'Good enough,' was the reply, caught up in a little sob, as she slipped her arm into his. 'And-and I had saved twenty-five pounds from my little shop towards it, old Only-oh, Bertie, you'd never have believed that was what I took the shop for. Now, would you?'

man.

'Bless us!' he said; 'how was I to know?' And the three walked slowly homewards together through the dusk.

WATCHERS OF THE MUD.

A SMUGGLING STORY.

I.

EOPLE and poets have praised the dawn

PEO

as if it had no drawbacks. I do not know why. There is no hour of the twenty-four so dismal as that dread, dead, stagnant hour before the sun rises, when the awful wan dawn-haze creeps over things from nowhere special, not dispersing but showing up the darkness, revealing night in a disgraceful manner-stark, pitiless night, stripped of the merciful purple cloak; night unashamed and blatant, cruel, cold, and monstrous.

It was at this time and in such a light that old 'Stiletto' Dobson loomed like a blurred smudge out of the surprised and frowning darkness along the top of the sea-wall. He was going eel-spearing; at least, he carried a thing like Neptune's trident, which, by those who go down to the mud of the estuary to earn their daily bread, is said to be used for no other purpose.

People do not go eel-spearing for fun, you understand. It is not the kind of thing one

would do unless one were forced.

Also, it

is a lonely business. It consists in plunging about in the mud-slime of the estuary in pursuit of eels. It is essentially a trade of the very poor-of, in fact, the marshmen, who are a race in themselves, and whose fathers and fathers' fathers were the old fowlers that we read about, and smugglers too at times.

'Stiletto' Dobson was, or appeared to be, an exception to the rule. Eel-spearing seemed to do him well, and, to use his own expression, he liked himself nicely on it.

He was a small, lithe, quick, black-and-tan terrier of a man, with smooth, effortless, swift motion, a soft voice, and eyes that shone like gulls' eyes. He appeared to divide his time between eel-spearing, wild-fowl shooting, and sleeping. One presumes he ate; but if any one ever saw him eat, the fact has not been left on record. If one judged by his white hair and quite a thousand wrinkles, he was an old man. On the other hand, if one judged him by his eyes and his manner, he was young. No one had ever seen him engage in anything else than the occupations named; he was known to have inherited nothing, and in his young, or perhaps I should say more youthful, days it is on record that he was as poor as the

rest of his race. But his daughters did not 'go to service,' nor did they work at a laundry. Mrs Dobson had been seen in a real silk dress; and, greatest proof of all that he was rich, old Dobson paid for his gun and his dog licence every year, and never asked no one for a fill,' which is a pipeful of tobacco.

The nickname of Stiletto' was a remnant of his wild and youthful days, and of an affray with knives, out of which he had emerged with a scar over his left eye and the present Mrs Dobson as his reward.

'Stiletto' Dobson made his way along the sea-wall with the short, quick strides affected by all his breed. The light brightened at every stride, and redshanks flew up from the marsh on his left, and fled, crying, 'Työ! työ!' Stiletto called them 'cussed tooks,' because they advertised his presence. Anon he came to some deserted oyster-beds, to build which some 'company' had been floated, gone smash, and fled to America; while the place itself had been pretty well floated out by the tides again. Here the concrete blocks of the wall had been broken and torn asunder and cast all ways by the water, and here, in a cave formed by these blocks, Dobson halted. Presently he began to burrow like a rat among the pebbles and

the rubbish, till suddenly he struck tin. In fact, he unearthed cases of tin to the number of five, and all of them packed full of tobacco. That, however, was his cousin's business, the tobacco being smuggled, and destined later to be taken inland. What concerned him now was another matter altogether.

Beside the square cases lay some long, thin ones. They were not big, and looked as if they might hold any little innocent things, such as umbrellas, for instance. Now, if any one had told old Dobson that each of those cases held two Lee-Enfield military magazinerifles, no one would have looked more shocked and surprised than he. Nevertheless, that was precisely what they did hold. Seeing that two great Powers were at that moment at issue with one another, magazine-rifles were fetching their weight in gold at the time. These rifles might, if smuggled out of the country secretly, be of value. At least, that was the hypothesis upon which Mr Dobson appeared now to be working. One of those Powers, at any rate, was willing to pay almost anything for good rifles and ammunition. Dobson wrapped some old sacking round one case, shouldered it with his trident, so that to the casual eye it might appear to be part of