er of the lugger shouted out, 'the _Jennie_ of Portsmouth.'
'Lend a hand, lads, with the sails,' he whispered to us; 'slip the
cable, Tom.' We ran up the sails in a jiffy, you may be sure, and all
the sharper that, as they were half-way up, four guns flashed out. One
hulled the lugger, the others flew overhead. Close as they were they
could not have seen us, for we could scarce see them and we were under
the shadow of the cliffs, but I suppose they fired at the voices. 'Sink
the tubs, lads,' the skipper said as the lugger glided away from us.
There was a nice little air blowing off shore, and she shot away into
the darkness in no time. We all rowed into the mouth of the cove for
shelter, and were only just in time, for a shower of grape splashed the
water up a few yards behind us.

"We talked it over for a minute or two, and settled that the _Boxer_
would be off after the lugger and would not pay any more attention to
us. Some of them were in favour of taking the kegs that we had got
ashore, but the most of us were agin that, and the captain himself had
told us to sink them, so we rowed out of the cove again and tied sinkers
to the kegs and lowered them down three or four hundred yards west of
the mouth of the cove. We went on board our boats and the other chaps
went on shore, and you may guess we were not long in getting up our
sails and creeping out of the cove. It was half an hour after the first
shots were fired before we heard the _Boxer_ at it again. I reckon that
in the darkness they could not make out whether the lugger had kept
along east or west under the cliffs, and I expect they went the wrong
way at first, and only found her at last with their night-glasses when
she was running out to sea.

"Well, next morning we heard that the shore men had not landed five
minutes when there was a rush of forty or fifty revenue men into the
village. There ain't no doubt they had only gone west to throw us off
our guard, and, as soon as it was dark, turned and went eastward. They
could not have known that the job was to come off at Lulworth, but were
on the look-out all along, and I reckon that it was the same with the
_Boxer_. She must have beaten back as soon as it was dark enough for her
not to be seen from the hills, and had been crawling along on the
look-out close to the shore, when she may have caught sight of the
lugger's signal. Indeed, we heard afterwards that it called back the
coast-guard men, for they had pass