rom the _Elector_ Schooner,
21 June 1757.

Of life bereft (by fell design),
I mingle with my fellow clay.
On God's protection I recline
To save me in the Judgement Day.

There too must you, cruel man, appear,
Repent ere it be all too late;
Or else a dreadful sentence fear,
For God will sure revenge my fate.

The Reverend Mr. Glennie wrote the verses, and I knew them by heart, for
he had given me a copy; indeed, the whole village had rung with the tale
of David's death, and it was yet in every mouth. He was only child to
Elzevir Block, who kept the Why Not? inn at the bottom of the village,
and was with the contrabandiers, when their ketch was boarded that June
night by the Government schooner. People said that it was Magistrate
Maskew of Moonfleet Manor who had put the Revenue men on the track, and
anyway he was on board the _Elector_ as she overhauled the ketch. There
was some show of fighting when the vessels first came alongside, of one
another, and Maskew drew a pistol and fired it off in young David's face,
with only the two gunwales between them. In the afternoon of Midsummer's
Day the _Elector_ brought the ketch into Moonfleet, and there was a posse
of constables to march the smugglers off to Dorchester Jail. The
prisoners trudged up through the village ironed two and two together,
while people stood at their doors or followed them, the men greeting them
with a kindly word, for we knew most of them as Ringstave and Monkbury
men, and the women sorrowing for their wives. But they left David's body
in the ketch, so the boy paid dear for his night's frolic.

'Ay, 'twas a cruel, cruel thing to fire on so young a lad,' Ratsey said,
as he stepped back a pace to study the effect of a flag that he was
chiselling on the Revenue schooner, 'and trouble is likely to come to
the other poor fellows taken, for Lawyer Empson says three of them will
surely hang at next Assize. I recollect', he went on, 'thirty years ago,
when there was a bit of a scuffle between the _Royal Sophy_ and the
_Marnhull_, they hanged four of the contrabandiers, and my old father
caught his death of cold what with going to see the poor chaps turned off
at Dorchester, and standing up to his knees in the river Frome to get a
sight of them, for all the countryside was there, and such a press there
was no place on land. There, that's enough,' he said, turning again to
the gravestone. 'On Monday I'll line the ports in black, and get a brush
of