smugglers. I learnt my first Latin with their sons at school. For years, when I was in my teens, there sat in the same pew with me on Sundays a respectable tradesman, whose place in the pew was once empty for months. He had fallen from the cliff and broken his leg while trying to escape from the coastguard who had caught him and his mates in the act of running a cargo of barrels. The “artful dodges” by which the smuggler, who were contemporary with my childhood, tried to evade detection would afford abundant material for many a “ winter’s tale.”
That it is no longer infra dig. for a native of Hastings to drink brandy on which the duty has been paid, or that no self-respecting Hastinger is now proud of being a smuggler, is not a matter for regret. We have, happily, changed all that. But it may be forgiven to an old man to confess that the recollection of these things has a not unpleasant piquancy about it, Other times, other manners. The “condemned hole” — a kind of high-fenced pound on the beach—in which smugglers’ boats were broken up to be sold as old timber; the jolly face of So-and-so; the sturdy frame of So-and-so; the many imprisonments of So-and-so; the tales told by my companions of an uncle shot, of another imprisoned, and of others who escaped sorely wounded — these things have the glamour of romance to me, Perhaps the latest memento of smuggling at Hastings that came under my observation was the sight, not many years ago, of a hero of the old days stumping along upon two wooden legs, he having lost his own in some of his mad adventures.
But enough about what is well got rid of. There were other sides of life in Hastings, things and persons that it is allowable to remember with a keen delight, and the passing away of which and of whom may be legitimately regretted. These things and persons doubtless have their modern representatives there now; but those representatives are not so conspicuous; they are lost in the mob, they do not give their own character to the place as their predecessors did. What are a handful of literary men and women, or of choice spirits who seldom put pen to paper or brush to canvas but are books and pictures in themselves, among fifty thousand people, nearly all of whom are either incessantly going and coming, or are continuously occupied in catering for the birds of passage? It is the birds of passage who now give a character to the place; in that earlier time they were either temporarily absorbed into the resident society—if they were fit for it—or served merely as a foil to the characteristic local community. The town was then Hastings first, and a watering-place next; now it is a watering-place first, and the name Hastings is little -
