The only reason these villains had to commit this murder on the poor wretch, who left behind a wife and many children, was, on a supposition only, that he had concealed a small bag of tea from them; for they had lodged a quantity of run tea near the barn where the man worked, and when they came to look for it, missed one bag, and imagined he had taken it away; though the villains, on a second search, after they had murdered the man, found the bag of tea where they had hid it, and had overlooked it before. This murder in itself was as barbarous as that of Mr. Galley; for they made him go with them upwards of ten miles, all the way whipping him, and beating him with the handles of their whips till they had killed him, and then tied stones to his legs and arms and flung him into the pond, which kept the body under water. These terrible executions, committed by the smugglers on these poor men, and the dreadful menaces which they uttered against any person that should presume to interrupt them, so terrified the people everywhere, that scarce anybody durst look at them as they passed in large bodies in open day-light. And the custom officers were so intimidated, that hardly any of them had courage enough to go on their duty. Some of them they knew they had already sent to France, others had been killed or wounded in opposing them, and Galley, in particular, had been inhumanly murdered by them: so that not only the honest trader suffered by the running of prodigious quantities of goods, which were sold again at a rate that he could not buy them at, unless he traded with them; but the King’s revenue was considerably lessened by this smuggling traffic. It is no wonder, indeed, that when once a set of men commenced as smugglers, that they should go on to commit the vilest excesses; for when a man has wrought himself into a firm persuasion that it is no crime to rob his King or his country, the transition is easy to the belief, that it is no sin to plunder or destroy his neighbour; and therefore we need not be much surprised that so many of the smugglers have turned highwaymen, housebreakers, and incendiaries, of which we have had but too many instances of late.