f Valenciennes, and a velvet hood--
A present from the Gentlemen, along o' being good!
Five and twenty ponies
Trotting through the dark--
Brandy for the Parson,
'Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie--
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!"

The memory of smuggling under Leith Hill has, indeed, lasted into the
last decade. Mr. H.E. Malden, the Surrey historian to whom all Surrey
writers and readers owe so much, tells us in a paper on Holmbury Hill
and its neighbourhood that he personally knew an old man, a native of
Coldharbour, who had actually seen the game going on. He was born, it is
true, in 1802, but he lived to be a hundred years old, and to talk to
Mr. Malden discreetly about what he had seen. In his conversation Mr.
Malden remarks with proper tranquillity "he indicated this and that
respectable neighbour. Well, he said, his grandfather, and _his_
grandfather and so on, knew something about the smuggling. He, of
course, had done nothing in that way, but he remembered his father
holding open the gate at the end of Crocker's Lane, Coldharbour, for a
body of men on horseback, each with a keg of brandy behind him, to ride
through. A man with whom he had worked told him how he was witness of a
scene when a bold gatekeeper refused to open his turnpike gate to a body
of armed men on horseback, who, after threatening him in vain, turned
aside across the fields." Relics of the past still remain in the
district. Under Holmbury Hill there is a cottage of which the cellars
run right back into the hill; tradition has placed kegs of brandy in
them. A naval cutlass was picked up some thirty years ago in a field by
Leith Hill--possibly it was used in a smugglers' fray with King George's
men. Nor was it long ago that a trackway which runs from Forest Green,
two miles to the west of Ockley, through Tanhurst over Leith Hill, was
known as the Smuggler's Way.

Surrey yeomen come nowhere of better stock than the oldest Ockley
families. Aubrey tells a story of one of the Eversheds of Ockley, who,
when the heralds made their visitation, was urged to take a coat of
arms. "He told them that he knew no difference between gentlemen and
yeomen, but that the latter were the better men, and that they were
really gentlemen only, who had longer preserved their estates and
patrimonies in the same place, without waste or dissipation; an
observatio