erty
and life had been risked flowed into the gutters like so much water.

In vain had Adam, to whom these scenes afforded nothing but anger and
disgust, used all his endeavors to persuade his fellow-workers to give
up running the vessel ashore with the cargo in her. The Polperro men,
except under necessity, turned a deaf ear to his entreaties, and in many
cases preferred risking a seizure to foregoing the fool-hardy
recklessness of openly defying the arm of the law. The plan which Adam
would have seen universally adopted here, as it was in most of the other
places round the coast, was that of dropping the kegs, slung on a rope,
into the sea, and (securing them by an anchor) leaving them there until
some convenient season, when, certain of not being disturbed, they were
landed, and either removed to a more distant hiding-place or conveyed at
once to their final destination. But all this involved immediate trouble
and delay, and the men, who without a complaint or murmur would endure
weeks of absence from their homes, the moment those homes came in sight
grew irritable under control and impatient of all authority.

With a spirit of independence which verged on rebellion, with an
uncertain temperament in which good and bad lay jostled together so
haphazard that to calculate which at any given moment might come
uppermost was an impossibility, these sons of the sea were hard to lead
and impossible to drive. Obstinate, credulous, superstitious, they
looked askant on innovation and hated change, fearing lest it should
turn away the luck which they vaunted in the face of discretion, making
it their boast that so many years had gone by since any mischance had
overtaken the Polperro folk that they could afford to laugh at the
soldiers before their faces and snap their fingers at the cruisers
behind their backs.

Under these circumstances it was not to be supposed that Adam's
arguments proved very effective: no proposition he made was ever
favorably received, and this one was more than usually unpopular. So, in
spite of his prejudice against a rule which necessitated the sequence
of riot and disorder, he had been forced to give in, and to content
himself by using his authority to control violence and stem as much as
possible the tide of excess. It was no small comfort to him that Eve was
absent, and the knowledge served to smooth his temper and keep down his
irritability. Besides which, his spirits had risen to no common height