Smuggling was a very popular employment. It was so easy to slip over to France and return with a cargo of contraband goods, which could be dropped overboard attached to a buoy if the revenue-officer inconveniently appeared. Even the clergy engaged in the traffic. It is said that Parson Troutbeck, who speaks feelingly of the drunkenness occasioned by smuggling, was himself obliged to leave the islands from fear of the consequences of having taken part in it. The Parsonage on Tresco was originally built in a spot especially convenient for this trade, although not otherwise suitable; and one of its tenants had also to run away because he was mixed up in some smuggling affair. In 1684 a new industry had come to the aid of the people. Kelping was introduced by a Mr. Nance from Cornwall, and for nearly one hundred and fifty years formed one of their chief employments. Kelp, as every one knows, is an alkali, of value to glass-makers, soap-makers, and bleachers, and obtained by burning seaweed, or “ore-weed,” as they call it in Scilly. I am tempted to commit a bold piracy and quote in full the vivid description of the kelping given by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in _Major Vigoureux_, for I could never hope to rival that description in its force and picturesqueness. It occurs in a romance, but all its facts are based on contemporary records, and are strictly true to life. “All the summer through, day after day, at low water, the islanders would be out upon the beaches cutting the ore-weed, and, as the tide rose, would drag it in sledges up the foreshore, and strew it above high-water mark, to dry in the sun. On sunny days they scattered and turned it; on wet days they banked it into heaps almost as tall as arrish-mows. “From morning until evening they laboured, and towards midsummer, as the near beaches became denuded, would sail away in twos and threes and whole families, to camp among the off-islands and raid them; until when August came and the kelping season drew to an end, boat after boat would arrive at high water and discharge its burden.