Henry Seton Merriman

“ Why, lass, can't ye see my face?”
He drops the handkerchief, and holds up his poor scarred countenance. He does not look at her, but away past her with the pathetic shame of a maimed dog. The cheek thus suddenly exposed to view is whole and brown and healthy. Beneath the mahogany-coloured skin there is a glow singularly suggestive of a blush. ”

“ I thought you'd be married, lass. But maybe ye are?”
“Maybe I'm daft,” puts in Annie coolly.
“I greatly feared,” the man goes on with the slow self-consciousness of one unaccustomed to talk of himself. “I greatly feared I'd meet up with a bairn of yours playing in the doorway. Losh! I could not have stood that! But that's why I stayed away, Annie, lass! So that you might marry a man with a face on him. I thought you would not know me if I held up my handkerchief over my other cheek!” ”

“ The keen fresh breeze—and there is nothing keener, fresher, stronger, and wholesomer in the world than that which comes roaring up between the two piers of the Tyne—this breeze blows right through Mason's, and blows the fume of cooking out into Slyne's Chare. ”