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Barefoot   /bˈɛrfˌʊt/   Listen
Barefoot

adjective
1.
Without shoes.  Synonyms: barefooted, shoeless.  "Shoeless Joe Jackson"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Barefoot" Quotes from Famous Books



... first appeared that low type of superstition which startled even superstitious ages in the early Plantagenets. Robber as he was of Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical censures, the fear of the end of the world drove Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre. Barefoot and with the strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his shoulders, the Count had himself dragged by a halter through the streets of Jerusalem, and courted the doom of martyrdom by his wild outcries of ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... beautiful shaded street walked the three little rag-pedlers; and it did seem as if they were met by all the people in town, from the minister down to the barefoot boys going fishing. At last they arrived ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May

... ironwork grilles at all the windows, and the painted frieze. But nothing could move her, nothing bend her stubborn will; and at last, furious at the girl he could not govern, Castiglione sent her to this convent, then one of the few houses of barefoot Carmelite nuns in Italy. He stipulated that she should take the name of Maddelena, that he should never hear of her again, and that she should be held an absolute ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various

... stronger one, and let's go back to business. You want a painted panel for your carriage. How will this do?' and he rapidly sketched a green, pleasant meadow, with a canal running through it, and on the canal a boat, drawn by one horse, which a barefoot, ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... terrific brogue the minute you ask her why we don't have someone in to help her," Norma contributed, with a sort of shy and loving audacity. "She'll tell you in a minute that faith, she and her sister used to run barefoot over the primroses, and they blooming beyond anything the Lord ever created, and the spring ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris

... blind and to the blind and Plebeian high art of course goes with low morals. The Plebs are always in the crushing majority. So the odd German mind jumped to the other extreme and for a few months got ashamed of little daughters going barefoot or ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry

... that would have been one of those important steps which the king alone had the right to take. There was, however, no doubt that the encounter between the two empires was imminent, and Isaiah ventured to predict the precise date of its occurrence. He walked stripped and barefoot through the streets of Jerusalem—a strange procedure which he explained by the words which Jahveh had put into his lips: "Like as My servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and a wonder upon Egypt and upon Kush (Ethiopia); so shall ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... the check reins and blinders of our civilization. Fortunate in that respect. And they never have had a shoe on their feet. Their feet are perfect, firm and sound, strong and healthy and elastic; natural, like those of the Indians, who run barefoot, who go over the rough places of the wilds as easily as these horses can run up the stairs or over the cobble stones of the pavement if they were turned ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various

... word? Did I not give you an Arabian horse, to drive mad with envy the foreign and native dandies of the Bois de Boulogne? Who paid your gambling debts? Who made provision for your excesses? Who gave you boots, you who once went barefoot? ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac

... ain't nuffin' to say jes' 'cept dis. When I was dat boy's age I was runnin' 'round barefoot an' putty nigh naked, my shirt out o' my pants haalf de time; but Marse John tuk care o' me, an' when I got hongry I knowed whar dey was sumpin to eat an' I got it. Dat boy ain't had nobody take care o' him till de Mist'iss ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith

... drawback to going barefoot was stumping your toe, which you were pretty sure to do when you first took off your shoes and before you had got used to your new running weight. When you struck your toe against a rock, or anything, you caught it up in your hand, and hopped ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells

... to run through Rayville, on the Shreveport road, he had occasion to visit the town of Ruston, in another parish some miles in the interior, and as he got off at the depot, a barefoot, poor white boy asked to carry his satchel. Smith was a fine looking mulatto, dressed well, and could have easily been taken for a white man, and the boy might not have known at the time he was a negro. When he arrived at his stopping place he gave ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.

... palms of your feet get dreadfully hot and sting-y when you go barefoot. I've tried it. Did ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow

... suddenly blushed as if she felt ashamed that the wealthy young women were looking at her naked shoulders and at her legs naked to the knee. But seeing that they too were barefoot and wore short skirts, she quickly recovered and smiled ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... legs of a country-boy, and shows itself in uneasiness in the toes, which get tired of boots, and want to come out and touch the soil just as soon as the sun has warmed it a little. The country-boy goes barefoot just as naturally as the trees burst their buds, which were packed and varnished over in the fall to keep the water and the frost out. Perhaps the boy has been out digging into the maple-trees with his jack-knife; at any rate, he is pretty ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... in mind a schoolmate, whose father lived in a fine country home two miles from the schoolhouse. The influence of my schoolmate's mother was pure as the diamond dew he brushed from the bending grass in barefoot days. But he left the country home and the last time I saw him he was a vagabond, begging bread from negro cabin doors. Ah! mother, you ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain

... night ter ile his boots. This made 'em good an' strong, ez well ez easy ter chew on. One night, Ezra bein' fond o' boots, finds 'em an' chews ther tops off'n 'em. They wuz ther only boots Bill hed, an' we wuz two hundred mile ter another pair, so Bill hed ter go through ther season barefoot, an' ther sun jest nacherly warped his feet out o' ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor

... wig. His more than seventy-years-old face was completely twisted into a sarcastic smile; while his eyes always remained large, and, though red, were always brilliant and intelligent. He lived in the old cloister of the barefoot friars, the seat of the gymnasium. Even as a child, I had often visited him in company with my parents, and had, with a kind of trembling delight, glided through the long, dark passages, the chapels transformed ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... might give her chloryform; so we agreed to stamp initials on her with Perkins's Indelible Dab. It is intended to mark sheep, but it don't hurt, and it don't never come off. We put the letters on the back of her heels, where they wouldn't show, for she's never to go barefoot, an' where they'd be easy got at if we wanted to find 'em. We put R.G. on one heel for the name of the place, and J.P. on the other heel for Jonas an' me. If, twenty years from now," said Pomona, her tears welling out afresh, "I should see a young woman with ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... in wine colour—was the darter of a big railroad man out West, so I guess she had all the schoolin' and Yurrup she wanted. Now that real pretty little woman jest speakin' to Lady Montgomery is Mis' Senator Freeman. They do say as how she was the darter of a baker in Chicago and used to run barefoot around the streets, but she looks as well as any of 'em now and she dines at every Embassy in Washington. Her dresses are always described in the Post: she wears pink and blue mostly. You kin tell by her face that she's got a lot of determination and that she'd git where she ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... Frank, with triumph in his heart and money in his fist, he ran barefoot to where Seth Tucket lay sprawled before the blazing rails, feeling of his stockings, to see if they were dry enough to ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge

... locomotive,' I complained at Seth, as I climbed down on to the right of way. I walked past our engine and up to the girl, and what do you think? Her eyes were shut tight. She was trembling that violent that you would see it by the moonlight. And she was barefoot, too. ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... came near falling in, but Edith and Mabel flew to the rescue, and held him up by his cap, and his curls, and his arm, till he recovered his balance. One foot was very wet. It had gone "way, way in," and in that condition, splashed and barefoot, for he pulled off the wet boot and stocking, he went back to the house with ...
— Five Happy Weeks • Margaret E. Sangster

... like a firebrand, in the dark Out of my way, unless he bid 'em: but For every trifle are they set upon me; Sometime like apes, that mow and chatter at me, And after bite me; then like hedgehogs, which 10 Lie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mount Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare

... of the Land; as oftentimes I have seen, being on the one side of a Mountain called Cauragas hirg, rainy and wet weather, and as soon as I came on the other, dry, and so exceeding hot, that I could scarcely walk on the ground, being, as the manner there is, barefoot. ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox

... hundred miles out of their course. This, in its turn, was followed by light winds and fair weather, with a sun so hot that the pitch began to melt and bubble out of the deck seams, so that the mariners, who had hitherto been going about their duty barefoot, were fain to don shoes to save their feet from being blistered. Finally, after a voyage of twenty-four days, they came to the Azores, where they remained four days, filling up their fresh water, replenishing their stock ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... country up to the Virginia line. There was no gate to be shut behind Longstreet if he were driven out. He could come back as soon as our troops withdrew. Marching and countermarching would destroy the nearly naked and barefoot troops without ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... dey couldn't just fix us up any kind of way when we going to Sunday School. We had to be dressed nice, if you pass him and you ain't dress to suit him he send you right back and say tell your ma to see dat you dress right. Dey couldn't send you out in de cold barefoot neither. I 'member one day my ma want to send me wid some milk for her sister-in-law what live 'round de corner. I fuss cause it cold and say 'how you going to send me out wid no shoe, and it cold?' Mausa hear how I talking and turn he back and laugh, den he call to my ma to gone ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... direction but that a semblance of ascetic retirement is still preserved. Between the monastery and the city lies the city park, which is not much patronized by the citizens, and for good reasons. To the rich wildness of nature is added the wildness of man. Hordes of desperadoes, "the barefoot brigade," the dregs of the local population, have taken up their residence there every spring, of late years, in the ravines and the caves which they have excavated, in humble imitation of the holy men ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... picked up in Scotland; and though I had read and collected many folk tales, I did not see through the deceit. I have a partial memory of two more elaborate tales, one of an Italian conspirator flying barefoot from I forget what adventure through I forget what Italian city, in the early morning. Fearing to be recognised by his bare feet, he slipped past the sleepy porter at an hotel calling out 'number so and so' as if he were some belated guest. Then passing from bedroom door to door he tried ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats

... dawn Charles the Fair took himself to bed. And to him, pattering barefoot along stone floors, came Clotilde, the child ...
— The Truce of God • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... semi-Genoese don't pick the olives unripe, like our Tuscan neighbors, but let them grow big and black, when the young fellows go into the trees with long reeds and shake them down on the grass for the women to collect—a pretty sight which your Excellency must see some day: the grey trees with the brown, barefoot lads craning, balanced in the branches, and the turquoise sea as background just beneath.... That sea of ours—it is all along of it that I wish to ask for money. Looking up from my desk, I see the sea through the window, deep ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... Al-Thauri that he said, 'To look upon the face of a tyrant is a sin.' Then the third damsel retired and came for ward the fourth, who said, 'Here am I to treat of sundry traditions of pious men which suggest themselves to me. It is related that Bishr Barefoot[FN348] said, 'I once heard Khalid say, 'Beware of secret polytheism.' I asked, 'What may secret polytheism be?'; and he answered, 'When one of you in praying prolong his inclinations and prostrations till a cause of impurity[FN349] come upon him.' And ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... and my pouch, Nor grudge the uncostly sympathy of smoke, His equal now, divinely unemployed. 220 Some smack of Robin Hood is in the man, Some secret league with wild wood-wandering things; He is our ragged Duke, our barefoot Earl, By right of birth exonerate from toil, Who levies rent from us his tenants all, And serves the state by merely being. Here The Scissors-grinder, pausing, doffs his hat, And lets the kind breeze, with its delicate fan, Winnow the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... impossible hours. They go out in silly little suits and run Marathon heats before breakfast. They chase around barefoot to get the dew on their feet. They hunt for ozone. They bother about pepsin. They won't eat meat because it has too much nitrogen. They won't eat fruit because it hasn't any. They prefer albumen and starch and nitrogen to ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock

... delicate skin could never be of any use in this way, and may often do harm. The Genevese, aroused at midnight by their enemies in the depth of winter, seized their guns rather than their shoes. Who can tell whether the town would have escaped capture if its citizens had not been able to go barefoot? ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... dyin' day, I shan't. Her like a spirit all in white and a face was both the saddest and the upliftedest ever I see; and them rough men all crowdin' up to their places, so soft you'd thought they was barefoot 'stead of heavy shod; and Jessie with her arms round the two little ones, and her mother pitchin' the tune, same as usual, and—and—I declare I can't keep the tears back yet, rememberin'. Before she ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond

... Sheldon's three thousand pounds must be mine before I can secure the humblest shelter for my sweet one; and although it would be bliss to me to tramp through the world barefoot with Charlotte by my side, the barefooted state of things is scarcely the sort of prospect a man would care to offer to the woman he loves. So once more to the chase. One more day in this delicious island of the lotus-eaters, Newhall farm; and then away!—hark forward!—tantivy!—and hey ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... who said that his sister had a dirty face,—which was quite true, but people do not need to say everything they know, do they? Who went swimming in the gravel pit long before the 24th of May, which marks the beginning of swimming and barefoot time in all proper families, and would have got away with it, too, only, in his haste to get a ride home, he and his friend changed shirts by mistake, and it all came to ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung

... now, of course, the young lady was seventeen, or would be when the piano reached Lower Merritt, for it was clearly meant to arrive on her birthday; it was a birthday-present and a surprise. He had always liked the way those nice people let their children play about barefoot; it would be in character with them to do a fond, pretty thing like that; and Gaites smiled for pleasure in it, and then rather blushed in relating the brown legs of the little girl, as he remembered seeing them in her races over her father's lawn, to the dignified ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... sidewalk, and Pete forgot that he himself rose fully as high above the crowds as this stranger. In fact, nearly every one turned to take a look at the huge islander, who, in reality, stood six feet four, barefoot. ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... men barefoot, his provisions almost exhausted, the Russian general reached Muotta, to find to his chagrin that Korsakof had been defeated and put to flight. He at once began his retreat, followed in force by Massena, who was driven off by the rear-guard. On October 1 Suwarrow reached ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... together. I noticed by the way that Clara must really rather have felt the contrast between herself as a town madam and this piece of the summer country that we all admired so, for she had rather dressed after Ellen that morning as to thinness and scantiness, and went barefoot ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris

... for a son, but she had never objected, and sat knitting on deck, well content not to be "in turret pent," but to go forth with the bright sword she had forged. "She adapted herself," her brother says, "to her strange surroundings, went about barefoot, found no heat too great for her, and at an age when her sisters at home were old ladies, learnt to ride!" After many wanderings through the warm ocean waters, with "green days in forest and blue days at sea," the yachters finally saw Samoa, and to the author it was the El Dorado of his dreams. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson

... Clopton bridge, built a hundred years before by rich Sir Hugh, sometime Mayor of London, was lined with straddling boys, like strawberries upon a spear of grass, and along the low causeway from the west across the lowland to the town, brown-faced, barefoot youngsters sat beside the roadway with their chubby legs a-dangle down the mossy stones, staring away into the south across the grassy levels of the valley ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett

... have gone to church barefoot, with my shirt open at the throat, and with a pocket full of cookies to munch ad lib throughout the services, I am sure that the spiritual uplift would have been greater. The soul of a boy doesn't expand violently when encased in a starched shirt and a paper collar, and ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson

... lanky barefoot boy with trousers too short. His shirt was in rags. His black hair was tousled. She sank into a chair, shaking with laughter. "A pretty President you'd ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah

... Twice as big as Elmwood Hall, if half were not in ruins, and the other half the rats run over like peas out of a bag. While as to the servants, there are dozens of them, mostly barefoot and in rags, who will run at the least beck from the old mistress or the young mistress, though they scowl at the master. But he is taking order with them, and teaching them who is to ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge

... up the hill, to make a loop for the return. Below, from among the trees, the farm-bell clanged. He saw the labourers, mowing barefoot at the thick grass, leave off their work and go downhill, their scythes hanging over their shoulders, like long, bright claws curving down behind them. They seemed like dream-people, as if they had no relation ...
— The Prussian Officer • D. H. Lawrence

... made a sign to the executioner, who instantly admitted old Wolde Albrecht by the same door. She entered barefoot, and in the black shift worn upon the rack, upon which the red blood lay in deep fresh stains. When Sidonia beheld this she shuddered. But Ludecke rose up and admonished Wolde to speak the truth without fear, and to remember that, on the morrow morning, at that very hour, she would stand before ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... shoes, but Margery went barefoot. They had nothing to eat but the berries that grew in the woods, and the scraps they could get from the poor people in the village, and at night they slept ...
— Goody Two-Shoes • Unknown

... So I lay, questioning wearily what it was that I required. One morning I wakened with a strange, new joy in my soul. It came to me at that moment with indescribable poignancy, the thought of walking barefoot in cool, fresh plow furrows as I had once done when a boy. So vividly the memory came to me—the high airy world as it was at that moment, and the boy I was walking free in the furrows—that the weak tears filled my eyes, the first I had shed in many ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... intrigues, and who was supported by the clergy, these saying they had doubts if the boy was really the son of the elder Haakon and grandson of King Sverre. Such things were not in those days usually settled in courts of law, but by what was called the ordeal, one form of which was to walk barefoot over red-hot irons. If not burned the accused was thought to have proved the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris

... and, for as sober as he now seemed, Hob had given once for all the measure of the devil that haunted him. He was married, and, by reason of the effulgence of that legendary night, was adored by his wife. He had a mob of little lusty, barefoot children who marched in a caravan the long miles to school, the stages of whose pilgrimage were marked by acts of spoliation and mischief, and who were qualified in the country- side as "fair pests." But in the house, if "faither was in," they were quiet as mice. In short, Hob ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... an uproar. Of course, the doctor felt nothing of the prickling, nerve-shaking pain that gripped every one of those barefoot men. They leaped and darted here and there, bluish sparks flashing wherever they touched the iron; or they fell after a step or two and writhed on the floor, shrieking and cursing with the exquisite torture of that awful current. Ernol alone kept from shouting; he stood and took ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint

... enraged dragon in such close vicinity the girls did not venture to stir, and silence reigned for the rest of the night. At the first coming of the dawn, however, Raymonde rose with infinite precaution, and stole barefoot along the passage to remove her wire and screws from the oak door. She accomplished that task without discovery, and, after hiding the screw-driver behind a ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... cloth skit and black bodice, the latter covered by a scarlet Chollet kerchief. The winged white cap entirely hid her hair; a gray cloak with a hood could either fold round her and her child or be strapped on her shoulders. Her sabots were hung on her shoulder, for she had learnt to go barefoot, and walked much more lightly thus; and her little bundle was slung on a staff on the back of Maitre Gardon, who in his great peasant's hat and coat looked so like a picture of St. Joseph, that Eustacie, as the light of the ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... said, "Art thou the King?" Then, bowing down his head, King Robert crossed both hands upon his breast, And meekly answered him: "Thou knowest best! My sins as scarlet are; let me go hence, And in some cloister's school of penitence, Across those stones, that pave the way to heaven, Walk barefoot, till my guilty soul ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... to have acquired the habit of cooeperation when asked. Yet even here I have been told repeatedly by teachers: "If we have to wait for that hospital or that charitable society, our children will go barefoot." In small communities where hospital and relief agencies are for emergencies only and generally inactive, it seems that the first thing to do is to ask some friends to establish a small relief fund, just as it is easier to give a child a five-cent meal than to teach its mother ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... who was to build the bridge, laughed, and looked with contempt upon him, Paul thought, because he was barefoot and had ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... putting the children to bed; they made her a great deal of bother, squirming off of her lap and running round barefoot. Sometimes I used to hold them and talk to them and help her a bit, when I felt good-natured, but I just sat and smoked, and let them alone. I was all worked up about that lamp-wick, and I thought, you see, if she hadn't had any feelings for me there was no need of my having any for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... and better clothes, but he often fails in attaining a healthy body and pure mind and never knows what a royal, wide-open chance for enjoying boyhood days he has missed. He never knows the delight of wading barefoot down a mountain brook where the clear water leaps over mossy ledges and where he can pull trout from every foam-flecked pool! He never realizes the charming suspense of lying upon the grassy bank of a meadow stream and snaring a sucker, or what fun it is to enter a chestnut grove ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn

... in with the Roman legates at Montpellier, heard them express their disgust. "Give up," said they to the legates, "your retinue, your horses, and your goings in state; proceed in all humility, afoot and barefoot, without gold or silver, living and teaching after the example of the Divine Master." "We dare not take on ourselves such things," answered the pope's agents; "they would seem sort of innovation; but if some person ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... the majority of people, in not regarding a full stomach as the panacea for the poor man. On the contrary (as in "Foma Gordyeeff," his most ambitious effort), he seems to regard precisely this as the cause of more ruin than the life of "the barefoot brigade," the tramps and stepchildren of Dame Fortune, with whom he principally deals. His motto seems to be "Man shall not live by bread alone." And because Gorky bears this thought ever with him, in brain and heart, in nerves and his very marrow, his work possesses a strength which ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... feet with shoe or sandal, his rule was to make them hardy through going barefoot. (8) This habit, if practised, would, as he believed, enable them to scale heights more easily and clamber down precipices with less danger. In fact, with his feet so trained the young Spartan would leap and spring and run faster unshod than another ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon

... out of Paris that bright May day it seemed Monday all along the way; for dames with baskets balanced on their heads were making their way to the waterside, followed by troops of barefoot or sabot-shod children. There was one fine young woman with a baby in her arms, and the innocent firstborn was busily taking its breakfast as the mother walked calmly along, bearing on her well-poised head the family wash. And a mile farther on, as if she had seen ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard

... a strong spirit of duty on him; and plodded on instead over the braes till he came near the House of Cairngorm. There, in a hollow place by the burnside that was shaded by some birks, he was aware of a barefoot boy, perhaps a matter of three years older than himself. The two approached with the precautions of a pair of strange dogs, looking at ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... sour wine, and other inferior supplies, often at three or four times their value when of good quality. They were even made to buy things at high prices which were of no possible use to them, such as silk stockings for men who went barefoot, and razors for those who had scarcely any beard to shave. One corregidor bought a box of spectacles from a trader, and made the natives buy these at his own price, to wear when they went to mass, without regard to the fact that they ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris

... way of compensation for the wound to his honour, so it would seem at least from his chatter, though I believe it's only drunken talk. It's simply his brag. Besides, that sort of thing is done much cheaper. But that he has a sum of money is perfectly certain. Ten days ago he was walking barefoot, and now I've seen hundreds in his hands. His sister has fits of some sort every day, she shrieks and he 'keeps her in order' with the whip. You must inspire a woman with respect, he says. What I can't understand is how Shatov goes on living above him. Alexey Nilitch has only been three ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... feeling in Whitey. For one thing, it was because he never had owned any. In New York all the boys wore shoes, and when Whitey had come to the ranch he had worn them, too, until the soles of his feet had become hard enough, like Injun's, for him to go barefoot, which he ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart

... on a slave's grave the immaculate Brigadier;—he, reader, was sipping whiskey toddy, as if it were his wont. Old Bunkum was the slave whose grave he sat upon. It was a strange penance over the mound of one so old; and yet who in the political world that had not paid it? 'Why!—Bunkum, you are barefoot;' a voice spoke. ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... were the horses. Great numbers of the men could scarce drag themselves along owing to the state of their feet; their shoes and sandals, well enough adapted for sandy plains, were wholly unfitted for traversing rocky precipices, and the greater part of the army was almost barefoot. ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... Lily faced her little group of barefoot children, she was thinking of Radbourn, of his almost fierce sympathy for these poor supine farmers, hopeless, and in some cases content in their narrow lives. The children almost worshipped the beautiful girl who came to them as a revelation of exquisite neatness ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... of him as I saw him one cold, rainy morning tending Jason Kibby's dozen cows. He had on a rubber coat and cap, but his trouser legs were rolled above the knee and he was barefoot, "Hannibal," I shouted, "you'll take cold with your feet ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... sons and daughters dead and gone, perhaps, just as other old women in better circumstances do; but they must not indulge such depressing thoughts, they must reserve all the energy, the stamina, they have, to drag round the city—barefoot, it may be, and in the cold—to beg for food, and scratch up what they can find among the cinder-heaps. They groan over past comforts and past times, perhaps, and think of the days when their limbs were strong, and their cheeks ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne

... my sister, lobbed a novel on to my brother-in-law's back, and withdrew before he had time to retaliate. Then I stepped barefoot downstairs, to perform ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... often for mooning over folly when others were hard at work. But he had minded neither curse nor blow. He had always said to himself, "I am a painter." Whilst camps were soaked with blood and echoing only the trumpets of war, he had only seen the sweet divine smile of Art. He had gone barefoot to Italy for love of it, and had studied, and laboured, and worshipped, and been full of the fever of great effort and content with the sublime peace of conscious power. He had believed in himself: it is ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... son of Erlin, Earl of Orkney. He was distinguished from childhood by an uprightness of life which indicated his future sanctity. Erlin was opposed by Magnus Barefoot, King of Norway, who made him prisoner and seized his possessions, carrying off the young Magnus to act as his personal attendant. After ravaging the Western Isles the Norwegian king encountered, off the Island of Anglesey, the forces ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett

... taught children the alphabet in the woodland cell. He has been good and bad, proud and humble, rich and poor, arrogant and gentle. He has met the shock of lances on his prancing steed, and trudged barefoot from town to town. He has copied manuscripts in the lonely Scottish isle, and bathed the fevered brow of the pilgrim in the hospital at Jerusalem. He has dug ditches, and governed the world as the pope of the Church. He has held ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart

... barefoot as long as the cold was not too great. A diary that I assayed to keep in my eighth year reminds me that on my birthday, five miles from home in the marshes, I fell head over heels into a deep hole, while wading out, gun in hand, after some oyster-catchers which I ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... me how an old wife should speak? 'Tis strange indeed that a father sits sheltered at home while his little one runs barefoot and begs." ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo

... barefoot, wan. Such a compression of a description into three bare epithets is frequent in Keats's poetry. He shows his marvellous power in the unerring choice of adjective; and their enumeration in this way has, from its very ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats

... air of utter desolation, and began to cry. "I wanted to give them something," said she. "I'd rather go barefoot on the snow all day than not send ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... sooth it has a romantic sound. The phrase calls up images of rosaries, and crosses, and shaven-headed friars. Had we lived in the olden days, such things might verily have accompanied our journey to that holy monastery. We might then have gone barefoot, saying prayers as we toiled along the banks of the Arno and up the steep Appenines, as did Benevenuto Cellini, before he poured the melted bronze into the mould of his immortal Perseus. But we are pilgrims ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... answered the mother, "but she is barefoot, and would not presume to talk Spanish unless ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various

... Crucifixion, every species of worldly Distress and Degradation. We may say, that he who has not known those things, and learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has missed a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse woollen cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the world, was no beautiful business;—nor an honourable one in any eye, till the nobleness of those who did so had made it honoured ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... of raw beans. These are intemperate on water, or bewail the touch of salt as sacrilege against the sacrifice of eggs. These grovel for nuts like the Hampshire hog, or impiously celebrate the fruitage by which man fell. Some cast away their coats, some their hosen, some their hats. They go barefoot but for sandals. They wander about in sheepskins and goatskins, eschewing flesh for their food, and vegetables for their clothing. They plunge distracted into boiling water. Shudderingly, they break the frosty Serpentine. They absorb the sun's rays like pigeons upon the ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... They sent Alva into the Netherlands to sweep it with fire. They revoked the edict of Nantes until the soil of France was drunk with the blood of her children. They led the trembling sons and daughters of faith, barefoot and blindfolded, over burning plowshares, stretched them on wheel and rack, tore them limb from limb, sparing not for the groan of age, the lisp of childhood, or the piteous ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... chair against the wall of the cell, behind the prisoner. Carton, pressing forward, had already, with the speed of lightning, got him down into it, and stood over him, barefoot. ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... to enter the pulperia a native man, barefoot, glided noiselessly up and addressed the doctor in Spanish. He was yellowish-brown, like an over-ripe lemon; he wore a cotton shirt and ragged linen trousers girded by a leather belt. His face was like an animal's, live and wary, but without ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... have I sold the hair of my head for bread. Who would believe that I am Sitis, the wife of Job, who was clothed in fine linen woven with gold, that washed her feet in basins of silver and gold, that lay softly and was nurtured in plenty; but now I go barefoot, in rags, and sell my hair for bread. One thing only remains, for my bones are broken with very weariness of spirit. Arise and eat this bread, and satisfy thy hunger, and then speak a word against the Lord, and die; and I shall be freed ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James

... their voyage till they found a good camping-place, where they built a roaring fire to dry themselves, and finally discovered that in the operations of the day each had utterly ruined his shoes, so that they were afterwards forced to go barefoot. In this way they continued for some days, paddling with their frying-pan, and going ashore to get a duck occasionally shot by Gerstaecker. This was often exceedingly painful, from the stubble of the grass along the banks, burnt over by fires accidentally set by ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... Forms, the teacher may occasionally allow some of his best readers to read a poem aloud, where the emotion is evident or the narrative plain. The Barefoot Boy, p. 118, Fourth Reader; The Homes of England, p. 375; and Bernardo del Carpio, p. 131, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education

... supposes to have taken place previous to 1736. Helen Walker, declining every proposal of saving her relation's life at the expense of truth, borrowed a sum of money sufficient for her journey, walked the whole distance to London barefoot, and made her way to John Duke of Argyle. She was heard to say, that, by the Almighty strength, she had been enabled to meet the Duke at the most critical moment, which, if lost, would have caused the inevitable ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... loved and tended by the one I love," said Clifford, in a low voice, "I would walk blind and barefoot ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... engagement, and more than two thousand of the enemy slain or made prisoners. Queen Isabella, on receiving tidings of the event at Tordesillas, where she then was, ordered a procession to the church of St. Paul in the suburbs, in which she herself joined, walking barefoot with all humility, and offered up a devout thanksgiving to the God of battles for the victory with which he had ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... daughter, came to Groa at the door; she was in her nightgown, and barefoot. She was then in her fourteenth year, and tall and comely to see. Her silver belt had tangled round her feet as she came from her bedroom. There was on it a purse with many gold rings of hers in it; she had it there with her. Groa was very ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... foxglove's spiky stem, That dew of morning studs with silvery gem. Then every butterfly that crossed our view With joyful shout was greeted as it flew, And moth and lady-bird and beetle bright In sheeny gold were each a wondrous sight. Then as we paddled barefoot, side by side, Among the sunny shallows of the Clyde, Minnows or spotted par with twinkling fin, Swimming in mazy rings the pool within, A thrill of gladness through our bosoms sent Seen in the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... Rasputin, although both were guilty of the same offense.... He was grossly illiterate,—the only schooling he ever got was in the Monastery Abalaksky and what he acquired from the lips of monks while making his rounds as a barefoot pilgrim from place to place.... His claims of having visions I ascribed to his empty stomach, although others gave credence to the nonsense.... Alice at first abhorred him; finally she began to regard him ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe

... accomplished the task, while tending his cattle on the hills. So successful was he that some of the old and superstitious people in the neighborhood concluded that he must have been assisted by 'the evil spirit.' On one occasion he went to Edinburgh, plaided and barefoot, walked into a bookseller's shop, and asked for a Greek Testament. 'What are you going to do with a Greek Testament?' said the bookseller. 'Read it,' was the prompt reply. 'Read it!' exclaimed the sceptical bookseller with a smile; 'ye may have it for nothing if ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson

... act than his older contemporary, Isaiah, he was not satisfied with a negative warning, such as the older prophet gave the leaders in Jerusalem when he walked about the city barefoot and in the ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman

... racked and tortured the papists for hundreds of years together! for what else is the cause but this ungodly fear, at least in the most simple and harmless of them, of their penances—as creeping to the cross, going barefoot on pilgrimage, whipping themselves, wearing of sackcloth, saying so many pater-nosters, so many Ave-Marias, making so many confessions to the priest, giving so much money for pardons, and abundance of other the like—-but this ungodly fear of God? For ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin

... ragged, barefoot prisoner, studying his silent guards, "looks a lot like a Roman legionnaire's, but that six pointed star on their helmets is pure Semitic. Yes, this sure ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various

... putting out his hand to meddle with and mend it; his mind fed on its incidents and conditions. The mill-girls standing on the Ancoats pavements; the drunken lurryman tottering out from the public-house to his lurry under the biting sleet of February; the ragged barefoot boys and girls swarming and festering in the slums; the young men struggling all about him for subsistence and success—these for the first time became realities to him, entered into that pondering of 'whence and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... friends suggested law to him, he laughed at the idea of his being a lawyer. He said he hadn't brains enough. He read law barefoot under the trees, his neighbors said, and he sometimes slept on the counter in the store where he worked. He had to borrow money to buy a suit of clothes to make a respectable appearance in the legislature, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... of a long journey, or when they wished to appear with state and magnificence. Ordinarily they were transported from place to place by the aid of their golden sandals, with the exception of the "silver-footed Thetis," to whom they seem to have been superfluous. When at home, the gods were barefoot, according to the custom of the age, as we see from various representations ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... his home. She protested against the immorality of the connection, and took a tone of injured virtue; the fact being that she was humiliated by having, at her age, a crab-girl for a mistress,—a child who had been brought barefoot into the house. Fanchette owned three hundred francs a year in the Funds, for the doctor made her invest her savings in that way, and he had left her as much more in an annuity; she could therefore live at her ease without the necessity of working, and she quitted the house ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... nothing but the stream of fire that ran between her and the room where Nevill lay. She picked up her skirt and waded through it barefoot. A spark flung from the burning draperies settled on the wide flapping frills of her night-gown. Nevill was fast asleep with the rug over him and his mouth open. She shook him with one hand, and with the other she tried to beat down her ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair

... monitors, they would have to move it out in the country if they wanted it where they could go and find it again when they needed it. The group on the pier was a rusty one—men and women, and boys and girls, all ragged and barefoot, uncombed and unclean, and by instinct, education, and profession beggars. They trooped after us, and never more while we tarried in Fayal did we get rid of them. We walked up the middle of the principal street, and these vermin surrounded us on all sides and glared upon us; and every moment excited ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... though upon a raft, here a thousand leagues in Ocean-Sea! Yet wilt Thou care for thy Good News. I will come to Spain, and I will tell it. Chosen, and almost by very name pointed out in Thy Book! The first Christian shore that I touch I will walk barefoot and in my shirt at the head of twelve to the first shrine. And, O my Lord, never more will I forget that that tomb in which thou didst rest, still, still is held by the infidel!" He beat his breast. "Mea ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... to blessedness, because, aside from being instructive, it binds the child into the family group in a way that factory work can never do. The country cries health and enthusiasm to the world-weary soul as it does to the barefoot boy. Whittier was very near the heart of ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... decided not to purchase handsome clothes at the price of a perfidy and a horrible murder. He resolutely threw off his vest, then his neckerchief; but at the idea of giving up his new shoes, of walking barefoot, as formerly, over roads paved with gravel and broken glass, the luckless Faribole had a moment ...
— The Story of a Cat • mile Gigault de La Bdollire

... custom has decided in favor of a singular, and in others, of a plural construction, connected with words of this class. For example; custom gives a preference to the constructions, "My people do not consider;" "The peasantry go barefoot;" "The flock is his object;" instead of, "My people doth not consider;" "The peasantry goes barefoot;" "The flock are his object." In instances like these, the application of the foregoing rules may ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham

... characterized the Lollards in common was a bold spirit of inquiry which led them, in spite of persecution, to read Wyclif's English Bible and call in question such dogmas and rites of the church as did not seem to find warrant in the sacred text. Clad in long robes of coarse red wool, barefoot, with pilgrim's staff in hand, the Lollard preachers fared to and fro among the quaint Gothic towns and shaded hamlets, setting forth the word of God wherever they could find listeners, now in the parish church or under the vaulted roof of the cathedral, now in the churchyard or market-place, or ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske



Words linked to "Barefoot" :   unshod, unshoed, barefooted



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