"I'll tell you what, Simes," he said--"you think that Martin and I do this out of regard to Bill Barham; but I tell you it is no such thing. I do it only because I think that such good luck does not fall in a man's way every day. Did you ever see a blackbird, on a sunshiny morning, sitting upon a bough, and singing as quietly as I might do at the club? Well, if he sees a great fat worm wriggle out his head, down he pounces upon him, and never ceases pulling till he has got him all out of his hole. Well, I am the blackbird, and this Old Miser Carr is the worm. I have sat cherupping here in London for a long while, till I got scent of this old fellow, and now I'll pounce upon him just like a sparrow-hawk upon a ground-lark. We will get help enough, if you don't like to go; it's not every man that has the same liberality of feeling as you think you have, to refuse his share of four or five thousand pound, just for a little bit of a smash that can be done in a minute, and we can be all over to Sheffield again, and then to London, before any one knows that we have been in the place at all. If the thing were to be done near town, I would not press it upon you, gentlemen, for there's all the risk in the world of being trapped, if we do such things too near home. But down there it's easy to do, and not easy to discover; and when four or five thousand pound is to be got, it's worth the touch of a crow-bar, or ten minutes' work with the centrebit." "Ay, but there's the job!" cried the man he called Simes; "I want to be made sure that the thing's worth the journey. I can pick up a nice little living here in London, without going down into Yorkshire, and perhaps getting myself hanged into the bargain; so let me be sure, I say, that there is this tin, or I shall say, I would rather be excused. I am not fond of eating an empty pudding, and do not particularly like the cordwainer's company. I don't choose to be made a freeman of it, and wear the riband upon the jugular; not that I am afraid, when there's anything really to be done, but I should like to know more about the money first." "Why, as for that, Mr. Simes," observed a stout man, with a hawk's nose, on his right hand; "you see I knew the country well enough, not long ago, when I used to do a little with the thimbles, at Doncaster. You may recollect that we, one time, had an engagement with the other gentlemen of the course; but they were too much for us, and drove us off with the butt ends of their horsewhips, and then we scattered about the country. Well, I had a gossip with one of the maids there, and sold her some real French muslin, which I picked up at York, and I asked her all about her master, Old Carr; the miser, as they called him in those parts, and she said he was prodigious rich, and never had less than two or three thousand pounds in the house, besides lots of plate."