Taking advantage of the information given by the informer, the officer occupied a room from which a view of a large boiler-foundry was obtainable. Keeping strict watch, he saw large quantities of tobacco being packed, by means of hydraulic pressure, into a couple of marine boilers, which, when the packing was completed, were placed on board a steamer for conveyance, if I remember aright, to Newcastle. Unfortunately, however, for the parties concerned in the smuggling transaction, a telegram arrived before the boilers. These were not seized at Newcastle, but were allowed to be placed on the railway and reach King’s Cross, London, without interference, the authorities wishing to take the principal participators red-handed. At King’s Cross they duly arrived, and remained unclaimed for several days. At last, one was taken to a railway arch at Stepney, where it was watched day and night until the smugglers came to claim it, when they were of course arrested. The other boiler, which had remained at King’s Cross, was—through a telegraphic error, which caused the police to relax their watchfulness—removed from that locality without their knowledge. But the conveyance on which it was removed broke down under the heavy weight, and through this unlooked-for casualty, it was at last secured. The smugglers were mulcted in a fine of nearly five thousand pounds, and being unable to pay it, were sent to jail. The writer remembers well inspecting the boilers when they were lying at the Custom House, and to those who had the opportunity of seeing them, their construction gave ample evidence that smuggling as a science was not yet entirely extinct. The boilers were simply ‘dummies.’ The iron used in their construction was too thin to resist steam-pressure, and they had evidently been made for the express purpose of conveying tobacco to this country. It is not at all improbable, either, that the ‘dummy’ boilers had made more than one trip to England, and had put a good many pounds sterling in the pockets of their ingenious but dishonest designers.