of this event from one of the participators, now living at Bexhill. According to his account, a cargo of goods was landed at Mr. Brooks ' forty-acre point, near Bexhill. It was a moonlight night, the moon being in the last quarter. The tubs of spirits were loaded on men's shoulders and in carts. A noted smuggler, a native of Bexhill, was captain of the boat. Of this man (now living, I believe), I shall have something further to narrate. The Coast-blockade from Galley Hill Tower tried to intercept the smugglers, but finding themselves too weak for the purpose (the smugglers being armed, and having likewise with them sixteen or eighteen batsmen), they obtained reinforcements that raised their number to about forty men. They came up with the smugglers near Sidley, and here, as Mr. Cooper says, ' the armed portion of the smugglers drew themselves up in regular line, and a desperate fight took place.' In the first onset a quarter-master, named Collins, was killed. Two batsmen were also killed ; the body of one named Smithurst was carried and laid in the barn of ' Cramp's Farm.' When his body was found, his bat was still grasped in his hands, and it was almost hacked in pieces by the cutlasses of the Blockademen. The goods were all got away, as were also all the wounded. One of the wounded men, named P___ was taken to his home, a lonely house near Windmill Hill, and the surgeon who attended him was in the habit of taking his horse to a gentleman's stables in the neighbourhood, putting him up there, and quietly walking across the fields to the house where his patient was lying. The smuggler became a cripple for life."
There is a gentleman now living in Hastings, who saw from one of the windows of the Bell Hotel at Bexhill, the smugglers and Coast-blockade go through -
