232 THE RECTORY AND ITS BIRDS 



Whitenose, eight or nine miles off; meet, as 

 arranged, the little craft which ran into a creek 

 laden with illicit spirits, and, sometimes, after a 

 smart brush with the " Government folk," more 

 often, quite unmolested, would return by dawn of 

 day, carrying each of them a keg or two of brandy 

 on his back, and then go to work as if nothing had 

 happened, and as if they had been sleeping peace- 

 fully in their beds all night. Many a story of such 

 brushes or of hair-breadth escapes have I heard, 

 when a boy, from one of these smugglers, George 

 Treviss, who had long been transformed into an 

 underkeeper. " Did you ever," I asked him one day, 

 in strict confidence, "cut about or kill any of the 

 Government folk?" "No," was the reply, "but I 

 have helped tie 'em to a post often." It was the 

 romance of their lives. They were not too well off 

 in point of wages ; and the archdeacon and parson 

 in one would have had much less perfect sympathy 

 with his archdeaconry and his parishioners than he 

 had, if he had not turned a blind eye to this source 

 of increased income for them. He placed the 

 tithe-barn at their disposal a queer "benefit of 

 clergy " and I have been told that scores of kegs 

 of illicit brandy often lay, in perfect security, beneath 

 innocent-looking heaps of hay or straw, till there 



