"Bare-legged" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the flesh was bloodless; a little way off, a group of three, the two salesmen and the metropolitan newspaper man, seemed as though stricken into stone, stripped of all assurance, all complacence, awed, tense, palpitant, as the patched, bare-legged tatterdemalion of ten from the fields, that stood beside them, was awed and ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... as the boat grates on the shallows, two small bare-legged urchins rush forward to help Miss Jocelyn to land. But Bee, active and fearless, needs no aid at all, and reaches the pebbled beach ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... a niche by herself. None prouder than they of the evidences of culture and refinement she showed, while with characteristic independence, they called her "Brat" just as in the days, when she ran bare-legged and dirty on ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... roll the great logs down to the torrent below, and float them away in long flexible rafts, which spin down the smooth water-ways at a giddy speed, or float silently along the broad, still reaches of the widening river, or dash over the dangerous rapids, skillfully guided by the wild raftsmen, bare-legged and armed with long poles, whose practiced feet support them as safely on the slippery, rolling timber as ours would carry us on the ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... though nominally he had been acting as best man to a brother officer, he had spent most of his time in the service of the muslin-frocked, bare-legged atom who now sprawled upon his knee with all the privilege of old acquaintance, assuring him of her whole-hearted ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... his guilty conscience was keeping him awake. Neither of these facts, however, was true. Mac, lying on his back, watching the square patch of moonlight on the floor, was planning darkest deeds of vengeance on a certain dirty, tow-headed, bare-legged little girl, who had twice got the better of him in the conflict of ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... he tended very careful, lugging water from the creek to keep it growing. Climbing roses covered one wall, and, honest, it cuddled there so cunnin' and comfortable, it reminded me of home. Think of that bare-legged, pock-marked, sock-knittin' disparagement of the human race havin' the good feelin' to make him a house like this! It knocked me then, because, as I have explained, I was young. I have since learned that the ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... Pasha. This country noblesse is more interesting to me by far than the town people, though Omar, who is quite a Cockney, and piques himself on being 'delicate,' turns up his nose at their beggarly pride, as Londoners used to do at bare-legged Highlanders. The air of perfect equality—except as to the respect due to the head of the clan—with which the villagers treated Mustapha, and which he fully returned, made it all seem so very gentlemanly. ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... observed the peril of the boys, but lamenting the absence of his mate. Petros ran down at speed to offer his help, and Anna could only borrow the glass, through which she plainly saw the three boys, bare-legged, sitting huddled up on the top of the rock, but with the waves still a good way from them, and their faces all turned hopefully towards the promontory of rock along which she could see Gerald picking his way; but there was evidently a terrible and fast- diminishing space between its final point ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Brown, bare-legged boys flocked from San Pantaleone and the people's quarters on the smaller canals, remitting, for the nonce, their absorbing pastimes of crabbing and petty gambling, and ragged and radiant, stretched themselves luxuriously along the edge of the little quay, faces downward, emphasizing their humorous ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... bring home when they do go, and how the brown naked children, who look like so many shrimps, cling screaming about them at the sight); how all hands are now employed at the wine-making, and her brother is at this moment dancing bare-legged in a vat half as high as the house; how the bigger girls bring baskets of grapes, with eyes closed to keep out the rain; and how the smaller ones gather snails in the wet grass, which will appear with fried pumpkin at the labourer's ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... dortoire—[dormitory]—and the cells of the priests, and we went into one; a very pretty little room, very clean, hung with pictures, set with books. The Priest was in his cell, with his hair clothes to his skin, bare-legged, with a sandal! only on, and his little bed without sheets, and no feather bed; but yet, I thought, soft enough. His cord about his middle; but in so good company, living with ease, I thought it a very good life. A pretty library they have. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. She was called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature had entered life in just ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Apennines would be too grim. Infinite air and this spare veil of spring-tide greenery on field and forest soothe their sternness. Two rivers, swollen by late rains, had to be forded. Through one of these, the Foglia, bare-legged peasants led the way. The horses waded to their bellies in the tawny water. Then more hills and vales; green nooks with rippling corn-crops; secular oaks attired in golden leafage. The clear afternoon air rang with the voices of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... about the shower-bath came very strictly true to me. We were all on the main deck, bare-armed and bare-legged, mopping and slopping and swabbing about in the cold sea-water, which was liberally supplied to us by the steam-pump and hose. I had been furnished with a squeegee (a sort of scraper made of india-rubber at the end of broom-stick), and was putting as much "elbow-grease" into my work ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Little bare-legged children ran about him, playing, on the grass; but Percival Ford did not see them. He was gazing steadily at the singer under the hau tree. He even changed his position once, to get closer. The clerk of the Seaside went by, limping with age and ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... legacy of hate on that May Day amidst the African hills; it was not England's yeoman sons who did that deed. But men whose feet were native to the heather, men on whose tongues the Scottish burr clung lovingly—the bare-legged kilted "boys" whom the lasses in the Highlands ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... liquor, and by certain incoherence of language and wildness of manner given indications of being in some degree the worse for it. Suddenly two figures appeared beneath the doorway; one was that of a bare-headed and bare-legged Moorish boy of about ten years of age, dressed in a gelaba; he guided by the hand an old man, whom I at once recognised as one of the Algerines, the good Moslems of whom the old Mahasni had spoken in terms of praise in the morning ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... He was not looking at her, nor over the bay, but in front of him, to where Gerda, a thin little upright form, moved bare-legged along the shining causeway to ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... saw him 'claid in quhyt cloathis, with ane quhyt head and ane gray beard'.[71] In East Lothian, 1630, Alexander Hamilton met the Devil in the likeness of a black man.[72] At Eymouth, 1634, Bessie Bathgate was seen by two young men 'at 12 hours of even (when all people are in their beds) standing bare-legged and in her sark valicot, at the back of hir yard, conferring with the devil who was in green cloaths'.[73] Manie Haliburton of Dirlton, 1649, confessed that, when her daughter was ill, 'came the Devill, in licknes of a man, to hir hous, ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... sat officers in uniform, and the dark-skinned dandies of Valencia, in white duck suits and Panama hats, toying with tortoise shell canes, which could be converted, if the occasion demanded, into blades of Toledo steel. In the streets were priests and bare-legged mule drivers, and ragged ranchmen with red-caped cloaks hanging to their sandals, and negro women, with bare shoulders and long trains, vending lottery tickets and rolling huge cigars between their lips. It was an old story to Clay and King, but none of the others had seen a Spanish-American ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... similar method. I once saw ten or twelve leeches adhere to each foot of an old horse a little above his hoofs, who was grazing in a morass, and which did not lose their hold when he moved about. The bare-legged travellers in Ceylon are said to be much infested by leeches; and the sea-leech, hirudo muricata, is said to adhere to fish, and the remora is said to adhere to ships in such numbers as to retard ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... a bare-legged King has in his own house an advantage over the European stranger. I was heated, partly from self- repression, partly from Scotch tweed. King George was quite, quite cool, and unencumbered, save for a trifling calico jacket, a pink ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... stared, and Ali said a few words to them in their native tongue, when they immediately gathered up the guns, and, being bare-legged, waded across the stream, which was about four ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... M-d-ff, in the desperate bombardment of Matagorda (an old fort in the Bay of Cadiz), the falling of a fragment of the rock, struck by a shell, broke, his great toe; in this wounded state he was carried about the alameda in a cherubim chair by two bare-legged gallegos, to receive the condolations of the grandees, and, we regret to add, the unfeeling jeers of the British, who made no scruple to assert that his lordship had, as usual, "put his foot in it." The noble general would no doubt have added another leaf to bis laurel under ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... drawbridge was down, and Gilbert halted just before entering the gate, calling loudly for the porter. But instead of the latter, Sir Arnold himself appeared at that moment within the courtyard, feeding a brace of huge mastiffs with gobbets of red raw meat from a wooden bowl, carried by a bare-legged stable-boy with a shock of almost colourless flaxen hair, and a round, red face, pierced by two little round blue eyes. Gilbert called again, and the knight instantly turned and came towards him, beating down ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... parts of Christendom, it is the custom to uncover the head in token of reverence, it is here the direct contrary; as, before any man can come into, the presence of this king, he must put off his shoes and stockings, coming before him bare-footed and bare-legged, holding his hands joined over his head, bowing his body, and saying dowlat; which duty performed, he sits down, cross-legged, in the king's presence. The state is governed by five principal officers, his secretary, and four others, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... it. They had a good deal of luggage altogether. When everything was stacked on the beach Mrs. Kinsella, with her baby in her arms, came down and looked at the pile with amazement. Three small, bare-legged Kinsellas, young brothers of Jimmy's, followed ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... the fellow arrested Robin's attention, and he decided to stop and talk with him. The fellow was bare-legged and bare-armed, and wore a long shift of a shirt, fastened with a belt. About his neck hung a stout, bulging bag, which was buckled by a good piece ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... and thankfully we put up our rods—it was glory enough for all time—and returned weeping in each other's arms, weeping tears of pure joy, to that simple, bare-legged family in the ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... evidently somewhat perplexed by the apparition of these three bareheaded, bare-legged, dust-stained youngsters, and reined up his horse as ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... single rude house of uncemented stones, approached by a pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it was then summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely withdraws; but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of peats which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of the cotter were wading by the pier. The same day we visited the shores of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole, sounding as we went; and, having taken stock ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with flashing eye and uplifted hand; but she let it fall suddenly, saying, "No, I vow I won't lick ye Christmas Day, if yer drive me crazy; but speak up smart, now, 'n' say whether yer'd ruther give Jim Cullen half yer candy or go bare-legged ter the party?" The matter being put so plainly, Peoria collected her faculties, dried her tears, and chose the lesser evil, Clem having hastened the decision by an affectionate wink, that meant he'd go halves with her on ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... unsheltered platform. He wished to think quietly, so he shifted his raincoat to his other arm and sought a shaded place against the railing. His mind was struggling in a vortex of ancient history, and this was the picture which arose from the strife. A very commonplace, bare-legged lad, with curly, uncombed hair and face so freckled that a few yards' distance merged them into one complete shade of reddish brown. He surveyed the neighboring bridge, and it came into his mental vision unconsciously. ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... Targets, I say," answered his companion; "for the Lady of Montrose herself could not be more courteously waited upon; she has four Highland maidens, and as many bare-legged gillies, to wait ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... lord, with three of his uncles, was on the spot by daybreak. They entered the house and ordered Allen to be brought before them. The archbishop was dragged from his bed; and in his shirt as he was, bare-legged and bare-headed, he dropt upon his knees, and begged for mercy. As well might the sheep have asked mercy of the famished wolf. He had but time to bequeath his soul to heaven, and his skull was cloven as he knelt; and, to make clean work, his chaplains, his servants, all of English blood ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... the hills were purple, the sands yellow, the seas sunny, the skies blue. A young lady sprawled with dreamy eyes in a moored boat, in company of a lunch basket, a champagne bottle, and an enamoured man in a blazer. Bare-legged boys flirted sweetly with ragged maidens, slept on stone steps, gambolled with dogs. A pathetically lean girl flattened against a blank wall, turned up expiring eyes and tendered a flower for sale; while, near by, the large photographs of some famous ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... domain some furze-crowned hills and a bog, the intricacies of which were known only to himself? whether he was arrayed in jewelled robes, with a crown of gold weighing on his temples? or whether he went bare-legged and bare-armed, with his bare locks flowing in luxurious wildness to the breeze? We request an answer to this in full simplicity. We observe that even in Ireland now, a fellow six feet high, and stout in proportion, is called a "prince of a fellow," although ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... ill-favored and awkward, and had cheek-bones like a Tartar. While reading of the great antiquity of his family (which reached obscurity in the thirteenth century), I set it down as established that the first of his unknown predecessors was a bare-legged thief, and, at the very moment that I imagined Anna was smiling on him, and retracting her coquettish denial, I could have sworn that he spoke with an unintelligible border accent, and ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... me, and I know it was even more so to Rectus, to stand here and have those strangers watch us fishing. If we had not been barefooted and bare-legged, we should not have minded it so much. As for the old Minorcan, I don't suppose he cared at all. I began to think it was ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... for an hour or two in the middle of the day, but even then in the shadow dwelt a cold breath—of the winter, or of death—of something that humanity felt unfriendly. To Gibbie, however, bare-legged, bare-footed, almost bare-bodied as he was, sun or shadow made small difference, except as one of the musical intervals of life that make the melody of existence. His bare feet knew the difference on the flags, and his heart recognized unconsciously the secret ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... "Ah, but I am not a Queen Elizabeth. Nor is this London." She regarded with a shrug of distaste the stretch of mud-flats reaching to the tide-line, rubbish—littered and unfragrant. Knee-deep in its mire, bare-legged Indians and booted men drove piles for the ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... pieces and gauntlets of light chain-armour, to protect them while pulling down and unroofing houses, which is their especial duty. All have a regular fire costume, from the 'Oki Yaconin,' or 'head man,' to the bare-legged coolie, who carries the badge of the brigade in large red characters on his back. On arriving at a fire, a point de tete is selected—generally a house, on the roof of which the fire-charms are immediately fixed, as if to forbid its further advance. These charms (the circular white ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... the decks were crowded in every part with lumber, live and dead. But all these symptoms had to be increased many fold in their intensity before we could hope to get under way; and a single glance at the listless countenances of the bare-legged, bare-armed, red-capped crowd who adhered like polypi to the rough foundation-stones of the mole sufficed to show that the performance they had come to witness would not soon commence. Our berths once visited, we cast about for some quiet position ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... of the girls' claims, where his figure was as familiar (and of about as much interest) as the magpies in the pasture. He fully meant to marry Louise, whose beauty and gracious manner even to the smallest bare-legged Mexican boy on the ranch captivated him and stirred in his breast a maddening desire for possession, so that he might cut off the rest of the world from her sweetness, so that it might alone feed his passion. Yes, he ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... which the now starved mother was unable to supply. The next older was barely able to toddle round on the clay floor; and they ranged up from that until the eldest of the six was reached, who was a bare-footed, bare-legged girl of eight. She was, however, so dwarfed through rough usage, insufficient food, and exposure, as to be little larger than ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... at the house of a man who was said to possess $150,000 (30,000 pounds) worth of land. The house was well enough. His two bare-legged daughters, girls of seventeen or eighteen, lounged about smoking pipes. I gave one a cigar. She replied, "I don't keer if I do try it. I've allays wanted to know what a cigar smokes like." But she didn't like it. Apropos of girls, I may say that there ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... others with an old carpet for a saddle-cloth, were waiting for the travellers who were to stop at Tantah to bear them from the station to the town. The donkey drivers, clothed in short blue and white tunics, bare-armed and bare-legged, their heads covered with a fez, a wand in their hand, and resembling the slender figures of shepherds or youths which are so exquisitely drawn on the bodies of Greek vases, stood near their animals in an indolent attitude, which they abandoned as soon ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... simple dignity which reminds one less of Gozzoli's master than of Lippo Lippi or Masaccio, whose frescoes in the Carmine he, in common with all other artists, had doubtless studied. There is nothing so classical or so natural in the picture as the beautiful little bare-legged boy that is running away in the foreground. This little bright panel—so gay, so naive, so ignorant, and withal so charming—is of importance in the history of art as illustrated in the National Gallery. It ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Ned?" said the latter as a ray of cheerfulness shot over his sad heart, on seeing the happiness meeting with himself gave to the boy; "where are you going so far from home, bare-footed and half bare-legged, on such a cold day ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... where we landed, benumbed with cold, and the women excessively sick: from our landing-place we were obliged to walk very near a mile to the inn where we purposed to lodge, attended by six or seven men and women, bare-legged, carrying our baggage. This boat cost me a guinea, besides paying exorbitantly the people who carried our things; so that the inhabitants of Dover and of Boulogne seem to be of the same kidney, and indeed they understand one another perfectly well. It was our honest captain who made the signal ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... are several, being shadowed and darkened by the general aspect of the place. When we arrived, all the wretched little dwellings seemed to have belched forth their inhabitants into the warm summer evening; everybody was chatting with everybody, on the most familiar terms; the bare-legged children gambolled or quarrelled uproariously, and came freely, moreover, and looked into the window of our parlor. When we ventured out, we were followed by the gaze of the whole town: people standing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... whiles, when household duties did not claim her. Now and then, when his back ached with the toil, he would break off for a spell and watch her as she stooped over the cooking-pot, or knelt by the stream-side, bare-legged, with petticoat kilted high, beating the linen ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... into port that they had had a lovely passage; but this emotion, at Boulogne, was speedily quenched in others, above all in the great ecstasy of a larger impression of life. She was "abroad" and she gave herself up to it, responded to it, in the bright air, before the pink houses, among the bare-legged fishwives and the red-legged soldiers, with the instant certitude of a vocation. Her vocation was to see the world and to thrill with enjoyment of the picture; she had grown older in five minutes and had by the time they reached the hotel recognised in the institutions and manners of France ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... to welcome them, and a beautiful bare-legged girl, about sixteen, ran forth to tell her father, in Gaelic, that the trouble was over, and that a ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... undulated and perfumed, according to the custom of the old french Kings;"[318] but much more it seems according to the custom of less ancient sovereigns; and there is at the Louvre, a portrait of Louis XIII. bare-legged, periwigged, ermine-cloaked, which corresponds far better to this description than anything ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... vessels—the Australian fleet. Mac had not previously known that they were to fall in with them here. For four days they lay at anchor swinging to the tide, in the entrance, lonely and unvisited, while the eager, bare-footed, bare-legged and bare-chested men gazed longingly at the distant port and tried to persuade themselves that the vessel must go up there for coal and water. Several times the life-boat crews lowered the boats and raced clumsily with each other; and once the ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... heard boyish tones; and the group of lads for whom she was waiting came in sight. Bare-legged, with trousers turned up at the knees, coatless, wearing a variety of hats, some having brims minus crowns and others crowns only, they came along carrying fishing-rods and tin cans for ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... a low voice, still watching intently: "Blue sky, green trees, a snowy shore, and little azure wavelets.... Two children bare-legged, playing in the sand.... A little girl—so pretty!—with her brown eyes and brown curls.... And the boy is her brother I think.... Oh, certainly.... And what a splendid time they are having with their sand-fort!... There's a little dog, too. They are calling him, 'Snippy! Snippy! Snippy!' How ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... the friar loved to hoist his capote on the cord, and tramp, bare-legged, out to his two-acre farm, leaving his slave, with a few small coins in the till, to keep shop should any ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... reasons which will afterwards appear, these honest vagabonds have been obliged to receive a new colony among them, and to submit to new laws and a new form of government. Instead of their former ragged and bare-legged captain, whom they took care, however, to keep innocent, they have now the honour of being governed by Don Jose Sylva de Paz, a brigadier of the armies of Portugal, who is accompanied by a garrison of soldiers, and has consequently a more extensive and better supported ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... would have had Carette as satisfied with my sole companionship as in the days when we romped bare-legged among the pools and rocks, and woke the basking gulls and cormorants with our shouts, and dared the twisting currents with unfettered limbs and no thought of wrong. These things in all their fulness of delight were, of course, no longer possible ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... bewilders you with its alien figures, its confusion of tongues, and its eccentric contrasts of dress. In five minutes you meet Spanish officers; nuns in broad-leaved white bonnets; a bearded sergeant nursing a baby; bare-legged, sun-burnished Moors; pink-and-white cheeked ladies'-maids from Kent; local mashers in such outrageously garish tweeds; stiff brass-buttoned turnkeys; Jews in skull-cap and Moslems in fez; and while you are ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... watching a couple of monster sharks that were hanging about the vessel, when the child slipped from his grasp and fell into the water. The father plunged overboard and seized him, and the sharks at once made to the pair. The bare-legged young buccaneer dropped the fruit-basket and went over the rail like a flash. As the first shark turned on its back, the invariable prelude to biting, the Cuban rose, and with a long, keen knife fairly disemboweled it. The other was not to be disposed ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... he, "I came very often to the Quarry House, but I always rode homewards discontented in the evening. Resilda at that time had a great ambition to be a boy. The sight of any brown bare-legged lad gipsying down the hill with a song upon his lips, would set her viciously kicking the toes of her satin slippers against the parapet of the terrace, and clamouring at her sex. Now I was not of the same mind ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... around the village and skirted the path up to the school-house. I woke from my unpleasant reverie to hear the gentle murmur of voices, moving rhythmically as in prayer; and in a short bend of the road I came face to face with the children leaving school. I had been accustomed to seeing these wild, bare-legged mountaineers breaking loose from school in a state of subdued frenzy, leaping up and down the side ditches, screaming, yelling, panting, with their elf-locks blinding their eyes, and their bare feet flashing amid the green of grasses or the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... of rolling, clear-cut shadows. The shore was bordered with flags and masts and white and brown sails; and in the white-and-green of billows harmlessly breaking could be seen the yellow bodies of the bathers. A dozen bare-legged men got hold of a yacht under sail with as many passengers on board, and pushed it forcibly right down into the sea, and then up sprang its nose and it heeled over and shot suddenly off, careering on the waves into the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... was what he wrote on the leaf out of the Bible. Me an' Blaisdell both tried to git out of him what thet meant. But not a word. I kept watchin' an' after a while I seen young Evarts slip out the back way. Mebbe half an hour I seen a bare-legged kid cross, the road an' go into Greaves's store.... Then shore I tumbled to your dad. He'd sent a note to Jorth to come out an' meet him face to face, man to man! ... Shore it was like readin' what your dad had wrote. But I didn't say nothin' to ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... amazing rapidity. Soon you were scouring the hollows in the woods for arbutus or splashing bare-legged into the bogs for cowslips. You even ventured knee-deep into the sea which although still chill was no longer frigid. And then, before you knew it, you were hauling out your fishing tackle and looking over your flies; inspecting ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... Bare-legged children stamp in the puddles, splashing each other, One—with a choir-boy's face Twits me as I pass... The word, like a muddied drop, Seems to roll over and not out of The bowed lips, Yet dewy red ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... better than that. Indeed, if she could have believed she would meet with Prosper at the end of that day, she would have borne with them, hindrance or none. But this was not to be. Her hair was yet a good six inches from her knees. So now, bare-legged and bare-footed, her skirts pulled back and pinned behind her, she felt the glad tune of the woods singing in her veins, and ran against the stream of cool air deeper into the fountain-heart whence it flowed, the great silence and shade of the ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... dashing along the league of sea-borded highway, group after group of gay riding-parties of all ages and both sexes—Spanish hats, feathers, and riding-habits—amazones, according to the French classic title, in the majority. First comes Papa Briggs, with all his progeny, down to the little bare-legged imitation Highlander on a shaggy Shetland pony; then a riding-master in mustachios, boots, and breeches, with a dozen pupils in divers stages of timidity and full-blown temerity; and then again loving pairs in the ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... the bare-legged little aspen with its restless and childlike ways is a tree that it is good to know. When alone, these little trees seem lonely and sometimes to tremble as though just a little afraid in this big strange ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... ourselves through them. To add to our perplexities, innumerable streams intersected this forest, which always brought us Europeans to a complete standstill. The only bridges which the natives ever think of making are formed by cutting down a tree, and letting it fall across; and over these our bare-legged attendants, loaded as they were, scrambled with all the agility of cats or monkeys; but it was not so with us: for several times they seated one of us on the top of their load, and carried him over. The chief, who accompanied ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... of white sand camped the merry-makers. Soon a great fire of driftwood and pine cones tossed its flames defiantly at a radiant moon in the sky, and the fishers were casting their nets in the sea. The more daring of the girls waded bare-legged in the water, holding pine-torches, spearing flounders ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... these birds. There are (as in seals) eared and earless owls, though the so-called "ears" in the birds are not actually ears at all, but tufts of feathers that give rather the impression of horns. There are bare-legged owls and owls with feather stockings. There are owls that fly by day and owls that fly by night, though this is a less satisfactory distinction than that between the diurnal butterflies and nocturnal moths. Any reliable classification of owls must, in short, rest on certain structural bony differences ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... the first fashion here seldom wear shoes or stockings in the house, but only keep them to wear upon particular occasions. I have often seen them coming to the church, which stood opposite to the governor's house, bare-legged, walking through mud and water, and at the church-door put on their shoes and stockings, and pull them off again when they came out. Though they are in general handsome, and have good complexions, yet many of them paint in so ridiculous ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... helmet, gaudy sash and plume, and sword hilt glittering with gold, a quaint contrast enough to the meager garron which carries him and his finery. Beside them, secured by a cord which a pikeman has fastened to his own wrist, trots a bare-legged Irish kerne, whose only clothing is his ragged yellow mantle, and the unkempt "glib" of hair, through which his eyes peer out, right and left, in mingled fear and sullenness. He is the guide of the company, in their ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... men looked up at Peter and said, "Oh! your name is Peter, isn't it? I hear you are a fighting man. Well, you just come down off that bare-legged horse, and I'll kill you in a couple of minutes, while I take ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... might with advantage be spared from the pictures at Lucca, and, in the hands of inferior men, the sky is merely encumbered with sprawling infants; those of Domenichino in the Madonna del Rosario, and Martyrdom of St. Agnes, are peculiarly offensive, studies of bare-legged children howling and kicking in volumes of smoke. Confusion seems to exist in the minds of subsequent painters ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... their saddles swinging from side to side, evidently thinking their tenure more precarious than that on the giddy mast; and wholly unmindful of the expressive gestures, and mournful ejaculations of the bare-legged pursuers. At another time, their antics and buffoonery, as they made unmerciful use of the short sticks with which they were armed, would have provoked a smile. Now our party gazed on these things as they move the wise. They felt calm and happy; ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... but the door at the front which opened, letting a stream of sunlight into the dark passage. In the doorway stood a woman, with two bare-legged ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... later we set off to catch fish. Narkiz had put on an extraordinary sort of cap with ears, and was more dignified than ever. He walked in front with a steady, even step; two rods swayed regularly up and down on his shoulders; a bare-legged boy followed him carrying a can and ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... have seen a good many young men dressed that way. I believe it is considered the tip of the fashion. I haven't seen any of the bare-legged dandies yet with a high silk hat and an umbrella, but I expect it won't be long before I meet one. We often see the Highland soldiers that belong to the garrison at the castle, and they look mighty fine with their plaid shawls and their scarfs ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... last of my journey in the cold end of December, in a mighty dry day of frost, and who should be my guide but Patey Macmorland, brother of Tam! For a tow-headed, bare-legged brat of ten, he had more ill tales upon his tongue than ever I heard the match of; having drunken betimes in his brother's cup. I was still not so old myself; pride had not yet the upper hand of curiosity; and indeed it would have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not quite equal to the gardens of Alcina; yet wanted not the 'DUE DONZELLETTE GARRULE' of that enchanted paradise, for upon the green aforesaid two bare-legged damsels, each standing in a spacious tub, performed with their feet the office of a patent washing-machine. These did not, however, like the maidens of Armida, remain to greet with their harmony the approaching guest, but, alarmed at the appearance of a handsome stranger on the opposite side, dropped ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... according to custom, bare-headed and bare-legged. He was enfeebled by confinement and affliction; by constantly brooding over the unknown fate of his child, and the disastrous interruption of his experiments. He sat bowed down and listless; his head sunk upon his breast; his whole ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... original whity-gray stuff in the banks—saw the melting in the pots (a wondrous process, a real poem)—saw the delicate preparation the clay material undergoes for these great pots (it has to be kneaded finally by human feet, no machinery answering, and I watch'd the picturesque bare-legged Africans treading it)—saw the molten stuff (a great mass of a glowing pale yellow color) taken out of the furnaces (I shall never forget that Pot, shape, color, concomitants, more beautiful than any antique statue,) pass'd into the adjoining casting-room, lifted by ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... as we sit listlessly expecting the arrival of our modest conveyance, suggest to our companion—a bare-legged Celtic brother of the gentle craft, somewhat at the wrong side of forty, with a turf-coloured caubeen, patched frieze, a clear brown complexion, dark-grey eyes, and a right pleasant dash of roguery in his features—the ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... long yellow robe; the thing in his hand was a bronze-headed staff. Three of his companions also wore robes; the other two were bare-legged in short tunics. The horn-bearers wore either robes or tunics; the spearmen and bowmen behind either wore tunics or were naked except for breechclouts. All wore sandals. They were red-brown in color, completely hairless; they had long necks, almost chinless lower jaws, ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... beautiful and white it seemed quite a desecration to walk upon it—this spotlessness did not last very long; and then two wooden piers with a light-house on each, and a quay, and blue-bloused workmen and red-legged little soldiers with mustaches, and bare-legged fisher-women, all speaking a language that I knew as well as the other commoner language I had left behind; but which I had always looked upon as an exclusive possession of my father's and mother's and mine for the exchange of sweet ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... dishevelled, uncombed hair falling about sallow, gaunt faces, are commingling in the yard with chickens, dogs, and calves. A sallow-faced, slatternly woman, bareheaded, with uncared-for hair, long, tangled, and black, with her dress tucked up to her knees, bare-footed and bare-legged, is wading through the mud from the bayou, with a dirty pail full of ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... be driven into the water. Scarbreast led, and his mustang, after many kicks and reluctant steps, went over his depth, wetting the stalwart chief to the waist. Bare-legged Indians waded in and urged their pack-ponies. Shouts, shrill cries, blows mingled ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... was James Whitcher. He was born in the Franconia Valley of northern New Hampshire, and his whole life had been passed there. He had always fished; he could not remember when or how he learned the art. From the days when, a tiny, bare-legged urchin in ragged frock, he had dropped his piece of string with its bent pin at the end into the narrow, shallow brooklet behind his father's house, through early boyhood's season of roaming along Gale River, ...
— Fishin' Jimmy • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... a long room with red-tiled floor and latticed windows, a woman, white-aproned and frail-faced, was bustling about her morning business. To her skirts clung a sturdy, bare-legged boy; while at the oak table in the centre of the room a girl with brown eyes and straggling hair was seated before a basin of ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... a million bare-legged children with short white socks running wild, and another half a million nurses with white caps running wild after them. And the Eiffel Tower! But that's since your time, ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... evening dress of European ladies is considered indelicate; but Hakka women move about freely without shoes or stockings. A Chinese man will, however, in warm weather often strip naked to the waist. Coolies frequently go bare-legged; they use sandals made of rope and possess rain-coats made of palm leaves. The garments of the poorer classes are made of cotton, generally dyed blue. Wealthy people have their clothes made of silk. Skirts and jackets are elaborately embroidered. Costly furs and fur-lined clothes are much prized, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... of the family fortune in shawls. They are handed down from generation to generation, for they never wear out; the older they are the more valuable they are considered. You often see a barefooted, bare-legged peasant with his head wrapped in a Cashmere shawl that would bring a thousand dollars in a London auction-room. It is considered absolutely essential for every young man to wear one of those beautiful ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... she didn't charge anybody with the murder of poor Johnny,—nobody meant to do him any harm, she knew that; but, after all, she wished she could only have had her own way with him from the first. And so she rode away,—her little bare-legged grandson, behind her, aggravating her distress by telling her that, when he got to be a man, he meant to do nothing all the days of his life but dig wells, and give ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... in the offing. Bare-legged and bare-shouldered La Paz scampered down to the beach, for the arrival of a steamer was their loop-the-loop, circus, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... the farmer, his wife and children, an aged mother whose voice has become a mere thread of sound, and who thinks over the past in the chimney-corner, sometimes with a distaff in her hand; two old uncles, a youth of all work, who has been brought up as one of the family, and a little bright-eyed, bare-legged servant girl, whose brown feet I still hear pattering upon the floors. One of the old men is a white-bearded priest of eighty-five, who has spent most of his life in Algeria, and has himself come to look like the patriarchal Arab in all but the ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... our child, bare-legged, watching the forbidden ground beyond the river. A fresh breeze was moving the trees and making the whole a dazzling mass of shifting light and shadow. He sat so still that a glorious violet and red kingfisher perched quite close, and, dashing into the water, came forth with a fish, ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... pot. At the sight of Henderson on his log, lying quite close to the edge, and far back from the dreadful cleft, the terror in the wild eyes gave way to inexpressible relief. The face drew back; and an instant later a bare-legged child appeared, carrying the pike-pole which Pichot had tossed into the bushes. Heedless of the sheeting volleys of the rain and the fierce gusts which whipped her dripping homespun petticoat about her knees, she clambered skilfully down ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... plant and made his way through the bare-legged, soft-eyed girls, looking for Dalon. He overheard a guard say in low, bitter tones to another: "... Maybe eight hours on Vogar, and we can't leave the ship, then on to the battle front for us while Y'Nor ...
— The Helpful Hand of God • Tom Godwin
... stupid, not very pretty by the Portraits; must now be two-and-thirty gone] is perfectly calculated to be the Priestess of it! Yet he dawdles away his day in a manner not unpleasant to him; and I really am persuaded he has a conscience that would gild the inside of a dungeon. The feats of our bare-legged warriors in the late War [BERG-SCHOTTEN, among whom I was a Colonel], accompanied by a PIBRACH [elegiac bagpipe droning MORE SUO] in his outer room, have an effect on the old Don, which would delight you." [Keith, i. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... sea, and a voice same as the throstle! Well, well, to think, to think! Playing in the gorse and the ling together, and the daisies and the buttercups—and then the curlews whistling and the river singing like music, and the bees ahumoning—aw, terr'ble sweet and nice. And me going barefoot, and her bare-legged, and divil a hat at the one of us—aw, deary me, deary me! Wasn't much starch at her in them ould ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... but courteous treatment from the soldiers of every rank and form of religion. Murray directed that 'the compliment of the hat' should be paid to all religious processions. The Ursuline nuns knitted long stockings for the bare-legged Highlanders when the winter came on, and presented each Scottish officer with an embroidered St Andrew's Cross on the 30th of November, St Andrew's Day. The whole garrison won the regard of the town by giving up part of their rations ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... wide paved walk on either side of the Canal, on which the waterman—and who in Venice is not a waterman?—is prone to seek repose. I speak of the summer days—it is the summer Venice that is the visible Venice. The big tarry barges are drawn up at the fondamenta, and the bare-legged boatmen, in faded blue cotton, lie asleep on the hot stones. If there were no colour anywhere else there would be enough in their tanned personalities. Half the low doorways open into the warm interior of waterside drinking-shops, and here and there, on the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... wanted no further telling, but came splashing up out of the stream to the open shallow muddy bed where the reeds grew, and as soon as they saw the monk's condition they began to indulge in a bare-legged triumphal war-dance, shrieking ...
— The King's Sons • George Manville Fenn
... dortoire [Dormitory.] and the cells of the priests, and we went into one; a very pretty little room, very clean, hung with pictures, set with books. The Priest was in his cell, with his hair clothes to his skin, bare-legged with a sandall only on, and his little bed without sheets, and no feather-bed; but yet I thought, soft enough. His cord about his middle; but in so good company, living with ease, I thought it a very good life. A pretty library they have. ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... over stables now converted to a garage, the dovecote, masking at the other end the conservatory which adjoined the billiard-room. Close to the red-brick lodge his two children, Kate and Harry, ran out from under the acacia trees, and waved to him, scrambling bare-legged on to the low, red, ivy-covered wall which guarded his domain of eleven acres. Mr. Bosengate waved back, thinking: 'Jolly couple—by Jove, they are!' Above their heads, through the trees, he could see right away to some Downs, faint in the July heat haze. And he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... been like a courtyard. The floor was cobblestoned, the walls were of adobe, and the large windows opened like doors. A blue cloud of smoke filled the place. Gale heard the click of pool balls and the clink of glasses along the crowded bar. Bare-legged, sandal-footed Mexicans in white rubbed shoulders with Mexicans mantled in black and red. There were others in tight-fitting blue uniforms with gold fringe or tassels at the shoulders. These men wore belts with heavy, bone-handled ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... system which afterward took the whole heart of the land. Nothing could have been more striking than to cast one's eye thus over the wide cotton-fields—for one associates cotton with the New—and find them cultivated by these bare-legged and breech-clouted peasants of the Douab, with ploughs which consisted substantially of a crooked stick shod with iron at the end, and with other such farming-implements out of the time that one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... circus wo'th lookin' at is that red-maned gal, an' she looks that sweet an' innercent she don't 'pear to rightly belong in that thar bare-legged bunch o' she dido-cutters. They-all must 'a mavericked her recent. Looks like a pr'ty ripe red apple among a lot o' ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... must have shoes and socks, or else he will have to run about bare-legged in clogs ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... shrimping, cockling, digging for lug and long-lining, bawling fish through Plymouth streets, even a hovelling job at times—nothing came amiss to them, and no weather. For a trip to Plymouth they'd put on sea-boots belike, or grey stockings and clogs: but at home they went bare-legged, and if they wore anything 'pon their heads 'twould be a handkerchief, red or yellow, with a man's hat clapped a-top; coats too, and guernseys like men's, and petticoats a short few inches longer; for I'm telling of that ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mountaineer is always minute; each day is a volume unto itself, and in this book abound many pictures. In a thorn-bush the old woman saw a mocking-bird feeding her young; in the dust she saw where a snake had smoothed his way across the road. She halted to look at a bare-legged boy, who with his straw hat was ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... offerings, and the final orders for the crossing were issued. We had twelve horses, carrying only quarter loads each, all led; the servants were mounted, 'water- guides' with ten-foot poles sounded the river ahead, one led Mr. Redslob's horse (the rider being bare-legged) in front of mine with a long rope, and two more led mine, while the gopas of three villages and the zemindar steadied my horse against the stream. The water- guides only wore girdles, and with elf-locks and pig-tails streaming from their ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... hundred yeares as with us to eighty. Mr. Meredith Lloyd hath seen at Dolkelly, a great parish in Merionithshire, an hundred or more of poore people at eighty yeares of age at church in a morning, who came thither bare-foot and bare-legged a good way. In the chancell of Winterborn Basset lies interred Mr. Ambrose Brown, who died 166-,aged 103 yeares. Old goodwife Dew of Broad Chalke died about 1649, aged 103. She told me she was, I thinke, sixteen yeares old when King Edward ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... settlements to which it belonged. The condition of these places and of their inhabitants is, of course, the same all over the plantation, and if I were to describe them I should but weary you with a repetition of identical phenomena: filthy, wretched, almost naked, always bare-legged and bare-footed children; negligent, ignorant, wretched mothers, whose apparent indifference to the plight of their offspring, and utter incapacity to alter it, are the inevitable result of their slavery. It is hopeless to attempt to reform their habits or improve their condition while the ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... for a refuge where they could talk, finding it in a rough shelter designed for the protection of nurses watching children playing on the sands. It was empty for the moment, except for a tiny, bare-legged girl of three or four crooning over a big doll. Edith led the way. "Come over here." They sat down on a bench hacked with initials and cleanly dirty with sand. The little girl at the other end of the bench rolled her big eyes toward them with ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... "idea", that no stone might be left unturned to hide the perfect innocence of the superintendent. He had known Abbott Ashton as a bare-legged urchin running on errands for his widowed mother. He had watched him through studious years, had believed in his future career—and now, no bold adventuress, though adopted into Hamilton Gregory's home, should be allowed to ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... something which you do not quite understand. She had none of his language, evidently; she was undersized, some three feet six inches by the look of her,[4] and yet perfectly proportioned. She was most curiously dressed in a frock cut to the knee, and actually in nothing else at all. It left her bare-legged and bare-armed, and was made, as he puts it himself, of stuff like cobweb: "those dusty, drooping kind which you put on your finger to stop bleeding." He could not recognise the web, but was sure that ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... together in front of them: while a fourth, with the blood squirting from a severed vessel, lay back with updrawn knees, breathing in wheezy gasps. Further back—all panting together, like the wind in a tree—there stood a group of fierce, wild creatures, bare-armed and bare-legged, gaunt, unshaven, with deep-set murderous eyes and wild beast faces. With their flashing teeth, their bristling hair, their mad leapings and screamings, they seemed to Alleyne more like fiends from the pit than men ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... brocade panels stained and well-worn showing at the back, the dark ceiling, the piece of tapestry that hung over the side-table between the doors—it was a martial scene, faded and discoloured, with ghostly bare-legged knights on fat prancing horses all in inextricable conflict, a great battleaxe stood out against the dusky foliage of an autumn tree; and a stag with his fore feet in the air, ramped in the foreground, looking over his shoulder. It was a ludicrously bad piece of work, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... sale of provisions. The king has five wives, besides several concubines, being attended by four men carrying great canes with silver heads, who are called pury bassas, and who seem to manage all his affairs. His majesty goes always bare-footed and bare-legged, being for the most part clad like a Dutch skipper, with a sort of green gauze covering strewed with spangles over his long black hair; but when he appears in state, he wears a long calico gown over his jacket, and sits on a chair covered with red cloth. He is always ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... customs will account for the superior virility of Europeans as compared with their distant kinsmen whose lot is cast in the sweltering tropics. But no one who has observed Bengali schoolboys standing up bare-legged to fast bowling will question their bravery. In fact, the instinct of combativeness is universal, and among protected communities ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... a short way from the tent, sat down, and counted and weighed the silver. Karl took the helmet off his head, and received in it the weighed silver. They saw a man coming to them who had a stick with an axe-head on it in his hand, a hat low upon his head, and a short green cloak. He was bare-legged, and had linen breeches on tied at the knee. He laid his stick down in the field, and went to Karl and said, "Take care, Karl Morske, that thou does not hurt thyself against my axe-stick." Immediately a man came running and calls with great haste to Leif Ossurson, telling him to come ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... of them for a little corn for his tortillas. They extracted from their claim $270,000; yet, in December, 1826, they were still living in a wretched hovel, close to the source of their wealth, bare-headed and bare-legged, with upward of $200,000 in silver locked up in their hut. But never was the utter worthlessness of the metal, as such, so clearly demonstrated as in the case of the Arancos, whose only pleasure consisted in contemplating their hoards, and occasionally throwing away ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... go to sleep, Bella Gelsomina," concluded the sub-keeper, "for the fishermen have left off shouting to say their prayers. Per Diana! The bare-headed and bare-legged rascals are as impudent as if St. Mark were their inheritance! The noble patricians should give them a lesson in modesty, by sending every tenth knave among them to the galleys. Miscreants! to disturb the quiet of an orderly town with their ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... comes on together with this kind of fit. He just lay there full length on a mat, while a ragged, bare-legged boy that he had picked up in the street sat in the patio, between two oleanders near the open door of his room, strumming on a guitar and singing tristes to him from morning to night. You know tristes—twang, twang, twang, aouh, hoo! ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... mason," looked upon his finished work and found it very good)—next morning, as Captain Edward Waverley was setting out for his morning walk, he found the castle of Bradwardine by no means the enchanted palace of silence he had first discovered. Milkmaids, bare-legged and wild-haired, ran about distractedly with pails and three-legged stools in their hands, crying, "Lord, ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... about in a state of joyous exultation. The painted flapper was making herself sick with the sweets of life after office hours in government employ, where she did little work for a lot of pocket-money. The society girl was dancing bare-legged for "war charities," pushing into bazaars for the "poor, dear wounded," getting her pictures into the papers as a "notable warworker," married for the third time in three years; the middle-class cousin ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... a little girl calling out "Good-night" from her room, and of your mother taking me in to see her in her bed, and wish her good-night. I have a yet clearer memory (like a dream of fifty years ago) of a little bare-legged girl in a sailor's jersey, who used to run up into my lodgings by the sea. But why should I trouble you with foolish reminiscences of mine ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... very rough. Now the bottom step of the ladder was in the water, now six feet above, but what did these poor ignorant Russians know about gymnastics? When the rolling sea brought the row-boats up, the pilgrim usually hesitated, while the bare-armed and bare-legged boatmen yelled and wrenched her hands from the chains. By the time the Mohammedans had shaken her loose, and the victim had crossed herself, the ladder was six or eight feet from the small boat; but it was too late to stay her now, even if the Arabs had wished to, but they did ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... fain to leave the place. Upon this they hoisted the English flag, and surrendered to King Edward. 'Tell your general,' said he to the humble messengers who came out of the town, 'that I require to have sent here, six of the most distinguished citizens, bare-legged, and in their shirts, with ropes about their necks; and let those six men bring with them the keys of ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... his school out for the day, came along the muddy road with two of his pupils, a bare-legged little boy and a tall girl with flaxen hair—Bettina Hansen and her small brother Hans, who refused to answer to any name other than Hans Nilsen. His father's name was Nils Hansen, and Hans, a born conservative, being the son of Nils, regarded himself as rightfully a Nilsen, and disliked ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... Hunter, Diablo the Terrible, Diablo the man-killer, paused and reluctantly turned about, shaking his head as though he did not wish to obey but was compelled by the force of conscience. At once a bare-legged boy of ten came in sight, running and shaking his fist angrily at the giant horse. Indeed, it was a tremendous animal. Not the seventeen hands that the hotel proprietor had described to Bull, but a full sixteen three, ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... a small settle by the fireside, where he had been placed out of the way by Biddy or Katty, sat a ragged bare-legged little boy, known as Patsy, the priest's gossoon; he was the only assistant Judy had in the management of Father John's menage. He ran on errands to Drumsna, and occasionally to Carrick-on-Shannon—fetched the priest's letters—dug ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... herdsmen and blanketed Mexicans, the last of whom suddenly slipped from doors and windows and round comers. It was a motley assemblage. The laced, fringed, ornamented vaqueros presented a sharp contrast to the bare-legged, sandal-footed boys and the ragged herders. Shrill cries, evidently from Don Carlos, somewhat quieted the commotion. Then Don Carlos could be heard addressing Sheriff Hawe in an exhortation of mingled English and Spanish. He denied, he avowed, he proclaimed, and all in rapid, passionate ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... chief local scenes of this industry with which the Bay of Naples has always been so closely associated, and it is here that we can best make ourselves acquainted with the process of manufacturing maccaroni. By following any one of the tall brown-skinned fellows, stripped to the waist and bare-legged, who have been breathing the fresh air of the street for a few moments, we quickly arrive at the entrance of one of the many small factories with which the town abounds. In spite of open doors and windows its atmosphere feels hot and stifling, for it is impregnated ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... girls, clad in a single tattered, gown which scantily covered their bare ankles and feet, and stout, shiny negro women, their waists tied with a string to prevent their flowing drapery from impeding their work. Flitting to and fro were numberless colored children, bare-headed, bare-legged, and often, with not a little of their sleek bodies gleaming through the innumerable rents of their garments, their eyes glittering like black beads, and their white teeth showing on the slightest provocation to mirth. Indeed, the majority of the young ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... he had to get down and wade bare-legged, towing the boat after him until at last Yae announced that the centreboard had been lowered and that the boat ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... remainder of the crew I can not give so good a report. They are a curious assemblage of one-eyed, forefingerless, toothless men, bare-legged, in robes of dark blue, and gay turbans, it being a common custom to render themselves thus maimed in order to escape military conscription. There is Mohammed, a good-natured fellow, ready to do just as his companions ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... talent for this department. True, they look upon the child only from the point of view of material well-being; but where this is concerned, their arrangements are admirable. My children must always be bare-legged and wear woollen socks. There shall be no swaddling nor bandages; on the other hand, they shall never be left alone. The helplessness of the French infant in its swaddling-bands means the liberty of the nurse—that is the whole explanation. A mother, ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... and chestnuts in their season. Cocote, too, had free access to the dainty grass and crystal spring of their pasturage in the hollow behind the cottage. Whilst my husband painted and I read to him, we watched the children, who, bare-footed and bare-legged, turned up the stones in the river-bed seeking for trout and crayfish. In the course of these pleasant excursions Gilbert entered into conversation with every one he met—farmers, shepherdesses, cow-boys, and ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... pointed out to me instead the colour of the brown sail of a little fishing-boat almost stationary on the placid sea, the light of the sinking sun upon it. A big steamer came into sight upon the horizon-line. A bare-legged man, pushing a shrimping-net before him, waded through the shallow ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... diversion; and wherever a knot of idlers was to be found, there was Phelim. He had, up to this period, never worn a shoe, nor a single article of dress that had been made for himself, with the exception of one or two pair of sheepskin small-clothes. In this way he passed his time, bare-legged, without shoes, clothed in an old coat much too large for him, his neck open, and his sooty locks covered with the hare-skin cap, the ears as usual sticking out above his brows. Much of his time was spent in ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... thrush (I saw only one individual) was by the lake-side, and within a rod or two of the bowling alley. What a strange, composite creature he is! thrush, warbler, and sandpiper all in one; with such a bare-footed, bare-legged appearance, too, as if he must always be ready to wade; and such a Saint Vitus's dance! His must be a curious history. In particular, I should like to know the origin of his teetering habit, which seems to put him among the beach birds. Can it be that such frequenters ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... if our fellows were not on the pavement as thick as ants. There was a little stoppage owing to the men not being able to clear off because of the crowd on the right and left. But the thick ends of the guns went steadily on with the bare-legged silent soldiers after them, and in a few strides the pavement was clear, and the soldiers were eating their bread and cheese with their faces to the crowd, and a tight right-handed grip on ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... for sugar they do not give; their customers are in the habit of taking it without. I was amused to-day," he continued, "by watching the progress down the street of a very simple style of water-cart. A butt of water, with a leathern pipe issuing from it, is drawn on a low cart by a donkey. A bare-legged fellow ties a string to the end of the leathern pipe, and follows jerking it to and fro, this side and that side—of course with many loud vociferations—and so continues to distribute the contents of his butt over a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... wet stockings and shoes aside, I walked about bare-legged among the throng, bent on seeing all that was to be seen. The first thing to be done was to secure the restive reins. Selecting a long thong or cord, a Lap took a turn of both ends round his left hand, and then gathered ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... spring day, the fjord just steals in smooth and shining by ness and bay. And at low water there is a whole wonderland of strange little islands, sand-banks, and weed-fringed rocks left high and dry, with clear pools between, where bare-legged urchins splash about, and tiny flat-fish as big as a halfpenny dart away to every side. The air is filled with a smell of salt sea-water and warm, wet beach-waste, and the sea-pie, see-sawing about on a big stone in the water, lifts his red beak cheerily sunwards and pipes: "Kluip, kluip! ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... second night, before he had commenced making arrangements for a hunt breakfast, by way of letting all his friends know that he was again among them. And so missives, in Guss and Sophy's handwriting, were sent round by a bare-legged little boy, to all the Mounts, Towns, and Castles, belonging to the Dillons, Blakes, Bourkes, and Browns of the neighbourhood, to tell them that the dogs would draw the Kelly's Court covers at eleven o'clock on the following Tuesday morning, and that the ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... doing the sixteen miles. The rumble where Tom sat was by this time so full of water that he was obliged to borrow a gimlet and bore holes in the bottom to let it run out. The horses that were to take us on were out upon the hills, somewhere within ten miles round; and three or four bare-legged fellows went out to look for 'em, while we sat by the fire and tried to dry ourselves. At last we got off again (without the drag and with a broken spring, no smith living within ten miles), and went limping on to Inverouran. In the first three miles we were in a ditch ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster |
