As he leaned on his pick, peering into the cavern with covetous eyes, but with a wildly-leaping heart, he was aware of an odd movement among the shadows which were elusively outlined by the light of his dip. It was almost as though some of them had an independent individuality, and could have detached themselves from their roots if they wished. It was certain a squat, hump-backed blotch, that was sprawling blackly beside a misshapen block, was either wriggling on the floor as if trying to stand upright . . . or else there was something wrong with his eyes. He stared at the wavering gloom in the cavern, with its quaint, angular splashes of glister, where heads of quartz and patches of mundic caught the light from the unsteady flame of the candle, and presently he was _certain_ that the shadows were alive. Most of all he was sure that the little hump-backed oddity had risen to its feet and was a veritable creature: an actual uncouth, shambling grotesque, instead of a mere flat blotch of shadow. Up waddled the little hump-back to the hole in the wall where Joel stood staring, leaning on his pick. "What can I do for'ee, friend?" he asked huskily: his voice sounding faint, hoarse, and muffled, as if it were coming from an immense distance, or as if the squat little frame had merely borrowed it for the nonce. Joel stared at the speaker, with his lower jaw dropping. "What can I do for'ee, friend?" asked the hump-back; peering at the grimy, half-naked miner, with his little ferrety eyes glowing luminously. Joel moistened his lips with his tongue before he answered. "Nawthin', plaise, sir," he gasped out, quakingly. "Nonsense, my man!" said the hump-back pleasantly, rubbing his hands cheerfully together as he spoke. And Joel noticed that the fingers, though long and skinny--almost wrinkled and lean enough, in fact, to pass for claws--were adorned with several sparkling rings. "Nonsense, my man! I'm your friend--if you'll let me be. O never mind my hump, if it's that that's frightening you, I got that through a fall a long while ago," and the lean brown face puckered into a smile. "Come! In what way can I oblige'ee, friend? I can grant you any wish you like. Say the word--and it's done! Just think what you could do if you had heaps of money, now--piles of suvrins in that owld chest in your bedroom, instead o' they paltry two-an'-twenty suvrins which you now got heeded away in the skibbet." Joel stared at the speaker with distended eyes: the great beads of perspiration gathering on his forehead. "How ded'ee come to knaw they was there?" he asked. "I knaw more than that," said the hump-back, laughing. "I could tell'ee a thing or two, b'leeve, if I wanted to. I knaw tin,[A] cumraade, as well as the next." And with that he began to chuckle to himself. "Wedn'ee like they two-an'-twenty suvrins in the skibbet made a hunderd-an'-twenty?" asked the hump-back insinuatingly. "Iss, by Gosh, I should!" said Joel.