lived at Market Cross House. Collins
employed his men not only in assisting him in smuggling, but for other
purposes removed from that calling by a wide gulf. Thus when Mr. Betts,
the minister of the Lady Huntingdon chapel at Alfriston, was
high-handedly suspended by the chief trustee of the chapel, on account
of his opposition to that gentleman's proposed union with his deceased
wife's sister, it was Collins's gang who invaded the chapel, ejected the
new minister, replaced Mr. Betts in the pulpit, and mounted guard round
it while he continued the service. Mr. Betts was equal to the occasion:
he gave out the hymn "God moves in a mysterious way."

Collins terrorised the country-side for some years (except upon the
score of personal bravery and humorous audacity, I doubt if his place is
quite on the golden roll of smugglers) and was at length brought within
the power of the law for sheep-stealing, and sentenced to seven years.
The last of his gang, Bob Hall, died in the workhouse at Eastbourne in
1895, aged ninety-four.

[Sidenote: THE CHURCH COMPLAISANT]

Sussex may always be proud of her best smugglers. There were brutal
scoundrels among them, such as the men that murdered Chater and were
executed at Chichester in 1748 (the report may be read in Mr. H. L.
Stephen's _State Trials_, vol. iv.); but the ordinary smuggler was often
a fine rebellious fellow, courageous, resourceful, and gifted with a
certain grim humour that led him, as we have seen, to hide his tubs as
often in the belfry or the churchyard as anywhere else, and enough
knowledge of character to tell him when he might secure the silence of
the vicar with an oblatory keg. The Sussex clergy seemed to have needed
very little encouragement to omit smuggling from the decalogue. It is, I
think, the late Mr. Coker Egerton, of Burwash, who tells of a Sussex
parson feigning illness a whole Sunday on hearing suddenly in the
morning that a cargo, hard pressed by the revenue, had in despair been
lodged among his pews. But the classical passage on this subject comes
from Cornwall, from the pen of R. S. Hawker, the vicar of Morwenstowe
and the author of "The Song of the Western Men." He was not himself a
smuggler, but his parishioners had no scruples, and his heart was with
the braver side of the business:--

It was full sea in the evening of an autumn day when a traveller
arrived where the road ran along by a sandy beach just above
high-water mark. Th