calls it, a pond of gold fish. But all this you will soon learn for
yourself." The coach now stopped on a rising ground, which showed the
little fishing village beneath us, basking in the glow of sunset. My
cicerone got down, and bade me farewell. On enquiring his name from my
fellow-travellers, a group of Sussex farmers, I found a general
disinclination to touch on the subject. Even the coachman, the
established source of information on all topics, exhibited no wish to
discuss the stranger; his official loquacity was almost dumb. "He merely
believed that he was something in the navy, or in the army, or in
something or other; but he was often in those parts, and generally
travelled to London by the Royal Sussex Stage."

No country in Europe has changed its appearance more than the greater
part of England during the last fifty years. Sussex was then as wild as
the wildest heath of Yorkshire. The population, too, looked as wild as
the landscape. This was once the very land of the bold smuggler; the
haunt of the dashing defier of the customhouse officer, who in those
days generally knew his antagonist too well to interfere with his days
or nights, the run between every port of the west of France and the
coasts of the Channel, being, in fact, as familiar to both as the
lounger in Bond Street to the beau of the day.

We passed groups of men, who, when they had not the sailor's dress, had
the sailor's look; some trudging along the road-side, evidently not in
idleness; others mounted on the short rough horse of the country, and
all knowing and known by our coachman.

On our passing one group, leaning with their backs against one of the
low walls which seemed the only enclosure of this rugged region, I,
half-laughingly, hinted to one of my neighbours, a giant of a