se of the other rocks which
lay scattered around. His voluntary walks, it will readily be believed,
had never led to this spot; so that, finding himself now there for the
first time after the terrible catastrophe, the scene at once recurred to
his mind with all its accompaniments of horror. He remembered how, like a
guilty thing, gliding from the neighbouring place of concealment, he had
mingled with eagerness, yet with caution, among the terrified group who
surrounded the corpse, dreading lest any one should ask from whence he
came. He remembered, too, with what conscious fear he had avoided gazing
upon that ghastly spectacle. The wild scream of his patron, 'My bairn! my
bairn!' again rang in his ears. 'Good God!' he exclaimed, 'and is all I
have gained worth the agony of that moment, and the thousand anxious
fears and horrors which have since embittered my life! O how I wish that
I lay where that wretched man lies, and that he stood here in life and
health! But these regrets are all too late.'

Stifling, therefore, his feelings, he crept forward to the cave, which
was so near the spot where the body was found that the smugglers might
have heard from their hiding-place the various conjectures of the
bystanders concerning the fate of their victim. But nothing could be more
completely concealed than the entrance to their asylum. The opening, not
larger than that of a fox-earth, lay in the face of the cliff directly
behind a large black rock, or rather upright stone, which served at once
to conceal it from strangers and as a mark to point out its situation to
those who used it as a place of retreat. The space between the stone and
the cliff was exceedingly narrow, and, being heaped with sand and other
rubbish, the most minute search would not have discovered the mouth of
the cavern without removing those substances which the tide had drifted
before it. For the purpose of further concealment, it was usual with the
contraband traders who frequented this haunt, after they had entered, to
stuff the mouth with withered seaweed, loosely piled together as if
carried there by the waves. Dirk Hatteraick had not forgotten this
precaution.

Glossin, though a bold and hardy man, felt his heart throb and his knees
knock together when he prepared to enter this den of secret iniquity, in
order to hold conference with a felon, whom he justly accounted one of
the most desperate and depraved of men. 'But he has no interest to injure
me,'