On the east coast of the county of Norfolk, there lay a village which shall be distinguished by the name of Corston. It was bounded on the one side by the sea, on the other by the open country, and beside the two or three gentleman farmers whose possessions comprised all the agricultural land within a radius of five miles, it could boast of a church and resident parson—a coastguard with its attendant officer, and above all, close contiguity with Rooklands, the estate of the Earl of Worcester. And those who are acquainted with the moral and social aspect, as it existed forty or fifty years ago, of the more insignificant villages of Norfolk, will acknowledge that Corston was favoured above its fellows. The sea coast in its vicinity brought many a gay riding party over from Rooklands, either to enjoy the fresh breezes, or to bathe in the sparkling waves from some sequestered nook, whilst the congregation of the church was made up of drafts from some four or five outlying hamlets which had not the advantage of a place of worship of their own. Conceive then what a much larger audience the Corston parson could depend upon, when the women had a prospect of seeing the bonnets from ten miles round (to say nothing of a chance of the Rookland aristocrats taking it into their heads to drive out), in addition to listening to his somewhat uninteresting sermons. The coastguard, too, was a cause of constant excitement, on account of the Admiralty having been in the habit of bestowing the appointment on old, worn-out, half-pay lieutenants who chose to expire almost as soon as they obtained it, and really, notwithstanding the church and the parson and Rooklands, there was not much in Corston worth living for. But at the time this story opens, the charge of the coast had not long been put in the hands of (comparatively speaking) a young and hale man who bid fair to keep anybody else out of it for a long while to come. His office was no sinecure though, for, notwithstanding the difficulty of landing, the coast was a celebrated one for smugglers, and as soon as the dark months of winter set in there was no lack of work for the preventive officers. For the village of Corston did not, of itself, run down to the sea. Between it and the ocean there lay the salt marshes, a bleak, desolate tract of land, which no skill or perseverance could reclaim from apparent uselessness. Except to the samphire and cockle-gatherers, the salt marshes of Corston were an arid wilderness which could yield no fruit. Many a farmer had looked longingly across the wide waste which terminated only with the shingled beach, and wondered if it were possible to utilise it. But as it had been from the beginning, so it remained until that day; its stinted vegetation affording shelter for sea-fowl and smugglers’ booty only, and its brackish waters that flowed and ebbed with the tides, tainting the best springs on the level ground of Corston. It was the existence