"Not likely," said the old man. "Women can't never shy straight. But I shouldn't wonder but what them posies heartened the chap up a bit. An afterwards they was all a-fightin' to get a bit of the rope he was hung with, for luck." "Do tell us some more about him," said all of us but Dora. "I don't know no more about him. He was just hung--that's all. They was precious fond o' hangin' in them old far-away times." "Did you ever know a smuggler?" asked H.O.--"to speak to, I mean?" "Ah, that's tellings," said the old man, and he winked at us all. So then we instantly knew that the coastguards had been mistaken when they said there were no more smugglers now, and that this brave old man would not betray his comrades, even to friendly strangers like us. But of course he could not know exactly how friendly we were. So we told him. Oswald said-- "We _love_ smugglers. We wouldn't even tell a word about it if you would only tell us." "There used to be lots of smuggling on these here coasts when my father was a boy," he said; "my own father's cousin, his father took to the smuggling, and he was a doin' so well at it, that what does he do, but goes and gets married, and the Preventives they goes and nabs him on his wedding-day, and walks him straight off from the church door, and claps him in Dover Jail." "Oh, his poor wife," said Alice, "whatever did she do?" "_She_ didn't do nothing," said the old man. "It's a woman's place not to do nothing till she's told to. He'd done so well at the smuggling, he'd saved enough by his honest toil to take a little public. So she sets there awaitin' and attendin' to customers--for well she knowed him, as he wasn't the chap to let a bit of a jail stand in the way of his station in life. Well, it was three weeks to a day after the wedding, there comes a dusty chap to the 'Peal of Bells' door. That was the sign over the public, you understand." We said we did, and breathlessly added, "Go on!" "A dusty chap he was; got a beard and a patch over one eye, and he come of a afternoon when there was no one about the place but her. "'Hullo, missis,' says he; 'got a room for a quiet chap?' "'I don't take in no men-folks,' says she; 'can't be bothered with 'em.' "'You'll be bothered with _me_, if I'm not mistaken,' says he. "'Bothered if I will,' says she. "'Bothered if you won't,' says he, and with that he ups with his hand and off comes the black patch, and he pulls off the beard and gives her a kiss and a smack on the shoulder. She always said she nearly died when she see it was her new-made bridegroom under the beard. "So she took her own man in as a lodger, and he went to work up at Upton's Farm with his beard on, and of nights he kept up the smuggling business. And for a year or more no one knowd as it was him. But they got him at last." "What became of him?" We all asked it.