"Shoeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of two hundred miles, from the south side of the Catawba to the north side of the Dan, in which the whole State of North Carolina was crossed by the ragged and largely shoeless army, was the salvation of the Southern States. In Greene's camp there was only joy and congratulation. Little did the soldiers heed their tattered garments, their shoeless feet, their lack of blankets and of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... her, when the lank figure of a man emerged from the other shanty. This man wore a cotton shirt and patched butternut trousers; he way hatless and shoeless, and his hair stood out from his head in a great flaming shock. He, too, was smoking a cob-pipe. Suddenly the man put out a long arm which found its way about the lady's waist, an attention that culminated ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... to our warehouse a large case of beautiful, buttoned shoes, of the kind called 'Sorosis.' 'What a bonanza!' we thought, when that box was opened—and through our minds went trooping a procession of the shoeless feet we had longed to comfort. But behold! every blessed shoe of the one hundred and forty-four was for the ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... laid—large sharp stones, over which no horse could be driven quickly without risk of danger. Over this road, with one shoe gone, I was forced to gallop at my utmost speed, my rider meanwhile cutting into me with his whip, and with wild curses urging me to go still faster. Of course my shoeless foot suffered dreadfully; the hoof was broken and split down to the very quick, and the inside was terribly cut by ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... 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 ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... 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
... Street and the Strand yet without seeing a starving woman and child. The children are indeed dreadful; they run unguarded and unwatched out of the side courts into the broader and more lively Strand—the ceaseless world pushes past—they play on the pavement unregarded. Hatless, shoeless, bound about with rags, their faces white and scarred with nameless disease, their eyes bleared, their hair dirty; little things, such as in happy homes are sometimes set on the table ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... 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 a madonna face above ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... was afraid, perhaps, that Peter would get talking to the rest of the crew, and hear something about Captain Hawkes which might induce him to go on shore again, the last boy having run from the ship, though shoeless and penniless, rather than endure the treatment he ...
— The History of Little Peter, the Ship Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... done what?" grunted her husband, from the lounge. He was coatless and shoeless, and had spread a newspaper over his bald spot to the annoyance of a few superannuated ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... in the most natural way. We catch our first glimpse of the boy when he sat in a little log school-house, without windows or floor, one of a humming score of shoeless boys, where a good-natured, irritable, drinking English schoolmaster taught him to read, write, and cipher as far as Practice. This was the only school he ever attended, and that was all he learned at it. His widowed mother, with her seven young children, her little farm, and two or three slaves, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... bloodhounds, and 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 ...
— Frank on the Lower Mississippi • Harry Castlemon
... top of 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, piling a lot of beds together for a theatre, ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... about a couple of miles long, and the journey thither was 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; ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... monastery. Such obeisance from man to man was wonderful, and the overpowering delight in the faces of the pilgrims was striking, as they accomplished the deeds of reverence they had come so many hundreds of miles shoeless to perform. Sometimes as many as three thousand pilgrims ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... 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
... 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 sky. In vain the frightened woman clutched, as she rose, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... 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 ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... heap of 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 took another ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... safely away; and then he needs must marry. Perhaps because she was young, perhaps because she was fair or because she had shapely ankles as she came one day through the marshes among the milkmaid flowers shoeless in spring. Less things than these have brought men to their ends and been the nooses with which Fate snared them running. With marriage curiosity entered his house, and one day as they walked with ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... 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
... 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 the appearance of a piebald affair, showing ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... whan the grey cock crew, she heard The sound o' shoeless feet; Whan the red cock crew, she heard the door, And a sough o' ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... shoeless horse around to face Aaron. "Haruna, who was my friend, whom I thought to stand with me in Mother's light, I would be merciful; but I cannot be weak. It is not me whom you must beseech, but the Mother ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... is made towards a river, across which Nature, the first of bridge-builders, many a generation ago afforded an easy, dry passage by throwing down a huge tree. It spans from bank to bank, and the wood is worn to slippery smoothness by the passing of shoeless feet. Thence it leads through forest and jungle and mangrove belts to another river, and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... 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, from which it appears ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... of the plaza in order to assuage his matutinal thirst. The first plunge of his unshod foot into the cool grass struck a concealed mine. Don Ildefonso fell like a crumpled cathedral, crying out that he had been fatally bitten by a deadly scorpion. Everywhere were the shoeless citizens hopping, stumbling, limping, and picking from their feet the venomous insects that had come in a single night ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... them to be good? A propos, 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 bene?" [3] To which, with infinite presence of mind (as the jest-book has it) she answered, "A shoeless pea." It was the first joke she ever made. Joke the second I make. You distinguish well, in your old preface, between the verses of Dr. Johnson, of the "Man in the Strand," and that from "The Babes in the Wood," I was thinking whether, taking ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... the hour as if it had all happened yesterday. I can recall the view from the windows distinctly, as though time had stood still ever since. There are no gardens under our windows in Buckingham Street. Buckingham Gate stands the entrance to a desert of mud, on which the young Arabs—shoeless, stockingless—are disporting themselves. It is low water, and the river steamers keep towards the middle arches of Waterloo. Up aloft the Hungerford Suspension rears itself in mid air, and that spick-and-span new bridge, ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 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; but who, true to their country and its holy cause, continued ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... 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 of ragamuffins, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... an individual 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 delivery of a passage of Scripture in French; how, where, or when he could have acquired this ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... of his approach having got spread abroad, he had scarcely entered the outskirts of the town when little Barnstable, hatless and shoeless, came running to meet him, cheering, clambering upon his wagon, and making such other demonstrations of welcome as satisfied the major that the town had waited his return with no little anxiety, though it annoyed old Battle exceedingly, for he had great difficulty in drawing the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... spoke did I remember that I was shoeless. Now I sat down beside Godfrey, got fumblingly into my shoes again, and then followed him and Simmonds ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... He 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 Phil's ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... shoes and stockings!' Trotty thought. But his heart yearned towards the child, for the love of those same shoeless and stockingless boys, predestined (by the Alderman) to turn out bad, who might have been the ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... German, tall, padded, smart, and stout, had held their ground. It was not until Thursday, and by noon, that they were slowly driven up the hill by the ragged lads, the Gauls, shoeless, some not in uniform at all, half-mutinous, drunk with pain and glory. And I remembered, as the scene returned to me, that this battle, like so many of the Revolution, had been a battle of men against boys; how grey and veteran and trained in arms were the Austrians and the Prussians, their ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... are turning away from us. And when we try to lead back these misguided souls, neither threats nor promises, neither gentleness nor violence, nor anything else is now successful. The Penguin clergy pine in desolation; our country priests, reduced to following the humblest of trades, are shoeless, and compelled to live upon such scraps as they can pick up. In our ruined churches the rain of heaven falls upon the faithful, and during the holy offices they can hear the noise of stones falling from the arches. The ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... close proximity, at Valley Forge, a bare twenty miles distant, northwest of the city. Here the little army of the Colonists menaced the position of the British while enduring with heroic fortitude the severities of the winter season. Shoeless and shivering, the soldiers prepared these winter quarters of cold huts, rudely constructed; themselves overcoated in torn blankets, with stuffed straw in their boots for want of stockings. Their food was as scarce as their clothing ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... the Rappahannock began to arrive; 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
... that mumbling, chattering, rattling noise that an alarmed camp alone produces. The shrill commands of the little officers in frantic endeavor to steady their men, the patter of many shoeless feet, the breaking of rifle-stacks, and the clanking of bayonets and swords, made a medley of camp music that ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves
... 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
... 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 a man who for good or ill, for struggle or submission, had walked ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... however, I witnessed a sad and striking scene of it at Twickenham. It was on a Sunday morning. Several boys surrounded two players, one of the latter being about 14 years of age, well dressed, and the other of about 10 years, all in tatters and shoeless. The younger urchin had a long run of good luck, whereat his antagonist exhibited much annoyance, swearing intemperately. At length, however, his luck changed in turn, and he went on winning until the former refused to play any longer, saying—'There, you've ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... 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 ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... minutes before eight, Passepartout, hatless, shoeless, and having in the squabble lost his package of shirts and shoes, ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... unpleasant towards evening, one by one the passengers went below; and the Prince, turning gradually pale, showed unequivocal symptoms of being affected by a malady which, like death, is no respecter of persons, but fastens indifferently on the sceptred monarch and the shoeless cowherd, when either ventures to go "ploughing the billows of ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... 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
... since I had seen him last. His clothes hung in tatters about his body, while his large feet were shoeless and bleeding profusely: but the fire of his black eyes was unquenched, and the bony form, still upright in spite of the hard labor to which he had been subjected, gave assurance, to my dismay, that he still ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... in the very act; and their shoeless feet, their confession of a guilty conscience, ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... learn that one partner in that firm gave 40l. toward a service of plate for the quartermaster, and 60l. toward a carriage for Mrs. Fremont. We learn how futile were the efforts of any honest tradesman to supply good shoes to soldiers who were shoeless, and the history of one special pair of shoes which was thrust under the nose of the quartermaster is very amusing. We learn that a certain paymaster properly refused to settle an account for matters with which ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... left Totagalpa, they were still drinking "chicha;" and I shall not forget the solemn satisfied look of the shoeless corporation, as they sipped their drink in sight of their townspeople, now and then singling out some friend, to whom they signed to come and quaff at the big bowl. The warm drink had loosened the tongue of the solemn alcalde. He came, and with many compliments, wished us ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... days of Antwerp's reign of terror fully 300,000 fugitives sought shelter in Bergen-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 was swamped; but the Hollanders ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... English troops were, 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 their contract ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... twelve miles to march to Washington's seventeen, to overtake them—he by a good road, they by a new and half-worked one. Miles, therefore, counted for much that night, and though many of the men wore rags wrapped about their feet, for want of shoes, and the shoeless artillery horses had to be dragged or pushed along over the slippery places, to prevent their falling, the column pushed on with unflagging energy toward ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... his love of speech, which was again interrupted by a terrific thundering at the door, which opened,—not to a deputation, but to a whole platform of rejected humanity, presenting the most grotesque appearance. Falstaff's invincibles would convey no comparison. Some were hatless and shoeless; some had sleeveless coats and tattered trousers: others had collars but no shirts; all had faces immersed in massive beards. Two-and-two abreast, they walked, in with an independent air, each provided with a ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... later the corporal, too, was signalling, he and his men at a halt. They, too, had made discoveries: the track, as it later developed, of two shod horses pursued by shoeless Indian ponies. Southeastward this trail went up a long, shallow ravine, then veered round to the south. It told of fugitives and, for a time, of pursuers. Ten minutes after the first discovery, down in the sandy bottom ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... Army Mother always was; sentimental pity without help she despised. When her little son, therefore, saw and pitied a small boy with shoeless feet, his mother quickly reminded him ...
— Catherine Booth - A Sketch • Colonel Mildred Duff
... my boat had drifted once more across the schooner's bows. I pulled it round until its nose touched the anchor chain, and made the painter fast. Then slipping my hand up the chain, I stood with my shoeless feet upon the gunwale by the bows. Still grasping the chain, I sprang and swung myself out to the jib-boom that, with the cant of the vessel, was not far above the water: then pressed my left foot in between the stay and the brace, while I hung for ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a steep ladder upon a jetty with a gridiron top, only safe for shoeless feet, and Mr. Hawley and I went up to the fort by steps cut in the earth. There are fine mango-trees on the slopes, said to have been planted by the Dutch two centuries ago. The fort is nearly oblong, and has ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... travelled over the picturesque figure on the bed, noting everything—the shoeless foot, the stockings wet to some inches above the small ankles, the mud-stained skirt, the bedraggled cloak saturated for quite a foot of its length. Her hair had lost its comb and had fallen about her shoulders. Mrs. Fenton frowned as she saw these ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... were not even interesting. Mother and children were alike—unwashed, uncombed, shoeless, and clothed in dirty, faded calico. The children were all girls—the oldest not more than ten years old, and the youngest scarce five. None of them pleaded for the prisoner, but still the woman wailed and moaned, and the children stood staring ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... the scenes, and even recommended her promotion to some of her little parts. But again the old man was reputed to be worth a world of money. He was supposed to have fifty pounds a year clear of the theatre. And then came staring upon her the figures of her little stockingless and shoeless sisters. And when she looked at her own neat white cotton stockings, which her situation at the theatre had made it indispensable for her mother to provide for her, with hard straining and pinching from the family stock, and thought how glad she should ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... age, with tangled hair, torn, untidy dress and soiled, stockingless feet partially covered by dilapidated slippers, was violating the rules of the church by sidling up to strangers and stealthily begging within the building; a boy, probably sixteen years of age, hatless, shoeless, coatless, with pantaloons in need of patches and body in need of soap, stood gazing curiously at the ceremony; and a man whose whole attire consisted of a ragged shirt and cotton trousers, with marks of grime on hands, neck, and face, leaned carelessly against a pillar with bare feet ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... ladder. So infectious was it, that after the briefest conflict, consternation fled the field, a little smile appeared, and then a merrier, and in a moment she was laughing with him. And certainly for a man commonly most careful of his appearance, he cut a comical enough figure, with his shoeless feet and tangled hair, and the great ill-fitting sheep-skin coat huddled round him ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... tramped from Granton to Yorkshire, where an accidental encounter with an old acquaintance tempted him to linger at Raynham. The two tramps, scoundrels both, and both alike penniless and shoeless, had stood side by side at the gates of the park, to see the stately funeral ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... sister were shoeless, and the latter had no hat on—she had hurried out of the house in such excitement that she thought of nothing but getting away. Having to walk some of the way, as all could not ride in the wagon at the same ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... 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 ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... the rest was told by many mouths. They forced open his grip on the horse's bridle and he collapsed and lay unconscious on the ground. They lifted him and carried him gently into the bus, and laid him on one of the long seats. His left foot was shoeless and lacerated. ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... want of boots, say that, 'If a thing is easy, it is never done?' So everything went well—except the boots. I beheld a vision of thee, fully dressed, but without a hat! appareled in waistcoats, yet shoeless! and bethought me of sending a pair of moccasins given to Florine as a curiosity by an American. Florine offered the huge sum of forty francs, that we might try our luck at play for you. Nathan, Blondet, and I ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... and consumptive; but still she did heavy work at the houses around, day by day. Well, one fine day a commercial traveller betrayed her and carried her off; and a week later he deserted her. She came home dirty, draggled, and shoeless; she had walked for a whole week without shoes; she had slept in the fields, and caught a terrible cold; her feet were swollen and sore, and her hands torn and scratched all over. She never had been pretty even before; but her eyes ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to bed at once," continued 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 somehow ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... he disappeared with the same cautious creak upon the stair, crept shoeless over the pavement of the yard, and, locking the gates behind him, passed out into the front where he had left his shoes. If the same way had been paved with burning ploughshares, it is not at all improbable ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Jay seized the shoes eagerly, and, taking off his wrappings, quickly thrust his feet, that had so long been shoeless, into them: and, with a "Bless you, Crip! I'll make it all right some day." hobbled off, making tracks in the snow, just before Crip's father came up from ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... asleep when my door opened, and the pattering of shoeless feet announced a visitor. Aleck was groping in the dark, and, guided by my voice, reached the bottom of my bed, discovered the mound raised by my feet, felt his way along the ridge of my person, and having arrived at my head, flung his arms around my neck, and ...
— The Story of the White-Rock Cove • Anonymous
... 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 with ribaldries to exchange. But there ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... determined scheming, had now given way to a nervous and unpleasant trepidation. So he poured spirits down to keep his spirits up. Very early after dark, he had watched his opportunity while Mrs. Quarles was scolding in the kitchen, had slipped shoeless and unperceived, from his pantry into the housekeeper's room, and locked himself securely in the shower bath. Hapless wight! it was very little after six yet, and there he must stand till twelve or so: ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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
... 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 seamen's bags, almost as plethoric as herself and ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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
... the bloodshed. France trembled for a moment. She aimed at the traitors within her borders, and struck down many a gallant friend in error. But she recovered from the panic. Then her sons, half-starved, ragged, shoeless, ill-armed, marched to the frontier, hurled back her enemies, and swept the trained armies of Europe into flight. They would be free, and who should say them nay? They were not to be terrified or deluded by "the blood on the hands of the king ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... Paradise go none but such folk as I shall tell thee now: Thither go these same old priests, and halt old men and maimed, who all day and night cower continually before the altars, and in the crypts; and such folk as wear old amices and old clouted frocks, and naked folk and shoeless, and covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst, and of cold, and of little ease. These be they that go into Paradise, with them have I naught to make. But into Hell would I fain go; for into Hell fare the goodly clerks, and goodly knights that fall in tourneys and great wars, and stout ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... stairs on shoeless feet the burglar entered the dining-room, picked the locks of the sideboard with marvellous celerity, unfolded a canvas bag, and placed therein whatever valuables he could lay hands on. Proceeding next to the drawing-room floor, he began to examine and appropriate the ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... Lalun's door I stumbled over a man at the threshold. He was sobbing hysterically and his arms flapped like the wings of a goose. It was Wali Dad, Agnostic and Unbeliever, shoeless, turbanless, and frothing at the mouth, the flesh on his chest bruised and bleeding from the vehemence with which he had smitten himself. A broken torch-handle lay by his side, and his quivering lips murmured, "Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!" as I stooped over him. I pushed him a ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless; the thing .. he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... footfall, nor of breathing, but it might 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 ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... 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
... 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 ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... little ones; they take two machines at least; the pater comes to smoke his cigar; the young fellows of the family-party come to look at "the women," as they irreverently speak of the sex. So the story runs on ad infinitum, down to the shoeless ones that turn up everywhere. Every seat is occupied; the boats and small yachts are filled; some of the children pour pebbles into the boats, some carefully throw them out; wooden spades are busy; sometimes they knock ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... of the stair. Quietly, in his shoeless feet, he began to climb them. He wanted to cry out Marette's name even before he came to the top. He wanted to reach up to her with his arms outstretched. But he came silently to her door and ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... sentry—the strangest thing I ever saw in the guise of a soldier—a brown Indian of the coast, dressed in some rags that were a uniform once, shoeless, filthy in the extreme, and armed with an amazing old flint-lock. He is bad enough to look at, in all conscience, and really worse than he looks, for—no doubt—he has been pressed into the service against ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... life drama that passes before the old maid while she looks out upon the rampart, the green, sunny rampart, where the children, with their red cheeks and bare shoeless feet, are rejoicing merrily, like ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... The shoeless, capless, unwashed boy, with his ragged trousers hitched to his shoulders by one suspender, frowned up at the judge through a fringe of ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... church members are expected to join. It is to one of these shouts of the negro children that Mr. Russell alludes in his Diary when describing a visit which he paid to a plantation near Charleston in April, 1861. He speaks of the children as a set of 'ragged, dirty, and shoeless urchins, who came in shyly, oftentimes running away till they were chased and captured, dressed into line with much difficulty, and, then, shuffling their flat feet, clapping their hands, and drawling out in a monotonous ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... commendable, if indeed doing anything we ought to do can be spoken of as being commendable, it is commendable for me to give a good pair of strong shoes to the man who in the midst of a severe winter is practically shoeless, the man who is exerting every effort to earn an honest living and thereby take care of his family's needs. And if in giving the shoes I also give myself, he then has a double gift, and I a ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... they 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 Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... of Vesterbro—narrow, poor-men's streets, which sprang up round the scattered country-houses, and shut out the light; and poor people, artistes and street girls ousted the owners and turned the luxuriant summer resort into a motley district where booted poverty and shoeless intelligence met. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... of one 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 after sitting ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... alder 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
... the sentence destroyed the suspicions raised by the former. Any one would have been justified in regarding Mulvaney as mad. He was hatless and shoeless, and his shirt and trousers were dropping off him. But he wore one wondrous garment—a gigantic cloak that fell from collar-bone to heel—of pale pink silk, wrought all over in cunningest needlework of hands long since dead, with the loves of the Hindu gods. The monstrous ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... she could not guess. Averil was sound asleep, breathing deeply and regularly, so that it was; a pleasure to listen to her; and Mary did not fear wakening her by a shoeless voyage of discovery to the place whence ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... To flirt with shoeless Seraphinas, To shrink at every ruffian's shako; Without a pair of shirts between us, Morn, noon, and night to smell tobacco; To live my days in Gallic hovels, Untouched by water since the flood; To wade through streets, where famine grovels In ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... over them." Not only were houses deserted, but growing crops were left and heavier household articles abandoned, and the roads leading to the south and through Salt Lake City were crowded day by day with loaded wagons, their owners—even the women, often shoeless trudging along and driving their animals before them. These refugees were, a little later, joined by Young and most of his associates, and by a large part of the inhabitants of Salt Lake City itself. It was estimated by the army officers ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... invasion the Confederate soldiers had endured every privation; one-half were in rags, and thousands barefooted had marked their path with crimson. Yet shoeless, hatless, and ragged, they had marched and fought with a heroism like that of the Revolutionary times. But they met their equals at Antietam. Jackson's and Hooker's men fought until both sides were nearly exterminated, and when the broken fragments fell back, the windrows of ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... "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 Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... 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
... 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 old friend. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... darkest time, discovered Washington on his knees in a lonely thicket, praying aloud for his country. This gave him hope, when hope was well-nigh dead, and he followed his commander across the Jerseys, one of the two thousand who wrote in blood, from their shoeless feet, their protest against British rule on the soil they thus ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... sheet of 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
... a day of cold and sleet, A little nomad of the street With tattered garments, shoeless feet, And face with hunger wan, Great wonder-eyes, though beautiful, Hedged in by features pinched and dull, Betraying lines so pitiful By ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... have 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 ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... relieved the 18th Corps in front of Petersburg. Here we remained, doing duty in 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 ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... to him. . . . Then she remembered that he stood there shoeless; and, giving a little cry, would have run barefoot down the moonlit rocky ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... negro from Mississippi were the additions to the profession, and during the incarceration of the premier artist, his sweetheart, a former hula danseuse, remained faithful to his brushes. When a shoeless man or woman regarded the new-fangled importations interestedly, the proprietors offered to beautify their naked feet, and, ridiculous as ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... 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
... 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 ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... 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 royal ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... arising from session, with slow steps they took their way towards a rill of very clear water, that ran down from a little hill, amid great rocks and green herbage, into a valley overshaded with many trees and there, going about in the water, bare-armed and shoeless, they fell to taking various diversions among themselves, till supper-time drew near, when they returned to the palace and there supped merrily. Supper ended, the queen called for instruments of music and bade Lauretta lead up a dance, whilst Emilia sang a song, to the accompaniment ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... waiting to be shod ambled ahead at a pace warranted to bring them to the towpath in time. Behind, at the same gait, came a tall, shambling man, what appeared to be a girl some twelve years of age in tattered calico, and shoeless, and ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... 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 ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... born of love and joy. The sorrows of Jewry are more apparent than real. After every Black Fast, when the congregations used to sit shoeless on the stone floors of the synagogues, weeping and wailing on account of the destruction of Jerusalem, the youngsters, and the grown-ups as well, were counting the hours before the Feast ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... 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
... upon them, and 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 he tried to whistle, ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... that he would take care of us; which he at once proceeded to do by bringing in some wood, and busying himself in making a fire in the open fireplace. While he is thus engaged, I will try to describe him. A small, wiry figure, stockingless, shoeless, out at the knees and elbows, and wearing the remnant of an old straw hat, which looked as if it might have done good service in scaring the crows from a cornfield. The face nearly black, very ugly, but with the shrewdest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... as philosophically accepted by the townsfolk. She wrangled with and fought the schoolboys with keener invective and quite as powerful arm. She followed the trails with a woodman's craft, and the master had met her before, miles away, shoeless, stockingless, and bareheaded, on the mountain road. The miners' camps along the stream supplied her with subsistence during these voluntary pilgrimages, in freely offered alms. Not but that a larger ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the tassels faded; My playmates moved in arrases brocaded; I slept beside the canopied and shaded Beds of forgotten kings. I wandered shoeless in the galleries; I contemplated long the tapestries, And loved the ladies for their histories And hands with ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness that made me shudder. The windows were tight closed to keep out the cold winter air; and the condensed breath ran in streams down the panes, chequering the dreary outlook of chimney-tops and smoke. The conductor handed me over to ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... tangles of raven hair fell limp and streaming; dark raiments clung to her form, diapered with sand and sea-foam, sodden with the moisture that dripped from them to the floor; under the hem of her skirt one foot peered forth, shoeless in its mud-stained stocking. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... frustrated by the royal counsellors. Richard came down in the royal barge as far as Rotherhithe, but was dissuaded by Sir Robert Hales, and the Earls of Suffolk, Salisbury, and Warwick, from "holding speech with the shoeless ruffians." ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... would have been to the Southern cause if all the hundreds of tanners and shoemakers in the Stockade could have, been persuaded to go outside and labor in providing leather and shoes for the almost shoeless people and soldiery. The machinists alone could have done more good to the Southern Confederacy than one of our brigades was doing harm, by consenting to go to the railroad shops at Griswoldville and ply their handicraft. The lack ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... steps to the house. Entering softly to the sitting-room he obtained a light, and with the manner of one who had considered his course he spread his rugs upon the old horse-hair sofa which stood there, and roughly shaped it to a sleeping-couch. Before lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and listened at the door of her apartment. Her measured breathing told that she ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... occupation in life, be it ever so humble, which is justly worthy of contempt, if by it a man is enabled to administer to his necessities without becoming a burden to others, or a plague to them by the parade of shoeless feet, fluttering rags, and a famished face. In the multitudinous drama of life, which on the wide theatre of the metropolis is ever enacting with so much intense earnestness, there is, and from the very nature of things there always must be, a numerous ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... in," "Oh, the Roast Beef of Old England!" "May we all live the days of our life." In John Bull Done Over, a very different picture is presented to our notice. The whole of John's fat is gone; he sits, a lean, starving, tattered, shoeless object in a bottomless chair, the embodiment of human misery. In place of his invoices lie the Gazette, which announces his bankruptcy, and a number of tradesmen's bills; on the back of his chair is coiled a rope, and on the table before him a razor lies on a treatise on suicide,—John ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... read much since infancy of the sufferings of our army during the Revolution,—how they were hatless, ragged, starved, and badly armed. We have shuddered at the pictures of the snow at Valley Forge, tracked by the blood from the feet of shoeless soldiers. Yet, in the year 1861, with abundant means and with all the sympathy and aid of a wealthy country, there has been more suffering in the army than the Revolution witnessed, and it was due in a great measure to men who hastened to the spoil like vultures to their prey. If the ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... 1802, 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 ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... cried the old woman, full of wrath at the sight of the shoeless boy. "What have you done with ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... the sea aren't the land, and here on these wild wastes o' waters there's chancy things beyond any man's wisdom as any mariner'll—ha, what's yon?" says he under his breath and whipping round, knife in hand. "'Twas like a shoeless foot, Mart'n ... creeping murder ... 'Tis there again!" Speaking, he tore open the door and I saw his knife flash as he sprang into the darkness beyond; as for me I quaffed my ale. Presently back he comes, claps to the door (mighty careful) and sinking upon ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... was to love her, though as yet I knew not that I had regained my liberty only to lose my heart. My feelings at the moment oscillated between admiration of her and a painful sense of my own disreputable appearance. Bareheaded and shoeless, covered with the dust of the desert, clad only in a torn shirt and ragged trousers, my arms and legs scored with livid marks, I must have seemed a veritable scarecrow. Angela looked like a queen, or would have done were queens ever so charming, or so becomingly attired. ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... if possible, to get the fall of the country the other way. The horses' shoes have been worn quite thin by the stones, and will not last above a day or two. Nay, some of the poor animals are already shoeless. It is most unfortunate that we did not bring another set with us. Distance ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... 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 and leaping in their ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... the boy made no answer, but hatless—shoeless as he was, disappeared round the corner of the house. Strange to say, the Indians, although they had seemingly listened with attention to Mr. Heywood while issuing these directions, did not make the slightest movement to arrest the departure of the boy, or even to remark upon it—merely ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... counties, 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 that humanity would prompt his release ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... before allowing us to step on to her clean mats. This was all very well, as far as it went; but she might as well have supplied us with some substitute for the objectionable articles, for it was a bitterly cold night, and the highly polished wood passages and steep staircase felt very cold to our shoeless feet. The apartment we were shown into was so exact a type of a room in any Japanese house, that I may as well describe it once for all. The woodwork of the roof and the framework of the screens were all made of a handsome dark polished wood, not unlike walnut. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... fearful one. They had left home in summer, when their raiment was thin; it had become scanty and ragged in the long and dusty march, so that they were exposed to the full severity of the cold. The rocks cut their shoeless feet, but nothing remained but to press onward or to lie down ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... third mate, who acted as supercargo, disposed of the whole of them, though there was some difficulty in finding articles for barter when their cash ran short. Had not the governor helped them, they would have remained shoeless. We were delighted with the quantity of fruit which was brought to us. There were cherries, and very large strawberries, and melons, and grapes—all of which, we had no doubt, were planted originally by Robinson Crusoe. We lunched with ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston |
