"Although I had continued my intimacy with several of my early smuggling companions, I managed to reach my eighteenth year without being considered worse than a wild sort of chap. About this time I formed an acquaintance with a pretty girl, the daughter of a respectable farmer in the neighbourhood. Her old father spoke to me on the subject. I knocked him down and fled. I had behaved like a villain. I knew it then; I feel it now. The poor girl refused to see me when I afterwards tried to meet her, and soon died of a broken heart. The neighbourhood was no longer to my liking. I felt that every finger was pointed at me; but I stifled conscience, and tried to appear indifferent as to what folks said of me. Oh, that I had listened to that small voice then! My after-life would have been very different. "I had always been accustomed to get about in boats; and having just before formed the acquaintance of a noted smuggler, one Brand Hallton by name--I then thought him one of the finest fellows on either side of the channel--I made my first trip across to the coast of France in his company. That man was the chief cause of my subsequent career in crime and misery--my evil genius. Oh, sir, warn all the young men you may meet to shun the company of the wicked and immoral as they would a pestilence! They are the instruments with which the devil works out his deeds of darkness. I did not know how bad he was, or, perhaps, I might have avoided him and been saved. For two years or more, I was constantly in some smuggling craft or another; and though we frequently lost a cargo, we managed to escape being taken and sent on board a man-of-war to serve the king. This hazardous varied sort of life just suited my taste, and, as I had more learning than the rest of my companions, I was looked up to by most of them. However, our success was not to last for ever: through the treachery, as we afterwards discovered, of one of the people we employed on shore, we were unusually unfortunate; and, suspecting what was the case, we vowed to be revenged on whomever it might be. "I had never seen blood shed--my hands were free from that crime. Oh that they were so now, I should not care so much about dying! We had a large cutter, carrying four guns, with forty stout hands on board, Brand Hallton being our captain; so that we could easily beat off any revenue boats which might attempt to board us.