Among the many ruses practised upon the preventive men, who, as the butts of innumerable evasive false-pretences, must have been experts in the ways of practical jokes, was that of the pretended drunken smuggler. To divert attention from any pursuit of the main body of the tub-carrying gang, one of their number would be detailed to stagger along, as though under the influence of drink, in a different direction, with a couple of tubs slung over his shoulders. It was a very excellently effective trick, but had the obvious disadvantage of working only once at any one given station. It was the fashion to describe the preventive men as fools, but they were not such crass fools as all that, to be taken in twice by the same simple dodge. The solitary and apparently intoxicated tub-carrier would lead the pursuers a little way and would then allow himself easily to be caught, but would then make a desperate and prolonged resistance in defence of his tubs. At last, overpowered and the tubs taken from him, and himself escorted to the nearest blockade-station, the tubs themselves would be examined—and would generally be found to contain only sea-water! The customs men, however, were not without their own bright ideas. The service would scarcely have been barren of imagination unless it were recruited from a specially selected levy of dunderheads. But it was an exceptionally brilliant officer who hit upon the notion of training a puppy for discovering those places where the smugglers had, as a temporary expedient, hidden their spirit-tubs. It would often happen that a successful run ended at the beach, and that opportunities for conveying the cargo inland had to be waited upon. It would, therefore, be buried in the shingle, or in holes dug in the sands at low water, until a safe opportunity occurred. The customs staff knew this perfectly well, but they necessarily lacked the knowledge of the exact spots where these stores had been made. [Picture: Smugglers Defeated] The exceptionally imaginative customs officer in question trained a terrier pup to the business of scenting them by the cunning method of bringing the creature up with an acquired taste for alcohol. This he did by mixing the pup’s food with spirits, and allowing it to take no food that was not so flavoured. Two things resulted from this novel treatment: the dog’s growth was stunted, and it grew up with such a liking for spirits that it would take nothing not freely laced with whisky, rum, gin, or brandy. The plan of operations with a dog educated into these vicious tastes was simple. When his master found a favourable opportunity for strolling along the shore, in search of buried kegs, the dog, having been deprived of his food the day before, was taken. When poor hungry Tray came to one of these spots, the animal’s keen and trained scent instantly detected it, and he would at once begin scratching and barking like mad.