True Stories of Girl Heroines

by Evelyn Everett-Green

Nor was Jessy in any way disturbed by the knowledge of what was going on. Smuggling was a regular trade all along the coast, and she regarded it as a matter of course.

As the old grandmother grew more and more infirm, Jessy was of necessity taken more into her confidence, and soon found that her suspicions were quite correct. The old woman received the contraband goods from the smugglers, and hid them in the recesses of the great cave—the secrets of which were known only to herself; and though very occasionally the revenue officers came to the cottage and insisted upon examining the place most carefully, they never discovered the secret hiding-place. For the small cave was only the ante-chamber to a very much larger one behind, and the entrance to the latter was so cleverly masked that it was long before even Jessy could learn the trick of the sliding shale of rock, though she had been shown it many times by her grandmother.

Exciting scenes were often witnessed along the coast in those days; and bloody scenes were enacted between the smugglers and the "gaugers" or revenue officers, in which lives were often lost. One gauger, more resolute than some of his predecessors, after having killed many desperate smugglers himself, was dragged bodily into a boat that he was pursuing, whilst his head was chopped off on the gunwale and flung into the sea.

The Black Prince was a trim little vessel that did a great deal of illicit traffic all along the coast at that time, and was well known to every man, woman, and child in Morwinstow. Whorwell was the name of her captain. A daring fellow he was, and one of the most popular smugglers in those parts, free with his money, free with his contraband spirits, making friends with villagers, parson, and sexton alike, and even bribing old Tom Hockday, this latter functionary, to let him deposit his kegs and bales in the church till he could find a convenient opportunity of getting them away to old mother Varcoe's, or some other convenient hiding-place. The farmers would lend him their stout little horses to lade up with his goods from over the water; and the horses would be so shaved and soaped that they were slippery as eels, and being accustomed to follow some well-trained animals, would gallop away to the hiding-place, safe from any hostile clutches!

In scenes such as these Jessy had been reared, and although she herself was something of an outcast in the scattered community where she dwelt, her sympathies, such as they were, were for a time all with the smugglers, whom she regarded as friends; till something came to change the face of affairs for her.

It seemed to begin from one Sunday morning, when Jessy, for a wonder, went to the church, in spite of her natural timidity at facing the jeers of the boys and girls, and the suspicious looks of their parents. She often hung about the little windswept church whilst Sunday service was going on, feeling in her heart a vague yearning after intercourse with her own kind, and a longing for some knowledge of the mysteries of religion; but she seldom ventured inside the porch, and might not have done so to-day had it not been that there was a little lad, with curly hair and blue eyes, whose face she did not know, whom she encountered when not far from the building, and who began to talk with her in an unsuspicious and friendly fashion that went straight to her heart.

Before they had got to the church she had gathered that the boy was the son of one of the revenue officers lately come into the neighbourhood, and that he often went out in the cutters that pursued the smuggling boats, or hunted the coast for them. The fearless little fellow had had some adventures already, which he retailed to Jessy with great gusto; and remarked that he did not think the people of Morwinstow liked him or his father.

To this Jessy answered that they did not like her either, and this seemed a bond drawing the pair together; so that when they reached the church they passed in together, and sat side by side in a shadowy corner behind a big pillar.

But the service had not proceeded very far before there was a whisper and then a buzz at the porch door, and one by one folks slipped from their seats and stole out, till at last only Jessy, and Tim (as the boy told her he was called), and the parson, and clerk were left; and the parson shut up his book and whipped off his surplice, saying: