We went down--I leading with "King George" under my arm and the two girls following. But on the stairway a sudden terror leaped upon Irma. While we were all down in the cellar, might not Lalor and his companion enter by the front door, or by some unguarded window. So she turned and ran back to the little boy's room to defend him with an old pistol I had found on the wall and loaded for her with powder and ball. Then Agnes Anne and I made our way into the cellar. We had taken with us the lantern, which we had hitherto kept covered, lest by the moving of the light about the house we might be suspected of being on our guard. Hastily I made the tour of the great cellar. The back of the place was full of the _debris_ of ancient barrels, some intact, some with gaping sides, many held together with no more than a single hoop. But packed together in one corner and occupying a place about one third of the whole area of the floor was something very different. Tarpaulined, fastened together by ropes, and guarded from damp by planks laid below them, were some hundreds of kegs and packages--all, so far as I could see, marked with curious signs, and in some cases the names of places. One I remember, "Sallet Ooil--Apuglia," gave me a sense of such distance and strangeness, that for a moment I seemed to be travelling in strange countries and seeing curious sights, rather than going down to risk my life in Miss Irma's quarrel with men I had never seen. It was very evident that there could be but one place where the passage Irma had spoken of (on her father's information) could debouch upon the great cellar of Marnhoul. In the angle behind the mass of kegs was an open space of some yards square, so clean that it looked as if it had been recently swept. Beyond this again and quite in the corner, there was a step or two downwards, as if it were into the bowels of the earth. This was stopped with a door of stone accurately arranged and fitted with uncommon skill. And I could see at a glance that it was probably one of the same kind that the men whom Agnes Anne had seen were engaged in bursting by stroke of crow. I understood more than that. For there was all the winter in Eden Valley scarce any other subject of talk than the Free Trade (which is to say, plainly, smuggling), and concerning the various "ventures" or boats and crews attached to some famous leader engaged in it. There was, in fact, no particular moral wrong attaching to the business in Eden Valley or along the Solway shore high and low--rather a sort of piety, since the common folk remembered that the excise had first been instituted by that perjured persecutor of the Church, Charles II. Even the Doctor, though he denounced the practice from the pulpit in befitting words, did so chiefly on the ground that the attractions of Free Trade, its dangers even, carried so many promising young men forth of the parish, and a goodly proportion of them to return no more.