Then the old smuggler reaches home, and every shadow may spell ruin; and all that is done is done in fear, and he has to be cunning always, and ready to fight to the death. The old smuggler belonged to the heroic age, and in all genuine stories he bulks colossal against a midnight sky black with tempest. The race has not disappeared; the conditions have changed, that is all. Uncle Bill told us that he could find a crew to-morrow if there was but a fair prospect of making five hundred pounds on the venture. And "I'd be one," said he.
If Nature intended a county for smuggling, it is Cornwall, which seems somehow to have been caught when cooling between two seas and pressed inward and upward, so that it is full of little bights and bays and caverns, which might have been vents for the gases to escape when the sea pressure at the sides became unbearable, and the earth groaned like the belle of the season in tight corsets. The caverns are given up to bats and otters and slimy things now, but in the "good old days!" The women, by all accounts, took kindly to smuggling, and stood shoulder to shoulder with their men when there was a fight with the preventive men, and ran off with the "tubs" of spirit and whatever they could carry, whilst the men held the King's officers in check. A young man who was content with a "living wage" on sea or on land wasn't thought much of by the black-haired, black-eyed damsels of the coast, who were up to snuff in the free-trade principles of their day and generation. The children were taught to look upon the sea as their own, and to regard smuggling as an honourable calling, and thousands of infant tongues prayed at night for God's blessing on smuggling ventures. And the Church was with the people, and blessed them, and shared their profits when there was no danger of being found out. "Nothing venture, nothing have" was the good old motto bound upon the smugglers' arms and hearts like phylacteries, and was to them as prayer.
A SHORT CUT.
Uncle Bill had a pen'ard of gin in his beer to clear his pipes one evening, and told us some yarns which he had heard from his father, who was called Enoch, who died in his bed at the age of ninety-six, and would have lived longer, only he "catched a cauld dru washing his feet in fresh water."
Uncle Bill was a young man, but not too young to go courting when his father made his last run across the Channel for a cargo of spirits. It came about in this way. Enoch and his family possessed five hundred one-pound notes issued by a bank which had failed, and so were practically worthless. This was a serious matter, and Enoch proposed, at the family council, to run across to Brittany and exchange the worthless notes for tubs of good brandy. Everything was done in secrecy and in hot haste to prevent suspicion, and to get the cargo of contraband on board before news of the bank's failure reached the French merchants. Had they been members of the Japanese Intelligence Department they could not have kept the secret better. They had a splendid run, landed the cargo all serene, and cleared cent. per cent.
"I have often blessed God that there were no telegraphs in those days," said Uncle Bill, fervently.