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His feet were large and ill-shod. From the chain of his watch depended an enormous bunch of old trinkets, among which in 1824 he still wore "American beads," which were very much the fashion in the year VII.

"Yes, it's fine weather, Christianna," answered the old man. "Come in, come in, and take a cheer!" Christianna came up the tiny path and seated herself, not in the split-bottomed chair to which he waved her, but upon the edge of the porch, with her back to the sapling that served for a pillar, and with her small, ill-shod feet just touching a bed of heartsease. She pushed back her sunbonnet.

They may be ill-shod and footsore; they may be hungry, and sick at heart, and forlorn in countenance, but they are almost always clean and wholesome-looking in person. They come singing in twos and threes, and sometimes in more numerous bands, as if to keep one another in countenance.

They went slowly back to the white room to find Will French leading a chorus of small urchins in the latest popular melody while they kept time with an awkward shuffle of their ill-shod feet. Sam growled: "Cut it out, kids, you scratch de floor," and Will French subsided with apologies. "I never thought of the floor, Endicott. Say, you ought to have a gymnasium and a swimming pool here."

Such things do not happen now; but it often does happen that hundreds are made footsore, and thrown out of the march, by being ill-shod; and there seems reason to believe that much of the lagging and apparent desertion of stragglers in the marches of the volunteers of the Federal army is owing to the difficulty of keeping up with men who walk at ease.

For Uncle Moses, being gouty, was ill-shod for wet weather. He was slippered, though not lean. And though Mrs. Burr, coming in just then, added her testimony that the children were quite safe and happy, only making a great mess, Uncle Moses would not be content to remain indoors, but must needs be going out.

At the beginning of March he had about four thousand men, a few weeks later only three thousand raw troops, ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-shod, ill-armed, and almost unpaid. Over against him was Howe, with eleven thousand men in the field, and still more in the city of New York, well disciplined and equipped, well-armed, well-fed, and furnished with every needful supply.

Soon a wreath of turnpike dust near the broken culvert over Turkey Creek showed the good speed the travelers made. The ill-shod youth and delicately-shod horse trudged side by side through the furnace heat of sunshine.

The early evening was quiet. Now and then a cloaked horseman went by noiseless on the snow. Josiah looked up, laid down the chicken, and listened to the irregular tramp of a body of men. Then, as the head of a long column came near and passed before him between the rows of huts, he stood up to watch them. "Prisoners," he said. Many were battle-grimed and in tatters, without caps and ill-shod.

The grandmother and sister had been keenly debating the news and what to do about it, the elder bird fierce to stay, the younger bent on flight, and had just separated to different windows, when they heard, turned and beheld him there, a stranger in tattered gray and railway dirt, yet their own coxcomb boy from his curls to his ill-shod feet.