Tales and Ballads of Wearside

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1885 edition. Excerpt: ... Balnjston; or, t(o Greater Love. A story of the "forty-five." chapter I. "And let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek/'--Twelfth Nig/it. N a cold, windy, and stormy night in the drear November of Seventeen Hundred and Forty-four, two apparently seafaring men were seated in the smallest room of a small public-house, in a small, narrowthoroughfare, or cross passage, between Warren Street and Silver Street, in the old town known as Sunderland-by-the-Sea. Those two individuals of the genus navis were quietly--and evidently in a manner perfectly satisfactory to themselves--imbibing a sort of liquid which at this particular period was held in special favour by the seagoing people of the north-east coast of Britain. The beverage in question was denominated "purl," but whether this appellation was fitly chosen or not is another matter. It was compounded of the following ingredients--viz., warm ale, with a small quantity of rum or gin, at the option of the drinker, while to the liquids were added sugar and nutmeg, and sometimes cinnamon. The older man, to judge by his appearance, would be verging close on the half-century. He had a rough, weather-beaten look, and despite the dim, uncertain light in the room, not a few iron-grey hairs were plainly conspicuous amid the sombre hirsute growth on his stormpelted visage. His upper-surface attire consisted of a sort of pea-jacket, or reefer, profusely and rather absurdly adorned with large horn buttons; his brown, shaggy fearnought trousers were half-hidden by a pair of unusually long sea-boots; while on the unpolished deal table, close to his elbow, lay a sou'wester, on which the rain-drops were still glistening. His companion--who was evidently the junior by some fifteen or...