The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-09-05

the smuggling romance of the shores Of East Anglia, of Dorset and Devon, is vivid and striking; the smugglers of the Hampshire and Sussex seaboard were bold and clever, but the smugglers or the Pedlington district outdid all. The keenest riding officers were appointed hereabouts, and the young lieutenant with an eye to advancement could not do. better than apply for one of those lone, dreary, storm swept posts on the edge of our great marsh, which marked the one respectable spot in wild world of daring rascality.
 The country has not changed much since those days. Throughout it's length and breadth there are probably not a score of buildings which have been put up within the past half centu- ry. The woodland is still trackless and impenetrable; the old ''keg ways" still run deeply between high banks, now aglow with fresh young foliage, and a blue and gold drapery of hyacinths and primroses, as they ran of yore; the great marsh has been reclaimed, and is now a vast grazing ground, and the three or four old towns which dot it have been awakened from their sleep of long years by week end golfers and mil itary experimentalists, but it is, still a solitude, and to wander off it's very few main roads means perdition. Not even have the people moved suffi- ciently with the times to adapt their homes to modern requirements. Along the roofs of one line of houses in Little Pedlington there still runs the secret escape passage of the snugglers, an arrangement which forhids standing upright in the living rooms below; eve- " house has ts disproportlonate cellar age it's hide and seek passages, it's odd means of egress, it's high lockout win dows and various other peculiarities of Ia business of which the keynote was evasion. Strangers come occasionally out of their way to see our church, be- cause it is fine in itself, and as striking an object in the landscape as the fla nous Pedlngton poplar, which, some say, threw it's straight stem fifty feet into. the air when Dollnesday Book was complied, but they do not know that Pedlington church was as intimately as sociated with the smuggling busness as was the Walnut Tree Inn. at which they have lunched. %.... E.
 Old Slingsby, the last human link to- day between Pedlington and the great past, who died last year, aged one hun dred and three, used to tell how when a new, parson was appointed to Pedling- ton he would find on his lawn in the morning after his arrival a goodly tub of spirits or keg of tobacco or a box of tea or of lace, with a scrawled inti- nation that as long as he was deaf and blind to much that went on around him generally, and in his church particu- lar, all would be we'll with him, and many generations of Pedlington par sons found it worth their while to ac quiesce. It was old Slingsby who point ed out an altar tomb in the church, the emblazoned side of which, being re- moved, revealed a descent into. the valuts below, where collins and kegs stood side by side, and who told of the new parson who was puzzled at the constant smell of tobacco during ser vice time, but who discovered that on Sundays there was usually larger con- gregation under the church than in 1t.
 Times have changed in Little Pedllng- ton since then A smuggler's keg was found in the woods the other day, and was bought by a local dealer in curios at price which would have paid for it when full of spirit, the finder and his friends regarding it with rather more curiosity than were regarded the relics of the Anglo-Saxon warrior found in the chalk pit at about the same time, Still we have some bits of history about us, and if it is only about smuggling it forms a not uninterestng chapter, inas- much as the contrast between what is and what was is so striking.