his mercy. Besides I might be wrong after all, and I had no right to presume that the officer who had passed the laths had not made a sufficient examination of them. The flurry of the young man might arise from physical weakness and the severe labor he was performing in such hot weather. These reasons, or more truly these excuses for doing nothing, were passing through my brain, when I observed the hasty approach of the collector of customs himself toward the cart, followed by several of his subordinates. Young Somers saw him as quickly as I did, and the young man's first impulse, it was quite plain, was flight. A thought, no doubt, of the hopelessness of such an attempt arrested his steps, and he stood quaking with terror by the side of the cart, his right hand grasping for support at one of the wheel-spokes. "One of you lend me a knife," said the collector, addressing the officers of customs. A knife was quickly opened and handed to him: he severed the strong cords which bound one of the bundles of laths together, and they flew asunder, disclosing a long tin tube of considerable diameter, closely rammed with tobacco! All the other bundles contained a similar deposit; and so large was the quantity of the heavily-taxed weed thus unexpectedly made lawful prize of, that a profit, I was assured, of not less than £500 or £600 would have been made by the audacious smuggler had he succeeded in his bold and ingenious attempt. The ends of the bundles had been filled up with short pieces of lath, so that, except by the process now adopted, it was impossible to detect that the cargo was not _bonâ fide_ what it had been declared to be. The penalties to which Somers had rendered himself liable were immense, the vessel also was forfeited, and the unfortunate young man's liberty at the mercy of the crown. He looked the very picture of despair, and I felt assured that ruin, utter and complete, had fallen upon him. He was led off in custody, and had gone some dozen paces when he stopped shortly, appeared to make some request to the officers by whom he was escorted, and then turning round, intimated by a supplicatory gesture that he wished to speak to me. I drew near, and at my request the officers fell back out of hearing. He was so utterly prostrated by the calamity by which he had been so suddenly overtaken, that he could not for several moments speak intelligibly. I felt a good deal concerned for so mere a boy, and one too so entirely unfitted by temperament and nerve to carry through such desperate enterprises, or bear up against their failure. "This is a bad business," I said; "but the venture has not, I trust, been made with your own or your father's money? "Every penny of it," he replied, in a dry, fainting voice, "was our own. Father lent me all his prize-money, and we are both miserable beggars." "What in the name of madness could induce you to venture your all upon a single throw in so hazardous a game?"