366 THE SMUGGLER. 



CHAPTER XXXII. 



THE reader has doubtless remarked for every reader who 

 peruses a book to any purpose must remark everything, inas- 

 much as the most important events are so often connected 

 with insignificant circumstances, that the one cannot be 

 understood without the other; the reader has doubtless re- 

 marked, that Mr. Radford, on leaving Sir Robert Croyland, 

 informed his unhappy victim, that he had still a good deal of 

 business to do that night. Now, during the day he had, as 

 may well be judged from his own statement of all the prepara- 

 tions he had already made, done a great deal of very important 

 business ; but the details of his past proceedings I shall not 

 enter into, and only beg leave to precede him by a short time, 

 to the scene of those farther operations which he had laid out 

 as the close of that evening's labours. It is to the lone house, 

 as it was called, near Iden Green, that I wish to conduct my 

 companions, and a solitary and gloomy-looking spot it was, at 

 the time I speak of. All that part of the country is now very 

 thickly inhabited: the ground bears nearly as large a popula- 

 tion as it can support; and though there are still fields, and 

 woods, and occasional waste places, yet no such events could 

 now happen as those which occurred eighty or a hundred 

 years ago, when one might travel miles, in various parts of 

 Kent, without meeting a living soul. The pressure of a large 

 population crushes out the bolder and more daring sorts of 

 crime, and leaves small cunning to effect, in secret, what 

 cannot be accomplished openly, under the police of innume- 

 rable eyes. 



But it was not so in those days; and the lone house near 

 Iden Green, whatever it was originally built for, had become 

 the refuge and the lurking-place of some of the most fierce 

 and lawless men in the country. It was a large building, 

 with numerous rooms and passages; and it had stables behind 

 it, but no walled court-yard ; for the cloie sweeping round of 



