The interior of the county was not less favourable to the traffic than the coast: large masses of wood, numerous gentlemen’s parks, hills and dales tossed about in wild confusion; roads such as nothing but horses could travel, or men on foot, often constructed with felled trees or broad stones laid side by side; wide tracts of ground, partly copse and partly moor, called in that county “minnises,” and a long extent of the Weald of Kent, through which no highway existed, and where such a thing as coach or carriage was never seen, offered the land-smugglers opportunities of carrying on their transactions with a degree of secrecy and safety no other county afforded. Their numbers, too, were so great, their boldness and violence so notorious, their powers of injuring or annoying so various, that even those who took no part in their operations were glad to connive at their proceedings, and at times to aid in concealing their persons or their goods. Not a park, not a wood, not a barn, that did not at some period afford them a refuge when pursued, or become a depository for their commodities, and many a man, on visiting his stables or his cart-shed early in the morning, found it tenanted by anything but horses or wagons. The churchyards were frequently crowded at night by other spirits than those of the dead, and not even the church was exempted from such visitations. None of the people of the county took notice of, or opposed these proceedings. The peasantry laughed at, or aided, and very often got a good day’s work, or, at all events, a jug of genuine hollands, from the friendly smugglers; the clerk and the sexton willingly aided and abetted, and opened the door of vault, or vestry, or church for the reception of the passing goods; the clergyman shut his eyes if he saw tubs or jars in his way; and it is remarkable what good brandy-punch was generally to be found at the house of the village pastor. The magistrates of the county, when called upon to aid in pursuit of the smugglers, looked grave and swore in constables very slowly, dispatched servants on horseback to see what was going on, and ordered the steward or the butler to “send the sheep to the wood”: an intimation not lost upon those for whom it was intended. The magistrates and officers of seaport towns were in general so deeply implicated in the trade themselves that smuggling had a fairer chance than the law, in any case that came before them; and never was a more hopeless enterprise undertaken, in ordinary circumstances, than that of convicting a smuggler, unless captured _in flagrante delicto_. [Picture: “For our Parson”] CHAPTER VI OUTRAGE AT HASTINGS BY THE RUXLEY GANG—BATTLE ON THE WHITSTABLE-CANTERBURY ROAD—CHURCH-TOWERS AS SMUGGLERS’ CELLARS—THE DRUMMER OF HERSTMONCEUX—EPITAPH AT TANDRIDGE—DEPLORABLE AFFAIR AT HASTINGS—THE INCIDENT OF “THE FOUR BROTHERS”