But there is a vast difference in taking a vessel round the North Foreland into London River, and in snatching her off the very edge of the Goodwins on to which she is blundering in fog or storm. _That_ was the hoveller’s ostensible business of old, in conjunction with the undeclared addition of smuggling. It was ever the smuggling, with a good deal of rascally cable-slipping and prowling the seas for wreckage, that made hovelling the fine and conscienceless trade it may most fitly be described, and incidentally made the Deal boatmen the finest sailors in the world. Their present-day representatives are fallen upon the worst of times, and now that days and nights of cruising these waters at their worst yields but an occasional job, the Deal lugger is becoming something of a rarity, and even that other peculiarly localised craft, the “knock-toe,” or galley-punt, does not seem to be as numerous on the beach as of yore. The Deal lugger is no longer built. It was a sailing craft, of some fifteen to twenty tons, undecked except for a forepeak. The galley-punt is built to combine the qualities of a rowing-boat and a sailing-vessel, and is thirty feet long, with a beam of five feet, a single mast, stepped amidships, and four oars. The old story of Deal shows the boatmen of some two hundred years ago to have been as thorough a crew of scoundrels as might have been found along our coasts, except perhaps in the West, where the wreckers of Cornwall were unsurpassed in cold-blooded, calculating ferocity. We do not read of the ’longshoremen of the Kentish coast luring vessels ashore, but we hear a very great deal of their heartless leaving the shipwrecked to perish on the Goodwin Sands and busying themselves in searching for valuable wreckage the while. Defoe, one of the greatest and most industrious journalists who ever lived, whose amazing fecundity staggers research, wrote and published a book called “The Storm” in 1704. It described the great storm of 1703 and reflected with just severity upon the inhumanity displayed here. “I cannot omit,” he says, “that great notice has been taken of the townspeople of Deal, who are blam’d, and I doubt not with too much reason, for their great barbarity in neglecting to save the lives of abundance of poor wretches; who, having hung upon the masts and rigging of the ships, or floated upon the broken pieces of wrecks, had gotten ashore upon the Goodwin Sands when the tide was out. It was, without doubt, a sad spectacle to behold the poor seamen walking to and fro upon the sands, to view their postures and the signals they made for help, which by the assistance of glasses, was easily seen from the shore. Here they had a few hours’ reprieve, but had neither present refreshment nor any hopes of life, for they were sure to be washed into another world at the reflux of the tide. Some boats are said to have come very near them in quest of booty and in search of plunder, and to carry off what