Revolution, he was, in company with other English, arrested and flung into prison in 1793. And in prison he remained during that Reign of Terror in which English prisoners were declared by the Convention to rank with the “aristocrats” and the “suspects,” and were therefore in hourly danger of the guillotine. This immediate terror passed when Robespierre was executed, July 28th, 1794, but it was not until August 1795 that Harry Carter was released. He reached home on August 22nd, and appears ever after to have settled down to tilling a modest farm and leaving smuggling to brothers John and Charles. CHAPTER XIII JACK RATTENBURY WE do not expect of smugglers that they should be either literary or devout. The doings of the Hawkhurst Gang, and of other desperate and bloody-minded associations of free-traders, seem more in key with the business than either the sitting at a desk, nibbling a pen and rolling a frenzied eye, in search of a telling phrase, or the singing of Methodist psalms. Yet we have, in the “Memoirs of a Smuggler,” published at Sidmouth in 1837, the career of Jack Rattenbury, smuggler, of Beer, in Devonshire, told by himself; and in the diary of Henry Carter, of Prussia Cove, and later of Rinsey, we have learned how he found peace and walked with the saints, after a not uneventful career in robbing the King’s Revenue of a goodly portion of its dues as by law enacted. With the eminent Mr. Henry Carter and his interesting brothers we have already dealt, reserving this chapter for the still more eminent Rattenbury, “commonly called,” as he says on his own title-page (in the manner of one who knows his own worth), “The Rob Roy of the West.” We need not be so simple as to suppose that Rattenbury himself actually wrote, with his own hand, this interesting account of his adventures. The son of a village cobbler in South Devon, born in 1778, and taking to a seafaring life when nine years of age, would scarce be capable, in years of eld, of writing the conventionally “elegant” English of which his “Autobiography” is composed. But nothing “transpires” (as the actual writer of the book might say) as to whom Rattenbury recounted his moving tale, or by whose hand it was really set down. Bating, however, the conventional language, the book has the unmistakable forthright first-hand character of a personal narrative. Before the future smuggler was born, as he tells us, his shoemaker, or cobbler, father disappeared from Beer in a manner in those days not unusual. He went on board a man-o’-war, and was never again heard of. Whether he actually “went,” or was taken by a press-gang, we are left to conjecture. But they were sturdy, self-reliant people in those days, and Mrs. Rattenbury earned a livelihood in this bereavement by selling fish, “without receiving the least assistance from the parish, or any of her friends.”