"Underfoot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that the secret of respectability is to ignore whatever you don't understand. Careful observation of this maxim had somewhat dulled the cry of that shrill queer music. It now caused only a faint pain in his mind. Still, he walked that way because the little meadow by the pond was agreeably soft underfoot. Also, when he walked close beside the water the voices were silent. That is worth noting, he said to himself. If you go directly at the heart of a mystery, it ceases to be a mystery, and becomes only a question of drainage. (Mr. Poodle had told him that if he had the pond ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... the advanced science of these invaders from far-off Rikor. Encased in their colossal machine-bodies of glittering metal, and armed with such terrible weapons as the black ray projector, the Shining Ones would be as invulnerable as men trampling an anthill underfoot. ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... and bone-barbed arrows. The sun shot up, and they swayed back and forth in the crimson shadows. Twice, with his axe blocked by too deep a blow, they rushed him; but each time he flung them clear. They fell underfoot and he trampled dead and dying, the way slippery with blood. And still the day brightened and the robins sang. Then they drew back from him in awe, and he ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... I am very, very humble. I have put my foolish pride underfoot. I am not broken. I am still very proud and, I fear, self-conceited, in spite of my severe lesson. Enid is beautiful, and I know it, and it helps me write this letter, but I have no right to ask even friendship from you. My proved failure as a playwright robs me of every ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... you want the walk!" she answered resignedly. "Though you've a queer taste in walks, for the streets are terrible underfoot. But I suppose you're shut up all day at your work. You'll just have to sit down and wait till I've checked the literature and handed in the takings. I doubt yon stout body in plum-coloured velveteen ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... hence their anxiety to detain us. O'Toole was told to be as dumb as an oyster as to ourselves, but wide awake as to the designs of our dubious friends. The general gave him five eagles for his purchase, tribute-money. He jumped into the canoe, and all returned to the fort. We dropped anchor underfoot to await his return, keeping a sharp lookout for any strange sail. The two hours passed in pleasant surmises as to what he would bring off; another half-hour passed, and no sign of his return; and we began to despair of our anticipated feast, and of O'Toole, a bright young Irishman, whose good ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... shone brilliantly. The snow was dead- white. The river Volga was deserted. It was dark and still by the old Cathedral. The frost was hard and crisp, crackling underfoot. The two young girls, Kseniya and Lena, with Sergius and the general, were returning to the mansion to fetch their handsleighs and toboggan down the slope to ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... evil enough, Mother, and anguish on earth Born with a man at his birth, Wastes underfoot, and above Storm out of heaven, and dearth Shaken down from the shining thereof, Wrecks from afar overseas And peril of shallow and firth, And tears that spring and increase In the barren places of mirth, That thou, having wings as a dove, Being girt with desire for a girth, ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... [Springing to his feet] No; and that is the enigma on which I ponder in darkness. Why am I here? I, who repudiated all duty, trampled honor underfoot, and ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... see to the execution of these instructions and that you will maintain the honour of the Philippines by your courage and in no way permit your rights to be trampled underfoot." [189] ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... memories of the gray cabins, the clear bright water on the race, the silent forests, the billows of laurel, the song of the brown thrashers, the shy children in a dusky doorway, the lean pigs not shy at all, the bloodroot underfoot, the soft, hazy sky overhead, the sense that here life was always as it is, and always will be, with no change but the changing seasons. I remember once more how I met the Spring at Thumping Dick, like a dryad dancing through the wood, caught ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... lived again. 175 The royal Agamemnon, sighing, grasp'd The hand of Menelaus, and while all Their followers sigh'd around them, thus began.[9] I swore thy death, my brother, when I swore This truce, and set thee forth in sight of Greeks 180 And Trojans, our sole champion; for the foe Hath trodden underfoot his sacred oath, And stained it with thy blood. But not in vain, The truce was ratified, the blood of lambs Poured forth, libation made, and right hands join'd 185 In holy confidence. The wrath of Jove May sleep, but will not always; they shall pay Dear penalty; their own obnoxious heads Shall ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... hand in her mane and my knees wedged against the tubs; away and galloping for the head of the beach, with the whole troop of laden horses pounding at our heels. I could see nothing but the loom of the cliff ahead and the white shingle underfoot; and I thought of nothing but to hold on—and well it was that I did, for else the horses behind had certainly trampled me flat in the darkness. But all the while I heard shouting, louder and louder, ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... fortunately put me out of it, as he did the Syracusan, and made me throw abroad all my reserve at random, the pleasure of a certain journey I took at very great expense having made me spurn this fond love of money underfoot; by which means I am now fallen into a third way of living (I speak what I think of it), doubtless much more pleasant and regular, which is, that I live at the height of my revenue; sometimes the one, sometimes the other may perhaps exceed, but 'tis very little and but ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... accomplish nothing. Brion turned instantly and did as he was bidden. The buildings grew further apart until he realized from the sand underfoot that he was back in the planet-wide desert. It could be a trap—he hadn't recognized the voice behind the whisper—yet he had to take this chance. A darker shape appeared in the dark night near him, and a burning hot hand ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... was the patron-saint of travellers, and the size is in keeping with the tradition which speaks of the saint as standing twelve cubits high. He is shown using a tree as his staff, and the Evil One is being trampled underfoot in the form ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... was no light task for a warm June afternoon, and we were soon perspiring freely. Gradually we removed the top of the knoll, following the hole inward, and came to the intersection of this one with another farther around to the west side. There was a considerable cavity here, matted underfoot with feathers and small bones. From this point the burrow crooked around a large rock down in ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... climbing up the Eagles with leisurely swinging curves, but the slopes just above him were heart-breaking, and Alcatraz began to realize in an hour that a mountainside from a distance is a far gentler thing than the same slope underfoot. It was the heart of twilight before he came to the middle of his climb and stepped onto a nearly level shoulder some acres in compass. Here he stood for a moment while the muscles, cramped from climbing, loosened again, and he ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... alley was barely ten feet wide: it lay like a crevasse between high, windowless walls of houses. The warm, leisurely rain dropped perpendicularly upon him from an invisible sky, and presently, hugging the wall, he butted against a corner, and found, or guessed, that his way was no longer straight. Underfoot there was mud and garbage that once gulfed him to the knee, and nowhere in all those terrible, silent walls on each side of him was there a light or a door, nor any sight of life near at hand. He might have been in a ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... sprung to life in the wilderness and which she had striven so desperately to shield from harm—that holy thing which had become dearer to her than life itself—desecrated, broken, and lying in the dust. And it was Burke who had flung it there, Burke who now ruthlessly trampled it underfoot. ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... views, succinctly and definitely expressed; but whither had flown his former keen spirit? He could no longer summon up the old impetuous dash with which he had meant to fall upon his opponent's arguments one after another, raze them to the ground and trample them underfoot like the entrenchments and fortifications in ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... columns, that seemed to stretch between earth and sky. There was no limb left them, and they rose, majestic in their cylindrical symmetry, in apparently endless battalions, a vista of plutonic desolation. Underfoot there was charcoal, and feathery ashes that whirled aloft, and sprinkling the men with a fine grey ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... never birds of a paradise. Little red monkeys grinned down at her as they raced clutching among the branches, while a big bandy-legged sambo, an exceedingly ill-tempered member of the same family, bawled his reproaches in a tone gruesomely human. Now and then her horse reared from an adder squirming underfoot, or she would see a torpid boa twined sluggishly around a limb, as about a victim. Once in a jungle-like place she experienced something akin to the prized ecstatic shudder as she made out the sleek form of a jaguar ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... fellows from the east fled before the pursuers, but the Britons following after did them sore mischief. They waxed weary of slaying, so that they trod the Romans underfoot. Blood ran in runnels, and the slain they lay in heaps. Fair palfreys and destriers ran masterless about the field, for the rider was dead, and had neither joy nor delight in the sun. Arthur rejoiced and made merry over so noble a triumph, which had brought the pride of Rome to the dust. ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... must have begun badly, sir.' Skepsey rattled the dry facts in his head to right them. From his not having begun well, they had become dry as things underfoot. It was an error to have led off with the sentiments. 'Two very, two very respectable persons—respectable—were desirous to witness a short display of my, my system, I would say; of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the light frame from Gaston's arm as the brothers drew to the edge of the moat. It was no time to speak, no time to ask or answer questions. At any moment some unguarded movement or some crashing of the boughs underfoot might awaken the suspicions of those within the walls. It was enough that the secret expedition had been crowned with success — that the captive was now released and in ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... urchins were marching us through street after street, one of them whistling that pleasing tune, Le lendemain elle etait souriante. Dark passage ways intervened between us and our destination: we threaded them. The cobble stones of the underfoot were not easy to walk on for my companion, shod in high-heels from the Place Vendome.... The urchins amused each other and us by capers on the way. They could have made our speed walking on their hands, and they accomplished at least a third of the journey ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... us trample religion underfoot, that the victory gained over it may place us on an equality with heaven" (book i.). See Diogenes Laertius, "Lives of the Philosophers," bk. x. ch. xxiv. pp. 453,454 (Bohn's edition); Lucretius, "On the Nature of Things," ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... this, the officer consented to accompany us. We had hardly taken half a dozen steps when they all began to ask what had become of the order I had just written, for it could not be found. They surrounded me, saying that I had not written it at all, and I was on the point of being trampled underfoot, when a militiaman found it all crumpled up in his pocket. The threats grew louder, and once more it was because I did not carry the flag high enough, everyone insisting that I was quite tall enough to display it to ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... from Paris, the other staying. Both were links in a long chain of political conspiring. They walked now down the street that was dark and old, underfoot old mire and mica-like glistening of fresher rain. ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... eighteenth of February, at about half past eleven o'clock, Marshal Waggoner was completing his regular before-midnight round of the business district. The weather was nasty, with a raw wet wind blowing and half-melted slush underfoot. In his tour he had encountered not a single person. That dead dumb quiet which falls upon a sleeping town on a winter's night was all about him. But as he turned out of Main Street, which is the principal ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... enemy the heavens were opened. From the eastern sky swept a sheer sheet of rain. With the first stabbing drops horses turned their heads away, trembling, and no whip or spur could bring them up to it. It drove through mackintoshes as if they were blotting-paper. The air was filled with hissing; underfoot you could see solid earth melting into mud, and mud flowing away in water. It blotted out hill and dale and enemy in one grey curtain of swooping water. You would have said that the heavens had opened to drown the wrath of man. And through it the guns still thundered and the khaki columns ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... eve ere summer in autumn sank At stardawn standing on a grey sea-bank He felt the wind fitfully shift and heave As toward a stormier eve; And all the wan wide sea shuddered; and earth Shook underfoot as toward some timeless birth, Intolerable and inevitable; and all Heaven, darkling, trembled like a stricken thrall. And far out of the quivering east, and far From past the moonrise and its guiding star, Began a noise of tempest and a light That was not of the lightning; and a sound ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... told him; "isn't the roof underfoot? You stand on the roof and it's underfoot. Your overhead expenses may be down in the cellar. Just the same as a scout can do a good turn while he's walking straight ahead. Deny it if ...
— Roy Blakeley's Camp on Wheels • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Susan replied, "I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... tracts of the bog-land, which vary their aspect as little as may be from shifting season to season, were flecked with golden furze-blossom, and whitened with streaming tufts of fairy-cotton, and sun-warmed herbs were fragrant underfoot. Mick rather hurried over this stage of his "stravade," partly because he foresaw a blazing hot day, and he wished to be among more broken ground, where there are sheltered hollows scooped in the "knockawns," and cool patches under their bushes and boulders. He entered the region of these things ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... the house and attack the old man, while his companion, whom they did not see, stole out of a back door and fled. And they dashed the wounded old man against the stones, and they marred his visage with savage blows; and they trod him underfoot, and tore from him his idol, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... underfoot!" said Madame de Ferrier. We were both stiff. I drew the boats where they could not be floated away, and we turned our faces to the unknown. I took her unresisting arm to guide her, and she depended ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... born in a wild smother of flying snow, which died at dawn to let a pale, heatless sun peer tentatively over the southern mountains, his slanting beams setting everything aglitter. Frost particles vibrated in the air, coruscating diamond dust. Underfoot, on the path beaten betwixt house and stable, the snow crunched and complained as they walked, and in the open where the mad winds had piled it in hard, white windrows. But in the thick woods it lay as it had fallen, full five foot deep, a downy wrapping for the slumbering ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a village, but saw nothing save a red mist that swam before him like a fog. The road underfoot seemed to rise and fall in wavelike undulations. Still he ran, with sobbing gasps and limbs that swerved under his weight; at his elbow hung death unnamable, and the fear of it urged him on while every instinct ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... slippery, nasty, and abominable. There were old houses, as a matter of course; but who can appreciate antiquities when his legs are wet about the knees and his boots are squirting water? Nevertheless, I tried to notice a few things besides the vileness underfoot. One was a rudely-carved image of the Virgin in a niche covered by a grating. This was in such a dark little street that it seemed as if the sun had given up all hope of ever shining there again. I struggled through ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... followed the first old logging road that they came to. It led them deeper and deeper into the forest that was alive with the sounds and scents of spring. Last year's fallen leaves made a springy carpet underfoot, while robins sang their spring song in the budding ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... For it is hard to be beaten—and the weed does so prevail, is so small, and so dominant! The sun takes its part, and one might almost imagine a sensitive Municipality in tears, to see grass running, overhead and underfoot, through the "third" (which is in ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... and blood for its loyalty to the race of Sforza. The period of anarchy and confusion which followed is described in mournful language by the Milanese chroniclers. During the next forty years, the city was continually taken and sacked by contending armies, her fair parks and gardens were trampled underfoot by foreign soldiery, and her beautiful churches and palaces destroyed by shells and cannon-balls. French and German ruffians tore the clothes off the backs of the poor, and snatched the bread from the lips of starving children. People were everywhere seen dying of hunger and the grass ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... it!" he hurried to add. "You're too good plucked an infant for that! And I'm sure he never twigged. Not he! He's not that kind. It was only because you saw a lot of him, that I thought so; and a girl who wouldn't fall head over ears in love with March, if he was always underfoot, wouldn't have wit enough to know which side her bread was ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... on through a forest of pines, the trail underfoot being of lava, as hard and smooth as a road could be. They were gradually drawing nearer to Sunset Mountain. After a time they turned off to the right, heading straight for ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... sea of unsubstantial texture, the world a visible spirit, the spiritual within us rises out of its darkness, loses something of its weight and body, and swims up towards heaven. This road that was a mere rutted white dust, hot underfoot, blinding to the eye, is now a soft grey silence, with the glitter of a crystal grain set starlike in its silver here and there. Overhead, riding serenely through the spacious blue, is the mother of the silence, she who has spiritualised the world, alone save for ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... profoundest of all the instincts of humanity laid claim upon her. But it rose before her, that instinct, arrayed—how could it be otherwise?— in the inevitable habiliments of a Victorian marriage; and she had the strength to stamp it underfoot. 'I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction,' she noted, 'and that would find it in him. I have a passionate nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction, and ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... Trinity. In accordance with an olden custom, the chambermaids of the establishment, while their ladies were still sleeping, had bought a whole waggon of sedge on the market, and had strewn its long, thick blades, that crunch underfoot, everywhere about—in the corridors, in the private cabinets, in the drawing room. They, also, had lit the lamps before all the images. The girls, by tradition, dare not do this with their hands, which have ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... Seats were littered with snake-skins like immense, decayed apple parings; fearsome, crescent-shaped knives; leopard rugs in embryo; and strange headgear in many varieties. Stuffed crocodiles fell down from racks and got underfoot: men walked about with elephant tusks under their arms; dragomans solicited a last tip; a six-foot seven Dinka, black as ink and splendid as a Greek statue, brought flowers from the Palace for some departing acquaintance of the Sirdar and his wife. Officers in evening dress ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... rose and went into the gardens to enjoy a dip in a pool, making, with its surrounding jungle of flowers, one of the pleasantest things about the wood-king's forest citadel. The very earth seemed scorched and baking underfoot—and the pool was gone! It had run as dry as a limekiln; nothing remained of the pretty fall which had fed it but a miserable trickle of drops from the cascade above. Down beyond the town shone a gleam ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... descended to the river preceded by some of my coolies. Two of them just in front of me were crossing over the stream on a thick and broad archway of ice. I was waiting for them to be safely across. When the men had nearly reached the other side they noticed a peculiar vibration underfoot. Scrambling away as best they could, they ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... look to herself or be trampled underfoot, and galvanized with terror, the woman struggled up and tottered hither and yon like a bewildered child, in the beginning too bemused to be able to keep out of the way of the combatants. If she crouched against a wall, battling bodies brushed her away from it. Did she take ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... first day gone. It is cold here—slushy underfoot, snow dirty, sky dark. How different from a ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... handiwork in the streets. The people throng the narrow ways, a chattering, happy, careless stream of buoyant humanity. Preposterous children rigged out with the shortest of ballet skirts and gilt wings, howl, underfoot, among the effervescent crowds. Especially is the arrival of the presidential party, at the opening of the season, attended with pomp, show and patriotic demonstrations ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... morning, and I and my two companions of the day before had soon distanced the others. At first the trail was rough and slippery, and all ups and downs. The vegetation was of almost tropical density, and the moisture underfoot and overhead was so great that it seemed to me I had never been wetter except in a bathtub. As we descended to lower levels the valley broadened out, and the going improved so that we were able to make very good time. At one point, after passing through ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... everywhere brick was the principal element in their construction. The soil of the marshes or of the plains, separated from the pebbles and foreign substances which it contained, mixed with grass or chopped straw, moistened with water, and assiduously trodden underfoot, furnished the ancient builders with materials of incredible tenacity. This was moulded into thin square bricks, eight inches to a foot across, and three to four inches thick, but rarely larger: they were stamped on the flat side, by means of an incised wooden block, with the name of the reigning ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... prayer! what rivalry in holiness! what strict discipline was observed! what reverence and obedience under the rule of the master showed they in all things! The traces of them that remain until now testify that they were truly holy and perfect men, who fighting so bravely trod the world underfoot. Now a man is counted great if only he be not a transgressor, and if he can only endure with patience what he ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... island where very tall trees grew, bearing fruits that were pleasant to the taste. Other trees on the island were covered with rich red and yellow blossoms; and masses of delicate blue flowers and of star-shaped white flowers grew underfoot. Hither and thither across the surface of the river flew swallows, with so much white in their plumage that as they flashed in the sun they seemed to have snow-white bodies, borne by dark wings. The current of the river grew swifter; there were stretches of ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... train went swaying and pitching across the gaunt face of a high, broad plateau, bleak, hot, and monotonous in contour; underfoot the reddish granite pulverized by grinding tire and hoof, over us the pale bluish fiery sky without a cloud, distant in the south the shining tips of a mountain range, and distant below in the west the slowly spreading ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... the mine. "Peregrina" mountain was almost another Mammoth Cave, so enormous are the caverns that have been "stoped out" of it in the past four centuries. In many a place we could see even with several candles only the ground underfoot and perhaps a bit of the nearest sidewall; the rest was a dank, noiseless, blank space, seeming square miles in extent. For three hours we wandered up and down and in and out of huge unseen caves, now and then crawling up or down three or four hundred foot "stopes" on hands and knees, by ladders, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... of Nature's mood. They were treading underfoot a growth of lank grass, and the slopes of the valley were clad with bluffs of bare-poled woodlands. The air was warm. It was warmer than the breath of a temperate winter, and the low-growing scrub marking the course of the river ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... along by himself, elate, and with a springy step, on thoughts of ambition intent, till he came at last to a cool and shadowy place, where as yet the ferns were NOT broken down and trampled underfoot, though Guy Waring found them so some twenty ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... organiser, Colonel Ward of Islington fame, who with the assistance of Colonel Stoneman systematised the collection and issue of all the food, civil and military, so as to stretch it to its utmost. With rain overhead and mud underfoot, chafing at their own idleness and humiliated by their own position, the soldiers waited through the weary weeks for the relief which never came. On some days there was more shell-fire, on some less; on some there was sniping, on some none; on some they sent a little feeler of cavalry ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... turned out to see the procession that was a mile long and overlapped, and went past double, going opposite ways, and the skies were blue as amethyst, and the lake was like the heavens, while underfoot the white dust lay thick until the growing, hurrying crowd sent it flying. All trades, with banners and bands and emblems, were represented; there were iron workers, tin workers, gardeners, women and ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... after, so that the town was lost under a white pall: house-entrances were with difficulty kept free, and the swept streets were banked with walls of snow, four and five feet high. The night-frosts redoubled their keenness; the snow underfoot crackled like electric sparks; the sleighs crunched the roads. But except for this, and for the tinkling of the sleigh-bells, the streets were as noiseless as though laid with straw, and especially while ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... nesting places. The beginning of spring in Shoshone Land—oh the soft wonder of it!—is a mistiness as of incense smoke, a veil of greenness over the whitish stubby shrubs, a web of color on the silver sanded soil. No counting covers the multitude of rayed blossoms that break suddenly underfoot in the brief season of the winter rains, with silky furred or prickly viscid foliage, or no foliage at all. They are morning and evening bloomers chiefly, and strong seeders. Years of scant rains they lie shut and safe in the winnowed sands, so that ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... powder smoke and with the pall of Valley dust. Horses lay stark across the way, or, dying, stared with piteous eyes. The sky was like a bowl of brass, and in the concave buzzards were sailing. All along there was underfoot much of soldiers' impedimenta—knapsacks, belts, accoutrements of all kinds, rolled blankets and oilcloths, canteens. Dead men did not lack. They lay in strange postures, and on all the dust was thick. There were many ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... tillers of the soil cursed the traveller who brought the potato, the substitute for bread, the poor man's daily food.... They shook the precious gift out of his outstretched hands, flung it in the mud, trampled it underfoot. ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... smoke-fog it bred. Every-thing was damply streaked with the soot: the walls of the houses, inside and out, the gray curtains at the windows, the windows themselves, the dirty cement and unswept asphalt underfoot, the very sky overhead. Throughout this murky season he continued his explorations, never seeing a face he knew—for, on Sunday, those whom he remembered, or who might remember him, were not apt to be found within the limits of the town, but were congenially occupied ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... overhead and damp underfoot, with a thrill in the air like a reminiscence of frost. I went up into the sloping garden behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the tune of my landlady's lamentations over sundry cabbages and cauliflowers that had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thoroughfares, two long straight streets intersecting each other at right angles near the palace, thus forming four corners. Here is a fountain, and the point is a centre of life and action; crowds of people surge back and forth, almost trodden underfoot by the ever-present, ponderous elephants, camels, and bullocks, drawing the little ekkas,—every one disputing the right of way. Proceed in any direction and more unusual street scenes present themselves along a single block than can elsewhere be found, and this in a city less than two ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... Have I said or done anything that a Gorgio duke wouldn't do? Ah, God's love, but you were bold to come! I married you by the River Starzke; I looked upon you as my wife; and here you were alone with me! I had my rights, and I had been trampled underfoot ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... being an Italian, and you Italian, I see no reason but self-love why passion for your country could not move you as it did the Ultramontanes. Cast it to earth now, and do not wait for time, since time does not wait for you—trampling such selfishness underfoot, with hate of vice and love ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... wake up," continued the Little Russian, tossing his head and letting his hands drop alongside his body, "and look around, you see it's all filthy and cold. All are tired and angry; human life is all churned up like mud on a busy highway, and trodden underfoot!" ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cavern is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... bleak place, Beacon Hill, and 'twas so soft underfoot that day the water'd got inside my boots, till they fair bubbled if I took a step. The rain was falling steady, and sputtered in the naphtha-lamps that they was beginning to light up outside the booths. There was one powerful flare ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... up. Before three months had passed I wanted to abdicate the worst way. I wanted to tread a deck again, an' rove around with Bull McGinty. I wanted th' smell o' the open sea an' th' heave o' th' Dashin' Wave underfoot. I was tired o' breadfruit an' guavas an' cocoanuts an' all th' rest o' th' blasted grub that Pinky was feedin' me, an' most of all I was gettin' tired o' Pinky. She would put cocoanut oil in her hair. Yet (here Mr. Gibney's voice vibrated with emotion as he conjured up these memories of his lurid ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... that Thunder Mountain was not formidable as far as the foot of the final scarp. Seth had taught her something of the lore of trails, and she was confident that she would be able to find her way even if the underfoot marks should fail. There would be blazes on trees, and broken limbs and twigs, and many subtle signs that she now sought to marshal in her mind against a possible perplexity. With eyes alert, she rode slowly and resolutely on, ever higher and higher, hour after hour, most ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... sorts of people resort. The king sits in a small raised gallery; ambassadors, great men belonging to the court, and strangers of quality, are within the innermost rail directly under him, that space being raised from the ground, covered overhead with canopies of silk and velvet, and laid underfoot with good carpets. The meaner men, representing what we would call gentry, are within the outer rail; the common people being on the outside of all, in a base court, so that all may see the king. The whole of this disposition ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... one another in the vividness of their crimson and orange, while the bracken was a sea of pale gold. There were all sorts of delightful things to be found—acorns lay so plentifully in the pathway that the girls could not help scrunching them underfoot. A few were already sending out tiny shoots in anticipation of spring, and these were carefully saved to take home and grow in bottles. A stream ran through the wood, its banks almost completely covered with vivid green mosses, in sheets so thick and compact that ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... anything less than one of His Majesty's colonels or secretary under the Crown. Here are the tombs of the Atkinsons, the Jaffreys, the Sherburnes, the Sheafes, the Marshes, the Mannings, the Gardners, and others of the quality. All around you underfoot are tumbled-in coffins, with here and there a rusty sword atop, and faded escutcheons, and crumbling armorial devices. You are moving in ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... very time of it—that he had spunk to speak his mind. I have seen too much of the supple stock. Sirs, it is but an ill thing to be over-rich, in which estate mankind is seen at the worst. The fawning sort cringe underfoot for favors, and the true breed of kindly folk are all o'erapt to pass the rich man by, verra scornful-like." He looked hard at Peter Johnson. "I am naming no ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... difficult running, since the floors had assumed an apparent tilt. Loose gear was rolling and sliding along underfoot, propelled forward by centrifugal force. Aft of Stores, I heard the whistle of escaping air and high pressure gasses from ruptured lines. Vapor clouds fogged the air. I called for floodlights for ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... Peabody's patience is nearly exhausted. You must come to see him at once if you expect the South to get a naval base at Altacoola or anywhere else. If you do not agree to take his advice this naval bill and any other that you are interested in now or in future will be trampled underfoot in the Senate. Mississippi will have no use for a Senator who cannot produce results in Washington, and that will prove the bitterest lesson you ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... he strove to stamp it out, then to smother it with damp mould. But as he followed its wormlike course, always ahead he saw the thin, blue signals rising through living moss—everywhere the attenuated spirals creeping from the ground underfoot. ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... reply, and followed it in person. Traveling through all that extent of country after three years of peace, he blessed the better days on which the world had fallen. The corn was golden, not drenched in unnatural red; was bound in sheaves for food, not trodden underfoot by men in mortal fight. The smoke rose up from peaceful hearths, not blazing ruins. The carts were laden with the fair fruits of the earth, not with wounds and death. To him who had so often seen the terrible reverse, these ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... the latest. Whenever it's wet underfoot I must put on my galoshes. Tonight even, he wanted me to put them on, but I wouldn't. The next thing he'll buy me will ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... marriage between a questionable woman and a young fellow who might be a flunkey. They wish to bring this woman into the house where my wife and daughter reside, but while I live and breathe she shall never enter my doors. I shall lie at the threshold, and she shall trample me underfoot if she does. I hardly talk to Gania now, and avoid him as much as I can. I warn you of this beforehand, but you cannot fail to observe it. But you are the son of my ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... said he; and then, as I was going, "Keep to the wall," he added; "there's nae bannisters. But the stairs are grand underfoot." ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... buttressing the sea-edge of which our new abode was built. A life for a big-winged angel seemed waiting us upon those downs. The wind still blew from the west, both warm and strong—I mean strength-giving—and the wind was the first thing we were aware of. The ground underfoot was green and soft and springy, and sprinkled all over with the bright flowers, chiefly yellow, that live amidst the short grasses of the downs, the shadows of whose unequal surface were now beginning to be thrown east, for the sun was going seawards. I stood up, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... underfoot ought to guide her down the drive to the great gateway; and once outside the park, clear of its overshadowing trees, one would surely find mitigation of darkness sufficient to show ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... irresolutely to Tasso, who was also uncertain what to do; but the tone was imperative; they were accustomed to obey. Crowds were now jostling them; women were crying; children were pushed hither and thither, their little toys trodden underfoot, more a grievance to them than the quaking earth. With a regretful glance at the donkey, Tessa and Tasso jumped into the carriage, which drove away as fast as the frightened horses could get through the throng. Miles and miles away they ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... many blind alleys, many sudden turnings, many unaccountably crooked portions; a road which, if it has a few sign-posts to guide us, bristles with threatening notices, now upon the one side and now upon the other, the very ground underfoot being often full of unsuspected perils ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... heart, if the colour be a suspicion of the pinkish,—no sign of rawness in that; none whatever. It is as becoming to him as to the salmon; it is as natural to your pea-chick in his best cookery, as it is to the finest October morning,—moist underfoot, when partridge's and puss's and renard's scent ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... and he had to climb down into it and up its farther side, for it was too broad to be jumped. So he came into the shelter of the young poplars and elms and oaks. The underbrush caught at his clothes, and the dead leaves of past seasons crackled underfoot; but after a little space he came to somewhat clearer ground, though the saplings still stood thick about ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... the leaping fire. His father tossed him a bucket, and with it swinging from his hand, he made through the wood towards a music of water. Goldenrod and farewell-summer and the red plumes of the sumach lined his path, while far overhead the hickories and maples reared a fretted, red-gold roof. Underfoot were moss and coloured leaves, and to the right and left the squirrels watched him with bright eyes. He found the stream where it rippled between banks of fern and mint. As he knelt to fill the pail, the red haw and the purple ironweed met ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... communication with regions unknown to man. Here in front of him was a wild mallard—just arrived from the home of the north wind. The creature brought within him an amplitude of Northern knowledge. Glacial catastrophes, snowstorm episodes, glittering auroral effects, Polaris in the zenith, Franklin underfoot,—the category of his commonplaces was wonderful. But the bird, like many other philosophers, seemed as he looked at the reddleman to think that a present moment of comfortable reality was worth a decade ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... willows emphasize by their starved and shivering appearance the nearness of the timber; where the snow-drifts, each with its little feather of drifting snow sheering from its crest, are heaped high; where the snow underfoot is unbroken; where under snow-filled skies a wind studded with needle-sharp ice crystals blows a perfect gale; where the lonely and frozen desolation is peopled only by the haunting shape of fear that next morning a wan and feeble ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... gathered into dull grey, formless clouds; it became quite warm, the thermometer rising to twenty below; and the moisture fell out of the sky in hard frost-granules that hissed like dry sugar or driving sand when kicked underfoot. After that it became clear and cold again, until enough moisture had gathered to blanket the earth from the cold of outer space. That was all. Nothing happened. No storms, no churning waters and threshing forests, nothing but the machine-like precipitation of accumulated moisture. ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... day, she sits in the hollow of the tree, but at night she is far too wide-awake to dream. And so great are the owl's powers of sight and hearing, and so swift is her "stoop" from the sky to the ground, that the bank-vole has little chance of escape should a single grass-stalk rustle underfoot when she is hovering near his haunt. Far from being shy and retiring in her disposition, the brown owl, directly night steals over the woodlands, is so fearless that probably no animal smaller than the hare can ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... were placed on opposite sides of the gridiron, and half a dozen footballs were produced. Punting and catching punts was the order of the day, and Neil was soon busily at work. The afternoon was warm, but not uncomfortably so, the turf was springy underfoot, the sky was blue from edge to edge, the new men supplied plenty of amusement in their efforts, the pigskins bumped into his arms in the manner of old friends, and Neil was happy as a lark. After one catch ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... of ponderous icicles depending from the tree trunks where the openings faced the light and the sun; farther in, and once safely past these glacial outposts, scarcely any signs of storm appeared; last year's leaves, still matted together underfoot, were tangled with the green vine of the creeping linnaea and a rare root of the lustrous winter-green. Here, beneath the thick canopy of branches not all devoid of their foliage since many larches and pines ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... manner av use is ut to me goin' out widout a dhrink? The ground's powdher-dhry underfoot, an' ut gets unto the throat fit to kill," wailed Mulvaney, looking at me reproachfully. "An' a peacock is not a bird you can catch the tail av onless ye run. Can a man run ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... followed, constantly interrupted by petty illnesses of a depressing kind. The house at Itu was completed, she herself laying down a cement floor, and Jean whitewashing the walls. Cement underfoot for many reasons was preferred, one being that it was impervious to ants. If these pests obtained hold of a house it was difficult to drive them out, and many a night her entire family was up waging battle with them. In ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... found myself in a sort of green basin, very cool after the heat and glare of the roads, for the high, tree-clad sides afforded much shade. On I went, past fragrant thickets and bending willows, with soft lush grass underfoot and leafy arches overhead, and the brook singing and chattering at my side; albeit a brook of changeful mood, now laughing and dimpling in some fugitive ray of sunshine, now sighing and whispering in the shadows, but ever moving upon its appointed way, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... the streams that empty into it, there hung a blue haze, soft and dream-like. The forest became a painted forest, with an ever thinning canopy and an ever thickening carpet of crimson and gold; everywhere there was a low rustling underfoot and a slow rain of color. It was neither cold nor hot, but very quiet, and the birds went by like shadows,—a listless and forgetful weather, in which we began to look, every hour of every day, for the sail which we knew we should not see ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... tar-like streaks, knocked down the women, who carried their children on their hips. The provisions in the baskets were pouring out; in walking, pieces of salt, parcels of gum, rotten dates, and gourou nuts were crushed underfoot; and sometimes on vermin-covered bosoms there would hang a slender cord supporting a diamond that the Satraps had sought, an almost fabulous stone, sufficient to purchase an empire. Most of them ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... now; they formed a dry, hard carpet over which it was impossible to follow game accurately, and they rustled a sharp warning underfoot if but a wood mouse ran over them. It was of little use to still-hunt the wary old buck till the rains should soften the carpet, or a snowfall make tracking like boys' play. But I tried it once more; found the quarry ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... the road through a fringe of bushes, Westcott laden with the bundle. Except for the sound of distant voices and an occasional loud laugh, the night was still. They could almost hear their own breathing, and the crackle of a dry twig underfoot sounded to strained nerves like the report of a gun. Crouching at the edge of the road they could see fairly well what was before them, as revealed by the lights shining forth through the dingy windows ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... yore, When outlaws bold were rife, The days of dagger and of bowl, Of dungeon and of strife. Oh! for the days when forks were not, On skewers came the meat; When from one trencher ate three foes: Oh! but those times were sweet! When hooded hawks sat overhead, And underfoot was straw Where hounds and beggars fought for bones Alternately ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... when Ma came back to earth and opened her eyes there were the great smiling mountains, the clear, clean waters foaming over the rocks, and underfoot was the cool, green grass, not that hot, hard 'dobe clay she had always known. Trees, too! Beautiful whispering trees, with smooth leaves instead of burrs and spines and stickers. Nor was there the faintest choking smell of dust; no ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of very young people, and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably reckless ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her all a-shake—even as a chill, When it hath gone into our marrow-bones, Sets us convulsively, despite ourselves, A-shivering and a-shaking. Therefore, men With two-fold terror bustle in alarm Through cities to and fro: they fear the roofs Above the head; and underfoot they dread The caverns, lest the nature of the earth Suddenly rend them open, and she gape, Herself asunder, with tremendous maw, And, all confounded, seek to chock it full With her own ruins. Let men, then, go on Feigning at will that heaven and earth shall be Inviolable, entrusted ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... which you pretend to know all about, you are like the deserter fleeing from the field of battle, and, to stifle his shame, sneering at war and at valour. Cynicism stifles pain. In some novel of Dostoevsky's an old man tramples underfoot the portrait of his dearly loved daughter because he had been unjust to her, and you vent your foul and vulgar jeers upon the ideas of goodness and truth because you have not the strength to follow them. You are frightened ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... girl I had in my mind. So I missed you, thinking of the little girl you were not. We do that all our lives, Robina. We are always looking for the flowers that do not grow, passing by, trampling underfoot, the blossoms round about us. It was the same with Dick. I wanted a naughty boy. Well, Dick was naughty, no one can say that he was not. But it was not my naughtiness. I was prepared for his robbing orchards. I rather hoped he would rob orchards. All the high-spirited ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... effects and perfects the thing which, because of the bad in us, he has to carry out in suffering and sorrow, his own and his Son's Evil is a hard thing for God himself to overcome. Yet thoroughly and altogether and triumphantly will he overcome it; and that not by crushing it underfoot—any god of man's idea could do that!—but by conquest of heart over heart, of life in life, of life over death. Nothing shall be too hard for the God that fears not pain, but will deliver and make true and blessed at his own ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... through sweet bevies thread Of round-faced roses, pink and petulant, Look back and beckon ere they disappear. Only my heart, only my heart responds. Yet, ah, my path is sweet on either side All through the dragging day,—sharp underfoot And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs— But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach, And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling, The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake, Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road A gateless garden, and an open path: My feet to ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... two in the morning, and the narrow canons were emptied of life, save the shadowy fleeting shape of some night prowler, some creature of the underworld. The air was a trifle less cold, and a fine hard snow was sifting down—crunched underfoot—a bitter, tiny, stinging ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... plough their hands they put, And wheresoe'er the soil had need The furrow drave, and underfoot They sowed themselves ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... own; the window was flung open, and a beautiful statue was hurled on to the pavement below. Down came rich hangings, costly pictures and gilded mirrors; the small articles only were stolen, the others were hacked and chopped and trampled to pieces underfoot. ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... was raging. Icy snow, blinding sheets of sharp-fanged smother, rode on the racing wind. Worse overhead, worse underfoot, would be hard to meet ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... mind, Pepperbottom," said the boy, giving the imp the name he had richly earned by repeated flagellations. "Never you mind. I am not ashamed to show my naked hide, you know. But it is against orders in these seas to go overboard, unless with a sail underfoot; so I sha'n't run the risk of being tattooed by the boatswain's mate, like some one I ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Jane Brown had been rather too worried to think about Twenty-two. She had grown accustomed to seeing him coming slowly back toward her ward, his eyes travelling much faster than he did. Not, of course, that she knew that. And to his being, in a way, underfoot a part of every day, after the Head had made rounds and was safely out of the road for ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Metropolitan Board of Works made everything. But in this country, where you really see humanity—raw, brown, naked humanity—with nothing between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, over-handled earth underfoot, the notion somehow dies away, and most folk come back to simpler theories. Life, in India, is not long enough to waste in proving that there is no one in particular ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... sumptuous dining-hall was filled with small tables exquisitely furnished, and the carpets underfoot, thick-piled and deep-toned, gave a singular solemnity to the function of eating. It was a temple raised to the glory of terrapin and "alligator pears"; and as the Captain moved slowly across the aisles, closely attended ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... later she followed the path he had taken. The thickly grown wood was alive with spirit of spring. Small animals scampered underfoot, and overhead a bird breathed forth its soul in incomparable song. She stopped for a minute to listen to the latter—clear-throated as an English nightingale—singing away as though winter and the stark ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... no gold is left on the floor of the drift, and there is then only the labor and expense of bringing the valuable quartz itself, a much less amount in bulk, to the surface of the ground. The accumulating mass of the dead rock underfoot, will then be constantly raising the floor of the drift, and as constantly bringing the miners within convenient working-distance of the receding roof. In the case of "understoping," however, in which the blasts are made from the floor of the drift, it will be perceived that all the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... far from you, in old Hindoo literature: underfoot, all round you, or away on the horizon, there they always are: the Forest, the Desert, ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... of the gods, this dragging in the mud of their Olympus, this mock at a whole religion, a whole world of poetry, appeared in the light of a royal entertainment. The fever of irreverence gained the literary first-night world: legend was trampled underfoot; ancient images were shattered. Jupiter's make-up was capital. Mars was a success. Royalty became a farce and the army a thing of folly. When Jupiter, grown suddenly amorous of a little laundress, began to knock off a mad cancan, ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... break one's way through untrodden forests. It is easier to walk after we "learn how," and learning how is simply doing it over and over until the legs and feet have acquired habits of motion and accommodation to distances and to what is underfoot. It is easy to do anything after we have done it again and again, so that it has become second-nature, and "second-nature" is habit. The wise man early forms certain habits of personal care, of eating, sleeping, exercising; of study, of meeting the usual occurrences of life. ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... set of old "Miss Pollys" and "Miss Betseys" who have lived half a century in the same families, respectful and respected, cherished, cared for in time of need (citizens as well as servants, holding a ballot as well as a broom, I tell her), and bringing back to us the lowly, underfoot virtues of contentment and humility, which we do so need to carpet the barren and hungry thoroughfare ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... woods whispered it, the birds trilled it, screamed it, the very leaves underfoot crackled assent. Only they said, 'You love her—the girl yonder with glad, frightened eyes, Spring's daughter.' Oh, I too, heard it, Marian! 'Follow,' the birds sang, 'follow, follow, follow, for yonder is ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... stopped," he said, "but the pavements are still wet underfoot. Has your grace taken the precaution to come out in a good stout pair ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... could be made without too many witnesses. True, Hallock had few friends in the railroad service, at least among those who professed loyalty to the management, but with explosives lying about everywhere underfoot, one could not be too careful ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... upon the Altar of the Good. It dares not only to flout the principles of patriotism, of family love, and of respect for the power and the dogmas of the established church, but, taking a step further, will even trample underfoot man's deepest organic needs, and actually seek to destroy the instinct of self-preservation. What even the strictest reformers, the most hardened misanthropists, would hardly dare to suggest, is accomplished ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... work of time. The Christian Socialism of 1848—one of the finest episodes in our moral history—had been trampled underfoot by the wickedness of the Crimean War. To all appearance, it fell into the ground and died. After two years of aimless bloodshed, peace was restored in 1856, and a spell of national prosperity succeeded. The Repeal of the Corn Laws had done its work; food was cheaper; times were better; ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... the hall-door for his burden; and she, though somewhat loth at leaving the fine company, mounted him cheerfully enough, and they rode away, and they rode away, and they rode away, through thick briar brakes and up fearsome cliffs. But ever the Black Bull trod the brambles underfoot and chose the easiest paths, while she ate out of his left ear and drank out of his right, and wanted for nothing, though he had neither bite nor sup. So it came to pass that he grew tired and was limping with one foot when, just as the ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... the infernal fool anchored, instead of drifting around underfoot? How does he bear, Mr. Mayo?" He was now back to pilot-house formality ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... doubted whether they would have averted or even deferred the fate which awaited them. The leaders of the two parties, before whose union they fell, had as little attachment to the new Constitution as the queen. The moment that they obtained the undisputed ascendency, they trampled it underfoot in every one of its provisions. Constitution or no Constitution, they were determined to overthrow the throne and to destroy those to whom it belonged; and to men animated with such a resolution it signified little what pretext might be afforded ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Colorado as they approached it. The level which had gradually lifted during the entire week, making each day cooler, rarer, as it came, now sloped downward, while mesa and headland grew higher, the way underfoot more broken, the trail fainter and fainter, and ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... misery of convoy-duty. To feel that you have a smart ship underfoot and a crew who will shrink from nothing their skipper may put them alongside, and to be doomed to drag along, day after day, under close-reefed topsails, in order to avoid running away from the sluggish, ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... little procession, did not hesitate. He dropped his head between his knees and moved very slowly, but none the less surely onward. The walking was almost incredibly difficult. The very desert underfoot seemed in motion. New ridges rose before their burning, half blinded eyes. The uproar was that of a hurricane roaring through a forest. Now Roger would stagger to his knees: now Charley. But Peter, lifting and planting his little feet gingerly ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... Waterfoot the copses grew close. The green turf was velvet underfoot. The blackbirds fluted in the hazels there. None of them listened to the voice of Gregory Jeffray, or cared for what he said to Grace Allen when she went nightly to meet ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... fruits of the human mind very much as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise or blame them; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in his trampling on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him as in the botanist's grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty. He does not conceive that it is his business rather to identify the species and then explain how and where the specimen is imperfect and irregular. If he could once acquire this simple idea of his duty he would be much more ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... flaming orb of the sun; and directly underfoot, rotating against the vast background of the North Atlantic, he now saw the asteroid, glinting metallically along its craggy length as it swung over. Carse centered every bit of power he had on it, and at maximum acceleration began to overhaul ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... David took for his own. From here you can watch the variable glow of color spread over the whole breadth of country, from the ground at one's feet to the distant purple hilltops of Bethlehem. The fluid air seems to swim, as if laden with incense. The rocks underfoot are of all tones of lavender in shadow, and of tender, warm gleams in the light, casting vivid violet shadows athwart the mottled orange of ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... one of the coldest ever recorded in New York. The thermometer had dropped to 8 degrees below zero and was still falling. Fifth Avenue glittered, sheathed in frost; traffic police on post stamped and swung their arms to keep from freezing; dry snow underfoot squeaked when trodden on; crossings were greasy ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... and with them I pressed forward down the winding streets, once so clean and trim, now so foul and mud-strewn. Men and women had died of hunger in these streets these latter years, and rotted where they lay, and we trod their bones underfoot as we walked. Yet rising out of this squalor and this misery were great pyramids and palaces, the like of which for splendour and magnificence had never been seen before. It was a ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne |
