THE SMUGGLE!!. 



CHAPTER I. 



IT is wonderful what improvements have taken place in clocks 

 and watches during the last half-century; how accurately the 

 escapements are constructed, how delicately the springs are 

 formed, how easily the wheels move, and what good time they 

 keep. After all, society is but a clock: a very complicated 

 piece of mechanism; and it, too, has undergone, in many 

 countries, the same improvements that have taken place in the 

 little ticking machines that we put in our pockets, or those 

 greater indicators of our progress towards eternity that we 

 hang upon our walls. From the wooden clock, with its weight 

 and catgut, to the exquisite chronometer which varies only by 

 a second or two in the course of the year, what a vast advance ! 

 and between even a period which many still living can re- 

 member, and that in which I now write, what a change has 

 taken place in the machinery and organization of the land in 

 which we dwell! 



In the times which I am about to depict, though feudal 

 ages were gone, though no proud barons ruled the country 

 round from castle and stronghold, though the tumultuous 

 times of the great rebellion had also passed away, and 

 men in buff and bandolier no longer preached, or fought, or 

 robbed, or tyrannised, under the name of law and liberty; 

 though the times of the second Charles, and the second James, 

 William arid Mary, and good Queen Anne, falling collars, and 

 hats and plumes, and floating wigs, and broad-tailed coats, 

 were all gone, bundled away into the great lumber-room of 

 the past; still, dear reader, there was a good deal of the 

 wooden clock about the mechanism of society. 



One of the parts in which rudeness of construction and 

 coarseness of material were most apparent, was, in the customs 

 system of the country, and in the impediments which it met 



