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Mr Jones was a retired exciseman, and of the description of man known as dapper; he was a little, fat, chubby fellow, who dressed very smartly, always wearing white trousers in the summer, and a buff waistcoat, made so as to show as much shirt-front and as little waistcoat as possible.
Wood, to say, that an order was gone off, by the same post, to direct the officers of excise in Bristol to restore the cask of colouring without delay; and almost as soon as this letter had come to hand, and before I could place it upon the file, one of the exciseman came quite out of breath to say that an order had arrived from the board of excise in London, to restore the cask of colouring, and it was quite at my service, whenever I pleased to send for it.
Why now, there is above forty shillings for window-lights, and yet we have stopt up all we could; we have almost blinded the house, I am sure. Says I to the exciseman, says I, I think you oft to favour us; I am sure we are very good friends to the government: and so we are for sartain, for we pay a mint of money to 'um.
'O, that Kennedy was murdered: it's an old case which has occurred on that coast before now, the case of Smuggler versus Exciseman. 'What, then, is your conjecture concerning the fate of the child? 'O, murdered too, doubtless, answered Pleydell.
"I say he sat by hisself; and I hear the listening ghost of him call me a liar. For there were another body present, though invisible to mortal eye; and that second party were Exciseman Jones, who was hidden up the chimney. "How had he inveigled him there? Ah, they've met and worried that point out since. No other will ever know the truth this side the grave.
His education therefore had been but indifferently attended to; and after being taken from a country school, at which he had been boarded, the young gentleman was suffered to be his own master in the subsequent branches of literature, with some assistance from the parson of the parish in languages and philosophy, and from the exciseman in arithmetic and book-keeping.
And the thought of this old exciseman, who once lipped and fingered on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the mountain air, and the words of the song he affected, carry your mind "Over the hills and far away" to distant countries; and you have a vision of Edinburgh not, as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood, but as a boss upon the round world with all Europe and the deep sea for her surroundings.
Your name is not Clarke, but Westhouse, or Waterhouse, and you are the same cursed exciseman who snackled our poor comrade, Cooper Dick, and swore away his life at Ilchester. 'I swear that you are mistaken, I replied. 'I have never in my life been in these parts before. 'Fine words! Fine words! cried another smuggler. 'Gauger or no, you must jump for it, since you know the secret of our cave.
The fellow at the door was an exciseman a race everywhere detested and with good cause, for besides the insolence of their manners nothing makes a man feel more like a slave than the inquisitorial search they are accustomed to make through one's clothes and most secret possessions.
But, in all charity, let us remember that it is not alone the poor exciseman who is dead, but the rare poet, who has intoned a prayer for ten thousand lips, "That He, who stills the raven's clamorous nest, And decks the lily fair in flowery pride, Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best, For them and for their little ones provide, But chiefly in their hearts with grace divine preside."
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