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A low lean-to room, stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness that made me shudder.
I reckon they'll leave a brighter streak than a deal of folk who aren't gaunt an' ragged an' shoeless an' dirty." "I don't ever see them so," said Christianna, in her soft drawling voice. "I see them just like a piece we had in a book of reading pieces at school. It was a hard piece but, I learned it.
"You push with the boat-hook, Mark, and I'll pull"; but it took a quarter of an hour's pushing and pulling to get the boat free of the mud. Except for the moon it would have been quite dark when the party reached the pier. They mounted the hill in some silence. It was difficult for Robinette to get along with her shoeless foot; Lavendar wanted to help her, but she demanded Carnaby's arm.
And that is the life drama that passes before the old maid while she looks out upon the rampart, the green, sunny rampart, where the children, with their red cheeks and bare shoeless feet, are rejoicing merrily, like the other free little birds.
What o'clock it was she could not guess. Averil was sound asleep, breathing deeply and regularly, so that it was; a pleasure to listen to her; and Mary did not fear wakening her by a shoeless voyage of discovery to the place whence Dr. May was visible. He turned at once, and with his noiseless tread came to her. 'Asleep still? So is he. All right. Here, waken me the moment he stirs.
My brother had turned him out of the house when he usurped my property, but by a still faithful domestic we were admitted, and I, knowing every secret passage in my house, came shoeless from behind some arras, and stood before them as they sat at supper. I was a ghastly sight.
Repeatedly, after long wearisome climbing of stone steps, and passing under gates full of gargoyles heads of elephants and heads of lions and entering shoeless into scented twilight, into enchanted gardens of golden lotus-flowers of paper, and there waiting for my eyes to become habituated to the dimness, I have looked in vain for images.
Existence was a luxury, and reckless riding a mere outcome of the animal spirits of horses and riders, and the thud of the shoeless feet as the horses galloped over the soft grass was sweeter than music.
And under the arcades of the temples cool shadows, dense and blue, trenchant against the white marble like an irregular mosaic of lapis lazuli, with figures gliding along between the tall columns, priests in white robes, furtive of gait, slaves of the pontificate, shoeless and silent and as if detached from the noise and bustle of the Forum, like ghosts that haunt the precincts of graves.
These people, with their shoeless feet encased in thongs of leather, with garments unconscious of the tailor's art, and in some instances regardless of the primary object of clothes as a human institution, were the most uncivilised of any I had yet seen in Hungary.
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