However, after what he had said, I wasn’t going to be put off in that way, and told Edward that I would have the man up the very next morning, before him; and that if he couldn’t give a good account of himself, why he should turn him out of the house then and there. Next morning at breakfast, I declare I couldn’t rest easy until we had Mr. Dick Farden up in the room, and when Edward reminded him of what had taken place the day before; the impudent fellow only stood there grinning and polishing the top of his oil-skin cap with his elbow, and saying that, of course, a gentleman so well acquainted with London as my husband, was very well aware of what he was after. That he had got no contraband articles to dispose of, and wasn’t such a stupid as to go infringing the laws, and running the chance of paying a hundred pounds odd for supplying the public with foreign articles, when many of them couldn’t tell the difference between them and the real, genuine English goods. And then the fellow went on and told us a whole pack of things,--how what he called his prime smuggled Havannahs were no more nor less than those that were imported from the extensive cabbage plantations of Fulham, into the snuff and tobacco manufacturies in the Minories, and his very best pale or brown French cognac, and which he always warranted to his customers to be the very best that France could produce, was none other than the real spirit of the potato, commonly known by the name of British brandy; and the whole cargo of it that he had in his possession had been run in a splendid lugger of a chay-cart all the way from Smithfield; although, of course, to give it a genuine foreign flavour, he told the gentlemen a long cock-and-a-bull-story, as to how, at the perils of their lives, and at the outlay of upwards of a hundred pounds spent in bribing the revenue officers, he and his pals had succeeded in running it safe ashore at Deal, after a three hours’ chase by one of the finest cutters in the revenue service. After this, it was no very difficult matter to see that the man was no more a smuggler than I was, so I asked him how it was that the gentlemen were stupid enough to buy his things? But he very frankly told me the whole secret, saying, that as the parties whom he went up to were mostly young men from the counting-houses, he generally commenced by calling them, “noble captains,” because they liked to be thought to be in the army, and having tickled with this, he said the other part of the business was mere child’s play--for the delicious flavour of a thing being foreign, together with the fine perfume of the idea that it was smuggled, was quite sufficient to make the youths of London buy and swallow anything.