Near to the spot on which Snow Hill and Holborn Hill meet, there opens, upon the right hand as you come out of the city, a narrow and dismal alley leading to Saffron Hill. In its filthy shops are exposed for sale huge bunches of second-hand silk handkerchiefs, of all sizes and patterns—for here reside the traders who purchase them from pickpockets. Hundreds of these handkerchiefs hang dangling from pegs outside the windows, or flaunting from the door-posts; and the shelves within are piled with them. Confined as the limits of Field Lane are, it has its barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse. It is a commercial colony of itself, the emporium of petty larceny, visited at early morning and setting-in of dusk by silent merchants, who traffic in dark back-parlours, and go as strangely as they come. Here the clothesman, the shoe-vamper, and the rag-merchant, display their goods as sign-boards to the petty thief; and stores of old iron and bones, and heaps of mildewy fragments of woollen-stuff and linen, rust and rot in the grimy cellars. It was into this place that the Jew turned. He was well known to the sallow denizens of the lane, for such of them as were on the lookout to buy or sell nodded familiarly as he passed along. He replied to their salutations in the same way, but bestowed no closer recognition until he reached the further end of the alley, when he stopped to address a salesman of small stature, who had squeezed as much of his person into a child’s chair as the chair would hold, and was smoking a pipe at his warehouse door. “Why, the sight of you, Mr. Fagin, would cure the hoptalmy!” said this respectable trader, in acknowledgment of the Jew’s inquiry after his health. “The neighbourhood was a little too hot, Lively,” said Fagin, elevating his eyebrows, and crossing his hands upon his shoulders. “Well! I’ve heerd that complaint of it once or twice before,” replied the trader; “but it soon cools down again; don’t you find it so?” Fagin nodded in the affirmative, and pointing in the direction of Saffron Hill, inquired whether any one was up yonder to-night. “At the Cripples?” inquired the man. The Jew nodded. “Let me see,” pursued the merchant, reflecting. “Yes; there’s some half-dozen of ’em gone in that I knows. I don’t think your friend’s there.” “Sikes is not, I suppose?” inquired the Jew, with a disappointed countenance. “_Non istwentus_, as the lawyers say,” replied the little man, shaking his head, and looking amazingly sly. “Have you got anything in my line to-night?” “Nothing to-night,” said the Jew, turning away. “Are you going up to the Cripples, Fagin?” cried the little man, calling after him. “Stop! I don’t mind if I have a drop there with you!”