You must know that this country is particularly favourable to the commerce of a set of desperate men from the Isle of Man, which is nearly opposite.

These smugglers are numerous, resolute, and formidable, and have at different times become the dread of the neighbourhood when any one has interfered with their contraband trade.
The local magistrates, from timidity or worse motives, have become shy of acting against them, and impunity has rendered them equally daring and desperate.

With all this my father, a stranger in the land, and invested with no official authority, had, one would think, nothing to do.

But it must be owned that, as he himself expresses it, he was born when Mars was lord of his ascendant, and that strife and bloodshed find him out in circumstances and situations the most retired and pacific.
'About eleven o'clock on last Tuesday morning, while Hazlewood and my father were proposing to walk to a little lake about three miles' distance, for the purpose of shooting wild ducks, and while Lucy and I were busied with arranging our plan of work and study for the day, we were alarmed by the sound of horses' feet advancing very fast up the avenue.

The ground was hardened by a severe frost, which made the clatter of the hoofs sound yet louder and sharper.