CHAPTER XXX

     I renounce your defiance; if you parley so roughly I’ll
     barricade my gates against you.  Do you see yon bay window? 
     Storm, I care not, serving the good Duke of Norfolk

          Merry Devil of Edmonton.

JULIA MANNERING to MATILDA MARCHMONT

’I rise from a sick-bed, my dearest Matilda, to communicate the strange and frightful scenes which have just passed.  Alas! how little we ought to jest with futurity!  I closed my letter to you in high spirits, with some flippant remarks on your taste for the romantic and extraordinary in fictitious narrative.  How little I expected to have had such events to record in the course of a few days!  And to witness scenes of terror, or to contemplate them in description, is as different, my dearest Matilda, as to bend over the brink of a precipice holding by the frail tenure of a half-rooted shrub, or to admire the same precipice as represented in the landscape of Salvator.  But I will not anticipate my narrative.

’The first part of my story is frightful enough, though it had nothing to interest my feelings.  You must know that this country is particularly favourable to the commerce of a set of desperate men from the Isle of Man, which is nearly opposite.  These smugglers are numerous, resolute, and formidable, and have at different times become the dread of the neighbourhood when any one has interfered with their contraband trade.  The local magistrates, from timidity or worse motives, have become shy of acting against them, and impunity has rendered them equally daring and desperate.  With all this my father, a stranger in the land, and invested with no official authority, had, one would think, nothing to do.  But it must be owned that, as he himself expresses it, he was born when Mars was lord of his ascendant, and that strife and bloodshed find him out in circumstances and situations the most retired and pacific.

’About eleven o’clock on last Tuesday morning, while Hazlewood and my father were proposing to walk to a little lake about three miles’ distance, for the purpose of shooting wild ducks, and while Lucy and I were busied with arranging our plan of work and study for the day, we were alarmed by the sound of horses’ feet advancing very fast up the avenue.  The ground was hardened by a severe frost, which made the clatter of the hoofs sound yet louder and sharper.  In a moment two or three men, armed, mounted, and each leading a spare horse loaded with packages, appeared on the lawn, and, without keeping upon the road, which makes a small sweep, pushed right across for the door of the house.  Their appearance was in the utmost degree hurried and disordered, and they frequently looked back like men who apprehended a close and deadly pursuit.  My father and Hazlewood hurried to the front door to demand who they were, and what was their business.  They were revenue officers, they stated, who had seized