Of course the fishers leaned to the side of the smugglers against the excise and customs officers. Almost everybody did, in the last century except the lawyers, something of a legal education being necessary to see the propriety of establishing what Adam Smith, while himself a Commissioner of the Board of Customs, denounced as the outposts of Pandemonium. When examined before the courts in smuggling cases, the fishermen contrived occasionally, under an appearance of simplicity, to baffle with considerable cunning the cross-examinations of the counsel for the Crown. Public sympathy was, in those days on the side of the smugglers, who called themselves free-traders, a designation which has since attained universal honour. The principle of obedience to law, the sine quâ non of civilisation, is less easily enthroned upon uneducated consciences than the principle of buying cheap and selling dear. Lairds, merchants, and workmen, therefore, all admired the cool duplicity with which the fishers sometimes evaded the truth when under cross-examinations. Some of them were once witnesses in a case of deforcement. The counsel for the prosecution asked a fisherman,--“While the men were struggling in the water, did you not hear the prisoner call out, ‘Drown the dogs?’” “We saw nae dogs there, sir,” was the demure and composed reply. “I do not ask you what you saw; but, on your oath, did you not hear him call out, ‘Drown the dogs?’” “There was nae ony dogs there, sir,” was again the obstinate answer. Although no man of distinction in science or letters has ever arisen in any of these villages, it cannot be doubted they have produced many men whom Poodle or Doodle might have safely trusted upon his legs on the floor of the House of Commons to answer the questions of honourable and independent members. A century ago the fishers, who were hardy, industrious, decorous, and honest, were nevertheless inveterate swearers--a fault which I did not observe among them in an offensive degree in the nineteenth century. Indeed, I have heard more swearing from two admirals in a London club than I ever heard in fishing villages. In the last century, however, the fishers would use the most tremendous oaths upon the most trivial occasions. Anger was not necessary to provoke them; the oaths seeming to be as necessary to the hauling up of a lugger, or the pushing out of a boat, as the cries of “Yo-hee O!” Persons unaccustomed to hear the strong phrases of swearing, feel their minds shocked by the ideas conveyed by them, being ignorant that they have ceased to convey ideas to the persons who use them. When a lady rebuked one of them for using the word deil (devil), he said, “Eh! mem, I didna think it meant ony ill. Does it mean ony ill? I thocht it was just a word to dad” (knock) “aboot.”