United States or Austria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Our very maid-servants, who were brought up shoeless, stockingless, and bonnetless, and who work day and night for a few dollars a month, spend those dollars in providing themselves with hoops, flounced silk dresses, and variegated bonnets for Sunday wearing. Tomes. Do you grudge the poor creatures their holiday and their holiday-dress? Grey. Far from it!

His soldiers, shoeless, tentless, and unprovided with provisions, pushed into the defiles of the Jura in the depths of one of the coldest winters ever known in Europe, hoping to escape into Switzerland. Eighty thousand men made their way over the mountains; fifteen thousand were made prisoners. A few escaped to their homes. A correspondent who saw them after they reached safety, said,

Then those of the man, alone, went sprinting down the bluff southeastward over the flats some distance south of the Foster's doorway and up the opposite bluff, to a point where four ponies, shoeless, had been huddled for as much, perhaps, as half an hour.

I can recall the view from the windows distinctly, as though time had stood still ever since. There are no gardens under our windows in Buckingham Street. Buckingham Gate stands the entrance to a desert of mud, on which the young Arabs shoeless, stockingless are disporting themselves. It is low water, and the river steamers keep towards the middle arches of Waterloo.

This lady, it seems, once had occasion to go by night for water to a stream. In her hand she carried an empty calabash. Stumbling in the dark over stones and the roots of trees she hurt her shoeless feet and began to abuse the moon, then hidden behind clouds, hurling at it some such epithet as "You old tattooed face, there!"

At this, Teach, hatless and shoeless, and, says his biographer, "a little flushed with drink" as a man might be who spent most of his waking hours swigging pure rum stumbled up on deck and made a proposal to his bored companions. "I'm a better man than any o' you alive, an' I'll be a better man when we all go below. Here's for proving it!"

Then, he was ragged, hatless, and almost shoeless, weary with watching, and living in constant fear of recapture. Now, he was among friends, the Old Flag waved above him, and he was the second in command of one of the finest vessels in the squadron.

The iron ventilating gratings were apparently uncomfortable to shoeless feet, so he went hopping and limping through the Division Lobby, affording ample glimpses of his deplorably discoloured woollen footwear. Later in the evening an attendant handed him a paper parcel containing his boots, the attendant having, of course, no idea where the parcel had come from.

The chair had been a recent gift from an anonymous admirer whose political necessities, the Honorable Mr. Linder idly surmised, had not yet driven him to reveal his identity. Its occupant stretched his shoeless feet, as was his custom, upon the broad window-sill, flooded by the seasonable warmth of sunshine, the while he considered the ripening mayoralty situation. He found it highly satisfactory.

The bluff and headstrong Junot, nicknamed "the tempest" by the army, was too artless to catch the prince by guile; but he hurried his soldiers over mountains and through flooded gorges until, on November 30th, 1,500 tattered, shoeless, famished grenadiers straggled into Lisbon to find that the royal quarry had flown. The Prince Regent took this momentous resolve with the utmost reluctance.