"Shoeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... recognized his talent, the master sent the lad to a portrait-painter in Warsaw. In 1831 he was sent to his master in St. Petersburg on foot by the regular police "stages" (etape), arriving almost shoeless, and acted as lackey in the establishment. At last his master granted his urgent request, and apprenticed him for four years to an instructor in painting. Here Shevtchenko made acquaintance with the artist I. M. Soshenko, and through him with an author of some little ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... 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 ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... happily into her place by Richard and they drove off to Bennington, at a slower pace than usual for Richard wished to "favor" the shoeless foot. ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... eighteenpence a week, I 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 ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... around in his 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 had very much ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Angell, a sack-maker. Here he continued to work day and night until desperation, long threatened, seized upon him. Court journals grew tired of articles showing little talent for political discussion, and he became ragged and almost shoeless. In the only despondent letter ever sent to his mother, he wrote of having stumbled into an open grave one day while walking in St. Pancras's Churchyard. The Angells, touched with his poverty and distress, kindly offered him food, which, except in one instance, he declined. One night ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Salisbury. He talks homilies even in drunkenness, prates about the beauty of charity, and duty of forgiveness, but is altogether a canting humbug, and is ultimately so reduced in position that he becomes a "drunken, begging, squalid, letter-writing man," out at elbows, and almost shoeless. Pecksniff's specialty is the "sleek, smiling abominations ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... 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 ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dog's deep-toned thunder no longer sounded through the house, baying joyous welcome when his mistress came down for her early morning ramble in the shrubberies. Arion had been sent to grass, and was running wild in fertile pastures, shoeless and unfettered as the South American mustang on his native prairie. Nothing associated with the exiled heiress was left, except the rooms she had inhabited; and even they looked blank and empty and strange without her. It was almost as if a whole family had ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... dragged from their beds, and hurried away, half naked, from their frantic wives and weeping children. The arrests, in numerous instances, were attended with every circumstance of barbarity short of death. Prisoners were goaded, with shoeless and bleeding feet, on the road to Pittsburg; numbers of them were tied back to back, and thrown into a wet cellar as a place of detention. One man, whose child was dying, came forward voluntarily when the arrests were being made, hoping ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... the men of the North, under intense suffering for liberty's sake, has been almost godlike! History has so recorded it. Who comprised that gallant army, without food, without pay shelterless, shoeless, penniless, and almost naked, in that dreadful winter,—the midnight of our Revolution,—whose wanderings could be traced by their blood-tracks in the snow; whom no arts could seduce, no appeal lead astray, no sufferings disaffect; ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... point or on the banks of the rocky ford beyond; but, in the shallows, close to the shore, lay the body of the second outrider, shot and scalped. In a clump of willows lay another body, that of a pinto pony, hardly cold, while the soft, sandy shores were cut by dozens of hoof tracks—shoeless. The tracks of the mules and wagon lay straight away across the stream bed—up the opposite bank and out on the northward-sweeping bench beyond. Hay's famous four, and well-known wagon, contents and all, therefore, had been spirited away, not toward the haunts of the road agents in the mountains ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... Boonsboro', where he bivouacked for the night. Stuart, it was ascertained, marched till about midnight to the small town of Leitersburgh, where he rested his worn and wearied command. His condition was really pitiable. A large number of his men were mounted on shoeless horses, whose leanness showed that they had made many a long march through and from Virginia. Or, as was the case with a large proportion of them, they had fat horses, which were stolen from the fields ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... night was dark, a strong, lurid glow, which seemed to emanate from all over it, enabled me to see distinctly its broad, muscular breast; its panting, steaming flanks; its long, graceful legs with their hairy fetlocks and shoeless, shining hoofs; its powerful but arched back; its lofty, colossal head with waving forelock and broad, massive forehead; its snorting nostrils; its distended, foaming jaws; its huge, glistening teeth; and its lips, wreathed in a savage ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... 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, ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... 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 ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... 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 about ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... 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 ...
— The Story of the White-Rock Cove • Anonymous
... approach of the patrol, who causes a turmoil, in the midst of which they all escape. Alcindor the old admirer finds only two bills awaiting him, when he returns with the new shoes. Musette has been carried away shoeless by her ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... never to visit it again. He never 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 man was just and self-denying, and as long as his mother lived she received twenty pounds ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... the good-for-nothing!" cried the old woman, full of wrath at the sight of the shoeless boy. "What have you done with your shoe, ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... notorious throughout Clerkenwell as 'Mad Jack.' Mad he presumably was—at all events, an idiot. A lanky, raw-boned, red-beaded man, perhaps forty years old; not clad, but hung over with the filthiest rags; hatless, shoeless. He supported himself by singing in the streets, generally psalms, and with eccentric modulations of the voice which always occasioned mirth in hearers. Sometimes he stood at a corner and began the ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... 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 May rest upon ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... 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
... he bounded swiftly away. Bathalda sat listening for a moment, to discover the direction from which the troops were coming. As soon as he made out the soft tread of the shoeless feet, he dipped his paddle in the water, and the boat ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... braved death a thousand times at the passage of the rivers. For the rainy season was at its height, and consequently the rivers were swollen outside their beds, and had very swift currents. They came afoot and shoeless, for the mud unshod them in two steps. Their food was morisqueta. [55] They suffered so great need of all things, although not through the fault of the father commissary, who ever treated them with great liberality and no less charity; but on the roads they met no people, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... I was shoeless, along with the greater part of my command, though the weather was bitter cold, and my feet were bleeding, and yet when I heard that trumpet voice, ordering us from the wagons to make one more stand, ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... and at the other the lowest riff-raff of the towns. It was Hankin's regular custom to visit the camps where these people were quartered, with the avowed object of "studying human nature," but really for the purpose of spying out the shoeless, or worse than shoeless, feet. He was a notable performer on the concertina, and I well remember seeing him in the middle of a pea-field, surrounded by as sorry a group of human wreckage as civilisation could produce, listening, or dancing to his strains. ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... 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 ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... much lengthened by the desire of the family to avoid the main road. They were all intensely ashamed; Darius was ashamed to tears, and did not know why; even his little sister wept and had to be carried, not because she was shoeless and had had nothing to eat, but because she was going to the Ba-ba-bastille; she had no notion what the place was. It proved to be the largest building that Darius had ever seen; and indeed it was the largest in the district; they stood against its steep sides like flies against a kennel. Then ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... and day and night the endless stream of muddy men poured down Main street, in steady tramp for the Peninsula. Grim and bronzed they were, those veterans of Manassas; smeared with the clay of their camp, unwashed, unkempt, unfed; many ragged and some shoeless. But they tramped through Richmond—after their forced march—with cheery aspect that put to flight the doubts and fears of her people. Their bearing electrified the citizens; and for the moment, the rosy clouds of hope again ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... or—I hope 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 your ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Scotland"; from which remark it may be 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
... him. . . . Then she remembered that he stood there shoeless; and, giving a little cry, would have run barefoot down the moonlit ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... moon becomes, in Maori legend, a woman, one Rona by name. 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 Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... 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
... 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 of chimney-tops and smoke. The conductor ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... populous, chiefly with shoeless inhabitants, monotonously flat, few buildings for dread of earthquake being over one story, even the national palace and cathedral sitting low and squat. An elevation of five thousand feet gives it a pleasant June weather, but life ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... 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
... 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 ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... 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 ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... 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 ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... the mire. Then the driver discovered that one of the horses had lost his shoes, and insisted on having them replaced before he proceeded. We were midway between two 'relay-houses,' each being six miles distant, and the Jehu decided on taking the shoeless horse back to the one we had passed. As he was unharnessing the animal, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... schools, and received subsidies from the municipality. Not only were all children under sixteen admitted to these schools without any fees, but the books, stationery, and all other material necessary were furnished gratuitously, and those who were shoeless were even provided with shoes, the only requisites being cleanliness and regular attendance. The direction was rigidly non-sectarian. The trustees were unpaid, and they comprised many of the leading citizens interested in popular education. They ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... struggle. The American army were sheltered by miserable huts, through which the 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 ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... his nobility of soul, and elevate them to a standard little short of his own? That he did do this we have the proof. Pillage was almost unknown amongst the Garibaldians; and these famished, ill-clad, shoeless men marched on from battle to battle with scarcely an instance of crime that called for the interference ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... followed by men at whose hands, if retaken, they 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 vessels in ...
— Frank on the Lower Mississippi • Harry Castlemon
... 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 ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... rags 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 ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... steps of a stair leading down to a door. Curiosity naturally led her to examine it. The key was in the lock. It opened outwards, and there she found herself, to her surprise, in the heart of another dwelling, of lowlier aspect. She never saw Robert; for while he approached with shoeless feet, she had been glancing through the open door of the gable-room, and when he knelt, the light which she held in her hand had, I presume, hidden him from her. He, on his part, had not observed that the moveless ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the words "Descalcos Bagagem" (literally, "For the Shoeless and Baggage") printed across them. In these the poorer classes and the tieless can ride for half-price. And to make room for the constantly inflowing people from Europe, two great hills are being removed and "cast into ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... in a different style of dress to what he had been accustomed to see her in; as at New Orleans she had not kept to her national costume. Besides, there was a soupcon of shabbiness about her present attire, and then the shoeless feet! ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... 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
... the trenches, until the 24th of September, at which time the 10th Corps marched to the rear to rest a few days preparatory to an advance upon Richmond then in contemplation. While here our ragged, dirty, and shoeless men were clad, washed, and shod as ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... was not a sign of the invalid about him. He walked twenty or thirty miles a day and cheerfully bore the discomforts of travel. But the tour proved too much for his strength. He caught a bad cold and sore throat, and was ordered home by the doctor. He went by boat, arriving brown, shabby, and almost shoeless, among his London friends. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... crossed shoeless to the fireplace, and now stood in the position lately occupied by his rival: only, whereas the stranger had lolled easily, Zeb stood squarely, with his legs wide apart and his hands deep in his pockets. He had no eyes for the intent faces around, ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... arbor with hesitating steps, and felt that his appearance was, indeed, sorely against him. He had no covering to his head, had nothing on, indeed, but a pair of trousers. He was shoeless and stockingless, and presented the appearance of a beggar boy, rather than the smart young sailor whom she had seen on ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... 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 ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... brown and savage, hungry and grim, ragged, hatless, shoeless, our cavalcade closed up and came on, and so at last came through. Ere autumn had yellowed all the foliage back east in gentler climes, we crossed the shoulders of the Blue Mountains and came into the Valley of the Walla Walla; and so passed thence ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... amounting, as it did, to 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
... fantastically far from hinting at later developments. But the romance of the hour was particularly in what I have called the eccentric note, the fact that the children, my entertainers, riveted my gaze to stockingless and shoeless legs and feet, conveying somehow at the same time that they were not poor and destitute but rich and provided—just as I took their garden-feast for a sign of overflowing food—and that their state as of children of nature was a refinement of freedom and grace. They were to ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... administer them as required to the people of the farm. When she was within a few feet of Julien, she recognized him, and her brow clouded over; but almost immediately she noticed his altered features and that one of his feet was shoeless, and divined that something unusual had happened. Going straight ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... thrill out of easy-going, matter-of-fact, well-tubbed Harry! It was a comradeship in itself. Not that she would have told him. This capacity of hers for thrills she had found need always to keep carefully covered. In the days when she was a shoeless child—those days of her father's labor in shaft and dump—she had dimly felt her world to be a creature of a keen, a fairly cruel humor, for all things that did not pertain to the essence of the life it struggled ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... Hatless, shoeless, and coatless were the oafs who surrounded the object of his speculations, some lying flat, with elbows forward and chins to fist; some creeping and scrambling about her to get her notice, or fire her into a rage; some squatting at an easy distance ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... 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 you might have guessed him under sixteen, but his face set you doubting. ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... its roof was of rushes, which lay over it like sea-wreck on a broken barrel. 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 ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... 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
... the hush of the breathless morning Oh 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 ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... they would never have come, for my shoeless feet were all bruised, and bleeding from the crunched lime and the splinters of broken stones; but, at long and last, a ladder was hoisted up, and having fastened a kinch of ropes beneath her oxters, I let her slide down ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... ocean-pebbles, There for thee is tracked a pathway, Through the woodlands on the sea-coast, To the Northland's farthest limits, To the dismal plains of Lapland, There 'tis well for thee to lumber, There to live will be a pleasure. Shoeless there to walk in summer, Stockingless in days of autumn, On the blue-back of the mountain, Through the swamps and fertile lowlands. "If thou canst not journey thither, Canst not find the Lapland-highway, Hasten on a little distance, In the bear-path leading northward. To the grove of Tuonela, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... 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 cut takes big risks. For girls, especially, running barefoot should ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... 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 ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... 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
... gained an 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 in tatters trying to touch the hem of his garment, while a group of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... course the unbroken, shoeless, mud-covered animals arrive, and the dealer, perched on a high wooden saddle, trots them up and down to show ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... my horse on the river bank, and listening to the careless laughter of those about me, I could think only of that other half-starved army in whose camp I had been the evening before, and of those scenes of suffering witnessed during the past winter at Valley Forge—the shoeless feet, the shivering forms, the soldiers dying from cold and hunger, the snow drifting over us as we slept. What a contrast between this foolish boy's play, and the stern man's work yonder. Somehow the memory stiffened me to the playing of my own part, helping me to crush back ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... us, who enjoys "lambing" and "bucketing" even a half-donkey. Of course, the more sensible animal of the two is knocked up; whilst the rider assumes the airs of one versed in the haute cole. The only difficulty, by no fault of the mules, was the matter of irons: shoeless they could travel only in sand; and, as has been said, the farrier ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... ambitious of independence to be won for him 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 army of 60,000 Russians. Of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... hued in 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 workings, details, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... had so curiously dwindled since the times of the Temples. To be called first to the reading of the Law, to bless his brethren with symbolic spreadings of palms and fingers in a mystic incantation delivered, standing shoeless before the Ark of the Covenant at festival seasons, to redeem the mother's first-born son when neither parent was of priestly lineage—these privileges combined with a disability to be with or near the dead, differentiated his religious position from that of the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Tony left them together, for it was time to put up the shop shutters. It seemed just like the night when he had followed Susan and the little girl, and loitered outside in the doorway opposite, to see what would happen after she had left her in the shop. He fancied he was a ragged, shoeless boy again, nobody loving him, or caring for him, and that he saw old Oliver and Dolly standing on the step, looking out for the mother, who had gone away, never, never to see her darling again. Tony's heart was very full; and when ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... 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
... 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 ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... events and horrors and of the actors in that great national tragedy, than I have received from all subsequent reading. I remember also how happy I was in being able to borrow the books of a Mr. Keyes after a two-mile tramp through the snow, shoeless, my feet swaddled in remnants of ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... 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, ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... followed him accordingly and so into a small cabin occupied—or, let me rather say, filled—by the stoutest woman it has ever been my lot to meet. She reclined—in such a position as to display a pair of colossal feet, shoeless, clothed in thick worsted stockings—upon a locker on the starboard side: and no one, regarding her, could wonder that this also was the side towards which the vessel listed. Her broad recumbent back was supported by a pile of ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 up ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... the stairs stood little Wright, shoeless, and shivering in his night-gown, but keenly entering into the fun, and not unconscious of the dignity of his position. Meanwhile the rest were getting up a scenic representation of Bombastes Furioso, arranging a stage, ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... 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 upturned ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... as we have seen, mere shoeless, shivering, starving vagabonds. The Earl had generously advanced very large sums of money from his own pocket to relieve their necessity. The States, on the other hand, had voluntarily increased the monthly contribution of 200,000 florins, to which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Antwerp's reign of terror fully 300,000 fugitives sought shelter in Bergan-op-Zoom about twenty-five miles northward across the Dutch frontier. Most of these were in a condition almost indescribable, ragged, travel-worn, shoeless, and bespattered and hungry. Few had money; valuables or other resources. All they owned they carried on their backs or in bundles. The little Dutch town of Bergen-op-Zoom with but 15,000 inhabitants ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... diggers going down with their swag. On the road they constantly passed smaller parties of unfortunate diggers, who had left the mine in despair when the weather broke and the claims filled with water; and the farther they went the more wretched was the condition of those they overtook. Ragged, shoeless, hungry, foot-sore, heart-sore, poor, broken pilgrims from ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... 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
... directed by a dancing-mistress. Cuckoo was neither reading nor working. She was simply staring straight before her, without definite expression. Her face indeed wore a quite singularly blank look and her mouth was slightly open. Her feet, stuck out before her, rested on the edge of the fender, shoeless, and both her general appearance and attitude betokened a complete absence of self-consciousness, and that lack of expectation of any immediate event which is often dubbed stupidity. The lady of the feathers sitting in the horsehair-covered ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... 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 ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... clump and caught a glimpse of her aunt standing near the garden gate talking with Mr. Coulson, Elizabeth became suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of her shoeless and disheveled condition. She knew that, while untidy hair and a dirty pinafore were extremely reprehensible, bare feet put one quite beyond the possibility of being genteel. That word "genteel" had become the shibboleth ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... at the Curragh of Kildare. The most remote as well as the most adjacent meeting attracted him. The cock-pit was his constant haunt, and in more senses than one was he a leg. No opera-dancer could be more agile, more nimble; scarcely, indeed, more graceful, than was Jerry, with his shoeless and stockingless feet; and the manner in which he executed a pirouette, or a pas, before a line of carriages, seldom failed to procure him "golden opinions from all sorts of dames." With the ladies, it must be owned, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... troop filed before him, and passed within two hundred paces of where he lay. Smoothly and silently it glided on. There was no chinking of bits, no jingling of spurs, no clanking of sabres. Alone could be heard the dull stroke of the shoeless hoof, or at intervals the neigh of an impatient steed, suddenly checked by a reproof from his rider. Silently they passed on—silent as spectres. The full moon gleaming upon them added to their ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... have been either. It was short and distinct, such a slight noise as might be made by drawing the palm of the hand quickly over a piece of stuff, or by a short breath checked almost instantly, or by a shoeless foot slipping a few inches on a thick carpet. Contarini stood still and listened, for though he had heard it distinctly he had no impression of the direction whence it had come. It was not repeated, and he began to search the ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... bonnie lass, what aileth thee, On this bright summer day, To travel sad and shoeless thus Upon ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... in the very act; and their shoeless feet, their confession of a guilty conscience, were reported to ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... by gas, so that to rush it was an impossibility. Suddenly my heart gave a bound and I held my breath, for out of an open door behind our quarry, a figure emerged slowly and noiselessly on to the landing. It was Thorndyke, shoeless, and ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... dancers, and as if his feet could not resist the fascination, Sir James held out his hand to the first comely lass he saw disengaged, and in spite of the steel-guarded boots that he wore, answered foot for foot, spring for spring, to the deft manoeuvres of her shoeless feet, with equal agility and greater grace. Nigel frowned more than ever at this exhibition, and when the knight had led his panting partner to a seat, and called for a tankard of ale for her refreshment, he ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... exclaimed Mynheer, gazing at Owen, as he stood, shoeless and hatless, in his still ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... when passing through the camp, I could not help discovering that the American forces were in many respects in a very bad condition, ill-fed and worse clothed. Whole corps were in a very ragged state, and some were almost shoeless, and entirely stockingless. This in the summer was bad enough, but with winter coming on, it was enough to ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 sorrow ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... The shoeless, capless, unwashed boy, with his ragged trousers hitched to his shoulders by one suspender, frowned up at the judge through a ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... succeed twice. The Prince Regent had his ships ready for flight. The bluff and headstrong Junot, nicknamed "the tempest" by the army, was too artless to catch the prince by guile; but he hurried his soldiers over mountains and through flooded gorges until, on November 30th, 1,500 tattered, shoeless, famished grenadiers straggled into Lisbon—to find that the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... suite with those of Sir Giles and Lady Brotherton. It was for a man an easy drop to this landing. Quiet as a cat, I crept over the roof, let myself down, crossed the court swiftly, drew back the bolt which alone secured the wicket, and, with no greater mishap than the unavoidable wetting of shoeless feet, was soon safe in my own room, exchanging my evening for a morning dress. When I looked at my watch, I found it nearly ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... the most 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 with delight. (And yet all the while I was not Hal the conqueror ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 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, he ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... returned through 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
... 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 ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... The poet's 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 represent Jesus Christ as a man because He was a man, ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude |
