran out from under the acacia trees, and waved to him, scrambling bare-legged on to the low, red, ivy-covered wall which guarded his domain of eleven acres. Mr. Bosengate waved back, thinking: 'Jolly couple—by Jove, they are!' Above their heads, through the trees, he could ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... when old Jaggs came out from the trees in his furtive way and glancing up and down the road made his halting way toward Monte Carlo. The only objects in sight was a donkey laden with market produce led by a bare-legged boy who was going in ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... would be too grim. Infinite air and this spare veil of spring-tide greenery on field and forest soothe their sternness. Two rivers, swollen by late rains, had to be forded. Through one of these, the Foglia, bare-legged peasants led the way. The horses waded to their bellies in the tawny water. Then more hills and vales; green nooks with rippling corn-crops; secular oaks attired in golden leafage. The clear afternoon air rang with the voices of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... in quhyt cloathis, with ane quhyt head and ane gray beard'.[71] In East Lothian, 1630, Alexander Hamilton met the Devil in the likeness of a black man.[72] At Eymouth, 1634, Bessie Bathgate was seen by two young men 'at 12 hours of even (when all people are in their beds) standing bare-legged and in her sark valicot, at the back of hir yard, conferring with the devil who was in green cloaths'.[73] Manie Haliburton of Dirlton, 1649, confessed that, when her daughter was ill, 'came the Devill, in licknes of a man, to hir hous, calling himselff a phisition'.[74] He came ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... straight forward, as if our fellows were not on the pavement as thick as ants. There was a little stoppage owing to the men not being able to clear off because of the crowd on the right and left. But the thick ends of the guns went steadily on with the bare-legged silent soldiers after them, and in a few strides the pavement was clear, and the soldiers were eating their bread and cheese with their faces to the crowd, and a tight ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... was Phelim. He had, up to this period, never worn a shoe, nor a single article of dress that had been made for himself, with the exception of one or two pair of sheepskin small-clothes. In this way he passed his time, bare-legged, without shoes, clothed in an old coat much too large for him, his neck open, and his sooty locks covered with the hare-skin cap, the ears as usual sticking out above his brows. Much of his time was spent in setting ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... Hunter, Diablo the Terrible, Diablo the man-killer, paused and reluctantly turned about, shaking his head as though he did not wish to obey but was compelled by the force of conscience. At once a bare-legged boy of ten came in sight, running and shaking his fist angrily at the giant horse. Indeed, it was a tremendous animal. Not the seventeen hands that the hotel proprietor had described to Bull, but a full sixteen three, and ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... glittered with dew and cast long shadows. A hawk woke up and settled on a haycock, turning its head from side to side and looking discontentedly at the marsh. Crows were flying about the field, and a bare-legged boy was driving the horses to an old man, who had got up from under his long coat and was combing his hair. The smoke from the gun was white as milk over ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... on their caps, and brown faces, and clear sharp eyes, look, for all their littleness, far more military and more intelligent than the heavy louts one has seen swaggering about the garrison towns in England. Yonder go a crowd of bare-legged fishermen; there is the town idiot, mocking a woman who is screaming "Fleuve du Tage," at an inn-window, to a harp, and there are the little gamins mocking HIM. Lo! these seven young ladies, with red hair and green veils, they are from neighboring Albion, and going to bathe. Here comes three Englishmen, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... streets and quays were thronged with people of the same varieties of race we had seen in the café; most of them, of course, of an inferior class. There can be no mistaking that wild-looking creature, bare-legged, and in a white bournouse, who is staring with curious eyes at the splendid array of jewellery and plate displayed to his eager gaze in that shop window. Again he pauses before that elegant assortment of silks and shawls. What ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... I found that each peasant family endeavored to secure for one or more of its daughters the pride and glory of living unseen. The other sisters, secure in innocence, tended cattle on lonely mountain-sides, or toiled bare-legged up the steep ascents, their heads crowned with orange-baskets. The chosen sister was taught to read, to embroider, and to dwell indoors; if she went out it was only under escort, and with her face buried in a hood of almost incredible size, ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... conscience was keeping him awake. Neither of these facts, however, was true. Mac, lying on his back, watching the square patch of moonlight on the floor, was planning darkest deeds of vengeance on a certain dirty, tow-headed, bare-legged little girl, who had twice got the better of him in ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... of Christendom, it is the custom to uncover the head in token of reverence, it is here the direct contrary; as, before any man can come into, the presence of this king, he must put off his shoes and stockings, coming before him bare-footed and bare-legged, holding his hands joined over his head, bowing his body, and saying dowlat; which duty performed, he sits down, cross-legged, in the king's presence. The state is governed by five principal officers, his secretary, and four others, called sabandars, in whom are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... scanter extent than the work of Mr. Cole, represented in frank rich colours and as a so-called "view in Tuscany" a rural scene of some exuberance, a broken and precipitous place, amid mountains and forests, where two or three bare-legged peasants or woodmen were engaged, with much emphasis of posture, in felling a badly gashed but spreading oak by means of a tense rope attached to an upper limb and at which they pulled together. "Tuscany?—are you sure it's Tuscany?" ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... yeares as with us to eighty. Mr. Meredith Lloyd hath seen at Dolkelly, a great parish in Merionithshire, an hundred or more of poore people at eighty yeares of age at church in a morning, who came thither bare-foot and bare-legged a good way. In the chancell of Winterborn Basset lies interred Mr. Ambrose Brown, who died 166-,aged 103 yeares. Old goodwife Dew of Broad Chalke died about 1649, aged 103. She told me she was, I thinke, sixteen yeares old when King Edward the sixth was in this countrie, and that he lost his courtiers, ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... the musical swish of brooms and water as the bare-legged watch scrubbed decks. A burly Hollander stood on the spare topmast lying in the port scuppers, one leg crooked over the bulwark rail, scooping water from the ocean with a draw-bucket and discharging it with consummate skill among the ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... him in the park now, rolling a hoop, bare-legged, with a broad white collar, not more than six or seven years ago—and ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... bare-legged impostor! From my dressing-table get thee gone! Dost thou think my flesh is double Glo'ster? There again! That cut was to the bone! Get ye from my sight; I'll believe you're right, When my razor ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... reaches of the Sound lay a great fleet of thirty or forty large vessels—the Australian fleet. Mac had not previously known that they were to fall in with them here. For four days they lay at anchor swinging to the tide, in the entrance, lonely and unvisited, while the eager, bare-footed, bare-legged and bare-chested men gazed longingly at the distant port and tried to persuade themselves that the vessel must go up there for coal and water. Several times the life-boat crews lowered the boats and raced clumsily with each other; and once the troops polished ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... echeneis, adhere strongly to objects probably by a similar method. I once saw ten or twelve leeches adhere to each foot of an old horse a little above his hoofs, who was grazing in a morass, and which did not lose their hold when he moved about. The bare-legged travellers in Ceylon are said to be much infested by leeches; and the sea-leech, hirudo muricata, is said to adhere to fish, and the remora is said to adhere to ships in such numbers as ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... in the offing. Bare-legged and bare-shouldered La Paz scampered down to the beach, for the arrival of a steamer was their loop-the-loop, circus, Emancipation ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... another word, because the animals were upon them. They came with a rush, as though furious at seeing the bare-legged boys in their hunting preserves. That leader must have taken a decided hatred of all human kind, and when backed by his followers, seemed ready for any deed ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... hull circus wo'th lookin' at is that red-maned gal, an' she looks that sweet an' innercent she don't 'pear to rightly belong in that thar bare-legged bunch o' she dido-cutters. They-all must 'a mavericked her recent. Looks like a pr'ty ripe red apple among ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... about sallow, gaunt faces, are commingling in the yard with chickens, dogs, and calves. A sallow-faced, slatternly woman, bareheaded, with uncared-for hair, long, tangled, and black, with her dress tucked up to her knees, bare-footed and bare-legged, is wading through the mud from the bayou, with a dirty pail full ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... flashing eye and uplifted hand; but she let it fall suddenly, saying, "No, I vow I won't lick ye Christmas Day, if yer drive me crazy; but speak up smart, now, 'n' say whether yer'd ruther give Jim Cullen half yer candy or go bare-legged ter the party?" The matter being put so plainly, Peoria collected her faculties, dried her tears, and chose the lesser evil, Clem having hastened the decision by an affectionate wink, that meant he'd go halves with her on ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... several, being shadowed and darkened by the general aspect of the place. When we arrived, all the wretched little dwellings seemed to have belched forth their inhabitants into the warm summer evening; everybody was chatting with everybody, on the most familiar terms; the bare-legged children gambolled or quarrelled uproariously, and came freely, moreover, and looked into the window of our parlor. When we ventured out, we were followed by the gaze of the whole town: people standing in their door-ways, old women popping ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... remainder of the crew I can not give so good a report. They are a curious assemblage of one-eyed, forefingerless, toothless men, bare-legged, in robes of dark blue, and gay turbans, it being a common custom to render themselves thus maimed in order to escape military conscription. There is Mohammed, a good-natured fellow, ready to do just ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... water-side, where Monsieur Lenoir raised his maize and his vegetables. Below the mill, so Monsieur Gratiot told me, where the creek lay in pools on its limestone bed, the village washing was done; and every Monday morning bare-legged negresses strode up this road, the bundles of clothes balanced on their heads, the paddles in their hands, followed by a stream of black urchins who tempted Providence to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... million bare-legged children with short white socks running wild, and another half a million nurses with white caps running wild after them. And the Eiffel Tower! But that's since your ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... rested in his paternal halls the second night, before he had commenced making arrangements for a hunt breakfast, by way of letting all his friends know that he was again among them. And so missives, in Guss and Sophy's handwriting, were sent round by a bare-legged little boy, to all the Mounts, Towns, and Castles, belonging to the Dillons, Blakes, Bourkes, and Browns of the neighbourhood, to tell them that the dogs would draw the Kelly's Court covers at eleven ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... came very strictly true to me. We were all on the main deck, bare-armed and bare-legged, mopping and slopping and swabbing about in the cold sea-water, which was liberally supplied to us by the steam-pump and hose. I had been furnished with a squeegee (a sort of scraper made of india-rubber at the end of broom-stick), and was putting as much ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... nominally he had been acting as best man to a brother officer, he had spent most of his time in the service of the muslin-frocked, bare-legged atom who now sprawled upon his knee with all the privilege of old acquaintance, assuring him of her whole-hearted devotion ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... holy pictures. I saw the dortoire [Dormitory.] and the cells of the priests, and we went into one; a very pretty little room, very clean, hung with pictures, set with books. The Priest was in his cell, with his hair clothes to his skin, bare-legged with a sandall only on, and his little bed without sheets, and no feather-bed; but yet I thought, soft enough. His cord about his middle; but in so good company, living with ease, I thought it a very good life. A pretty library they have. And I was in the refectoire, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... and Targets, I say," answered his companion; "for the Lady of Montrose herself could not be more courteously waited upon; she has four Highland maidens, and as many bare-legged gillies, ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... at the house of a man who was said to possess $150,000 (30,000 pounds) worth of land. The house was well enough. His two bare-legged daughters, girls of seventeen or eighteen, lounged about smoking pipes. I gave one a cigar. She replied, "I don't keer if I do try it. I've allays wanted to know what a cigar smokes like." But she didn't like it. Apropos of girls, I may say that there is a far ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... ground; they used no saddle or stirrups, but sat upon a cloth of gay colours; the bits were of silver and the bridles of many-coloured cords. The less important people were on small strong horses of various colours, well suited to a mountain journey; and all (even the Rajah) were bare-legged to above the knee, wearing only the gay coloured cotton waist-cloth, a silk or cotton jacket, and a large handkerchief tastefully folded around the head. Everyone was attended by one or two servants bearing his sirih ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to me, and I know it was even more so to Rectus, to stand here and have those strangers watch us fishing. If we had not been barefooted and bare-legged, we should not have minded it so much. As for the old Minorcan, I don't suppose he cared at all. I began to think it was ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... Difference of environment and social customs will account for the superior virility of Europeans as compared with their distant kinsmen whose lot is cast in the sweltering tropics. But no one who has observed Bengali schoolboys standing up bare-legged to fast bowling will question their bravery. In fact, the instinct of combativeness is universal, and among protected communities it ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... were by no means the least impressive part of the circus. There were no drags and carriages on this occasion and no gaily-caparisoned horses with nodding plumes, but in their places were heavy-wheeled carts drawn by humpbacked little bullocks and jinrickshas drawn by bare-legged Cingalese. About these swarmed the natives in their rainbow attire, the whole scene being one of ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... rainy summer mornings, the friar loved to hoist his capote on the cord, and tramp, bare-legged, out to his two-acre farm, leaving his slave, with a few small coins in the till, to keep shop should any ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... down, and counted and weighed the silver. Karl took the helmet off his head, and received in it the weighed silver. They saw a man coming to them who had a stick with an axe-head on it in his hand, a hat low upon his head, and a short green cloak. He was bare-legged, and had linen breeches on tied at the knee. He laid his stick down in the field, and went to Karl and said, "Take care, Karl Morske, that thou does not hurt thyself against my axe-stick." Immediately a man came running and calls with great ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... and he found himself in front of a gate, on the high post of which was perched a diminutive, bare-legged girl in a soiled, damp frock, superintending the drying of three pair of mud-covered shoes arranged in a row on the picket fence, while she issued orders to the two sisters sitting in the middle of the gravel walk ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... almost twelve months from the day Foe left the portico of the Flaxman Building Hotel, New York, that he stepped ashore on the beach below San Ramon and resigned his light suitcase to a herd of bare-legged boys who offered to carry it up to the hotel, but seemed likelier to dismember it on the way and share up the shreds. They took him, as a matter of course, for a plantation inspector, arrived in the off-season. He was the only passenger landed from the P.M. Diaz, which had dropped anchor comfortably, ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... streamers. In front of them sat officers in uniform, and the dark-skinned dandies of Valencia, in white duck suits and Panama hats, toying with tortoise shell canes, which could be converted, if the occasion demanded, into blades of Toledo steel. In the streets were priests and bare-legged mule drivers, and ragged ranchmen with red-caped cloaks hanging to their sandals, and negro women, with bare shoulders and long trains, vending lottery tickets and rolling huge cigars between their lips. It was an old story ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... stretch of white sand camped the merry-makers. Soon a great fire of driftwood and pine cones tossed its flames defiantly at a radiant moon in the sky, and the fishers were casting their nets in the sea. The more daring of the girls waded bare-legged in the water, holding pine-torches, spearing flounders and ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... Ballinrobe folk indulged but very slightly in groaning or hissing, and when the little army got clear of the town its sole followers were a couple of cars, a market cart, and a private gig driven by a lady, the tag-rag and bobtail being made up of a dozen bare-legged girls, whose scoffs and jeers never went beyond the inquiry, "Wad ye dig auld Boycott's pitaties, thin?" There was no wit or humour racy of the soil, no flashes of bitter sarcasm, no pungent observations: everybody felt that the thing was going off like a damp firework, and that, ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... (Marseilles) "for a ship. We are likely to go to Cyprus. The vintage was going while we were en route hither. I was interested to see men walking bare-legged, stained purple nearly to the knee, with treading the wine vat. I then understood the Scripture metaphor.... The men seemed to have been wading in blood.... I should deprecate a whole district being dependent for its livelihood on the sale of wine.... ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... was unlocking the boat-house, having already observed the peril of the boys, but lamenting the absence of his mate. Petros ran down at speed to offer his help, and Anna could only borrow the glass, through which she plainly saw the three boys, bare-legged, sitting huddled up on the top of the rock, but with the waves still a good way from them, and their faces all turned hopefully towards the promontory of rock along which she could see Gerald picking his way; but there was evidently a ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a market is held every day for the sale of provisions. The king has five wives, besides several concubines, being attended by four men carrying great canes with silver heads, who are called pury bassas, and who seem to manage all his affairs. His majesty goes always bare-footed and bare-legged, being for the most part clad like a Dutch skipper, with a sort of green gauze covering strewed with spangles over his long black hair; but when he appears in state, he wears a long calico gown over his jacket, and sits on a chair covered with red cloth. He is always attended by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... seemed quite a desecration to walk upon it—this spotlessness did not last very long; and then two wooden piers with a light-house on each, and a quay, and blue-bloused workmen and red-legged little soldiers with mustaches, and bare-legged fisher-women, all speaking a language that I knew as well as the other commoner language I had left behind; but which I had always looked upon as an exclusive possession of my father's and mother's and mine for the exchange of sweet confidence and the bewilderment of outsiders; and here ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... even Mr. Macdonald thought it ingenious. 'And so,' I went on, 'we were alive and awake and beginning to make history when you Scots were only bare-legged savages roaming over the hills and stealing cattle. It was a very bad habit of yours, that cattle-stealing, and one which you kept ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... halted just before entering the gate, calling loudly for the porter. But instead of the latter, Sir Arnold himself appeared at that moment within the courtyard, feeding a brace of huge mastiffs with gobbets of red raw meat from a wooden bowl, carried by a bare-legged stable-boy with a shock of almost colourless flaxen hair, and a round, red face, pierced by two little round blue eyes. Gilbert called again, and the knight instantly turned and came towards him, beating down with his hands the huge dogs that sprang up at him in play and seemed ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... prohibited on pain of forfeiture, it was not to be bought here, and scarcely anything else, for he had made a useless journey below, not being able to obtain shoes and stockings for his little children who were bare-legged. ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... fire, on their hands and knees, and apparently poking at it, each with a bit of wood, or about to lay the bits of wood on it, were two little girls, shock-headed, barefoot and bare-legged, clad only in coarse tunics of rusty dark wool. I am not accurate as to children's ages: I took these girls for seven and five; but they may have been six and four or eight and six. At sight of us they scrambled to their feet ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... bicycle and its rider depart from among them so soon, although at the same time anxious to see me speed along the smooth, straight trails that fortunately lead directly from the caravanserai eastward. Scores of the shouting, yelling mob race, bare-footed and bare-legged, over the stones and gravel alongside the bicycle, until I can put on a spurt and out-distance them, which I take care to do as soon as practicable, thankful to get away and eat the bread pocketed in disgust at the caravanserai ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... city, but a few miles distant, and the young lord, with three of his uncles, was on the spot by daybreak. They entered the house and ordered Allen to be brought before them. The archbishop was dragged from his bed; and in his shirt as he was, bare-legged and bare-headed, he dropt upon his knees, and begged for mercy. As well might the sheep have asked mercy of the famished wolf. He had but time to bequeath his soul to heaven, and his skull was cloven as he knelt; and, to make clean work, his chaplains, his servants, all of English blood who ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... one drew blood of the other, wherefore the same church was suspended, and no service sung or said therein for the space of one month after; the priests were committed to prison, and the 15th of October, being enjoined penance, they went at the head of a general procession, barefooted and bare-legged, before the children, with beads and books in their hands, from Paul's, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... look of the fellow arrested Robin's attention, and he decided to stop and talk with him. The fellow was bare-legged and bare-armed, and wore a long shift of a shirt, fastened with a belt. About his neck hung a stout, bulging bag, which was buckled by a good piece ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of flat land thickly covered with black walnuts, oaks, and hickories. As the general mast was a good one that year, squirrels were seen gamboling on every tree around us. My companion, a stout, hale, and athletic man, dressed in a homespun hunting-shirt, bare-legged and moccasined, carried a long and heavy rifle, which, as he was loading it, he said had proved efficient in all his former undertakings, and which he hoped would not fail on this occasion, as he felt proud to show me his skill. The gun was wiped, the powder ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... he, "I came very often to the Quarry House, but I always rode homewards discontented in the evening. Resilda at that time had a great ambition to be a boy. The sight of any brown bare-legged lad gipsying down the hill with a song upon his lips, would set her viciously kicking the toes of her satin slippers against the parapet of the terrace, and clamouring at her sex. Now I was not of the same ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... do go, and how the brown naked children, who look like so many shrimps, cling screaming about them at the sight); how all hands are now employed at the wine-making, and her brother is at this moment dancing bare-legged in a vat half as high as the house; how the bigger girls bring baskets of grapes, with eyes closed to keep out the rain; and how the smaller ones gather snails in the wet grass, which will appear ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... yet been indissolubly blended together. The events of 1715 and of 1745 had left painful and enduring traces. The tradesmen of Cornhill had been in dread of seeing their tills and warehouses plundered by bare-legged mountaineers from the Grampians. They still recollected that Black Friday, when the news came that the rebels were at Derby, when all the shops in the city were closed, and when the Bank of England began ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Lincoln should have said, when a bare-legged boy, that he intended to be President of the United States, is not remarkable. Every boy in the United States says it; soon, perhaps, every girl will be able to say it, and then human happiness will be complete. But Lincoln was really carrying on his political education. Dennis Hanks is asked ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... meeting at Blair-Athol by exclaiming that he beholds a dirk sticking in the breast of their entertainer. That night he is stabbed to the heart; and even while the seer beheld the visionary dagger, a bare-legged gilly was watching outside to execute a long-cherished Highland vengeance. The Marquess of Argyle, who was afterwards beheaded, was playing with some of his clan at bowls, or bullets, as Wodrow calls them, for he was not learned in the nomenclature ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... of—the original whity-gray stuff in the banks—saw the melting in the pots (a wondrous process, a real poem)—saw the delicate preparation the clay material undergoes for these great pots (it has to be kneaded finally by human feet, no machinery answering, and I watch'd the picturesque bare-legged Africans treading it)—saw the molten stuff (a great mass of a glowing pale yellow color) taken out of the furnaces (I shall never forget that Pot, shape, color, concomitants, more beautiful than any antique statue,) ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... to the edge of the first, and I climbed on the guide's back. He went bare-legged into the stream deeper and deeper till my feet, though held up high, just touched the water; then laboriously he climbed the further shore, and I got down upon dry land. It had been but twenty yards or so, and he knew the place well. I had seen, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... tones; and the group of lads for whom she was waiting came in sight. Bare-legged, with trousers turned up at the knees, coatless, wearing a variety of hats, some having brims minus crowns and others crowns only, they came along carrying fishing-rods and tin cans for ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... Into it the bare-legged trio dared not venture, knowing that they would get a worse scratching and tearing than if ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... musked and powdered; his flowing wig was curiously combed, curled, frizzed, undulated and perfumed, according to the custom of the old french Kings;"[318] but much more it seems according to the custom of less ancient sovereigns; and there is at the Louvre, a portrait of Louis XIII. bare-legged, periwigged, ermine-cloaked, which corresponds far better to this description than anything we ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... leather straps, booted, as it were, with ample shin-guards of thick hide, bronze-plated like the straps of his flapping kilt. He carried a big oval shield and threatened with a long straight sword his adversary, a Roman in every outline, a slender young man, barefoot, bare-legged, kilted with the scantiest form of gladiator's body-piece and apron, clad in a green tunic and carrying only the small round shield and short sabre of a Thracian. He wore a helmet like a skull cap with a broad nose-guard that ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... very good)—next morning, as Captain Edward Waverley was setting out for his morning walk, he found the castle of Bradwardine by no means the enchanted palace of silence he had first discovered. Milkmaids, bare-legged and wild-haired, ran about distractedly with pails and three-legged stools in their hands, crying, "Lord, guide ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Little bare-legged children ran about him, playing, on the grass; but Percival Ford did not see them. He was gazing steadily at the singer under the hau tree. He even changed his position once, to get closer. The clerk of the Seaside went by, limping with age and dragging his ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... look like one who owns three country dwellings, bare-legged thou standest, and like a beggar clothed; thou hast not ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... squirting from a severed vessel, lay back with updrawn knees, breathing in wheezy gasps. Further back—all panting together, like the wind in a tree—there stood a group of fierce, wild creatures, bare-armed and bare-legged, gaunt, unshaven, with deep-set murderous eyes and wild beast faces. With their flashing teeth, their bristling hair, their mad leapings and screamings, they seemed to Alleyne more like fiends from the pit than men of flesh ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... keep anything to myself. The children pulled my books to pieces to look at the pictures; and an impudent, bare-legged Irish servant-girl took my towels to wipe the dishes with, and my clothes-brush to black the shoes—an operation which she performed with a mixture of soot and grease. I thought I should be better off in a place of my own, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... appeared, in his usual state of comparative nudity. Beholding this personification of poverty in the middle of this luxurious dining-room, the cost of one panel of which would have been a fortune to the bare-legged, bare-breasted, and bare-headed child, it was impossible not to be moved by an impulse of charity. The boy's eyes, like blazing coals, gazed first at the luxuries of the room, and then at those ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... low voice, still watching intently: "Blue sky, green trees, a snowy shore, and little azure wavelets.... Two children bare-legged, playing in the sand.... A little girl—so pretty!—with her brown eyes and brown curls.... And the boy is her brother I think.... Oh, certainly.... And what a splendid time they are having with their sand-fort!... There's a little dog, too. They are calling him, 'Snippy! Snippy! Snippy!' How ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... beech trees, upon a low, bleak-looking field before the house, which is called, par excellence, the lawn; a pig or two, some geese, and a tethered goat are, here and there musing over the state of Ireland, while some rosy curly-headed noisy and bare-legged urchins are gamboling before the door. This is the dwelling of the worshipful justice, to which myself and my party were now approaching, with that degree of activity which attends on most marches of twenty miles, under the oppressive closeness of a day in autumn. Fatigued ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Irish troops, and nothing but courteous treatment from the soldiers of every rank and form of religion. Murray directed that 'the compliment of the hat' should be paid to all religious processions. The Ursuline nuns knitted long stockings for the bare-legged Highlanders when the winter came on, and presented each Scottish officer with an embroidered St Andrew's Cross on the 30th of November, St Andrew's Day. The whole garrison won the regard of the town by giving up part of their rations for the hungry poor; while the habitants from the surrounding ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... when not, he went to the Graham ranch on Diamond Creek, five miles south of the girls' claims, where his figure was as familiar (and of about as much interest) as the magpies in the pasture. He fully meant to marry Louise, whose beauty and gracious manner even to the smallest bare-legged Mexican boy on the ranch captivated him and stirred in his breast a maddening desire for possession, so that he might cut off the rest of the world from her sweetness, so that it might alone feed his passion. Yes, he meant to ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... galloping from every direction. In a few minutes the road in my immediate vicinity is alive with twenty prancing steeds; some are bestrode by men who, from the superior quality of their clothes and the gaudy trappings of their horses, are evidently in good circumstances; others by wild-looking, barelegged bipeds, whose horses' trappings consist of nothing but a bridle. The transformation brought about by crossing the mountain ridge is novel and complete; the fez, so omnipresent throughout the Ottoman dominions, has disappeared, as if by magic; the better class Persians wear tall, brimless black hats ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... old house seemed to be exuding children from a thousand pores—children red-haired and black-haired, and tow-headed, boys and girls, little and big, and apparently yelling on a wager about who owned the loudest voice, all dirty-faced, barelegged, and scantily clothed. J.M. mechanically set himself to counting them, but when he got as high as seventeen, he thought he must have counted some of ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield |
