Gulliver is said to have employed fifty men, who wore a livery, powdered hair, and smock frocks. This smuggler amassed a large fortune, and he had the audacity to purchase a portion of Eggardon Hill, in west Dorset, on which he planted trees to form a mark for his homeward-bound vessels. He also kept a band of watchmen in readiness to light a beacon fire on the approach of danger. This state of things continued until an Act of Parliament was passed which made the lighting of signal fires by unauthorized persons a punishable offence. The Earl of Malmesbury, in his _Memoirs of an Ex-Minister_, relates many anecdotes and adventures of Gulliver, who lived to a ripe old age without molestation by the authorities, for the reason, it is said, that during the wars with France he was able to obtain, through his agents in that country, valuable information of the movement of troops, with the result that his smuggling was allowed to continue as payment for the services he rendered in disclosing to the English Government the nature of the French naval and military plans. Warner, writing about 1800, relates that he saw twenty or thirty wagons, laden with kegs, guarded by two or three hundred horsemen, each bearing three tubs, coming over Hengistbury Head, and making their way in the open day past Christchurch to the New Forest. On a tombstone at Kinson we may read:-- "A little tea, one leaf I did not steal; For guiltless blood shed I to God appeal; Put tea in one scale, human blood in t'other, And think what 'tis to slay thy harmless brother". The villagers of Kinson are stated to have all been smugglers, and to have followed no other occupation, while it is said that certain deep markings on the walls of the church tower were caused by the constant rubbing of the ropes used to draw up and lower the kegs of brandy and the cases of tea. That many church towers in the neighbourhood were used for the storage of illicit cargoes is well known, and the sympathies of the local clergy were nearly always on the side of the smugglers in the days when a keg of old brandy would be a very acceptable present in a retired country parsonage. Occasionally, perhaps, the parson took more than a passive interest in the proceedings. A story still circulates around the neighbourhood of Poole to the effect that a new-comer to the district was positively shocked at the amount of smuggling that went on. One night he came across a band of smugglers in the act of unloading a cargo. "Smuggling," he shouted. "Oh, the sin of it! the shame of it! Is there no magistrate, no justice of the peace, no clergyman, no minister, no----" "There be the Parson," replied one of the smugglers, thinking it was a case of sickness. "Where? Where is he?" demanded the stranger. "Why, that's him a-holding of the lanthorn," was the laconic reply.