Reckless as impunity in crime had made him, he was not dull enough to ignore the stupendous risk of such a colossal piece of knavery. But the excitement of carrying out Goodhare’s daring plans had now become necessary to his jaded senses, on which the risks of smaller and meaner thefts were beginning to pall. Trusting, therefore, to the fertile invention of the elder man for the details of the plot, he at once set to work on the preliminaries Amos had suggested, and persuaded the reluctant Sep to do the same. Weeks passed on, during which Amos put the younger men through their paces with regard to their recently acquired knowledge of the geography of the Tower, tested Rees’s progress in the art of using a file expeditiously and without noise, and caused him to forge letters from Lord Wenlock, until he produced one which the general himself might have mistaken for the production of his own pen. Then, when all was ready, came a spell of bright weather; and Amos, who had implicit faith in the disorganising powers of fog, waited until the kindly brown cloak was again drawn over the sky. One morning in the middle of February he announced that all was ready, and that the attempt would be made that day. Sep, whom Amos had kept under his own eye for a week or more, made his way through a thick sepia-colored mist to the Tower, presented the forged letter, and after only a short delay was admitted to the Wakefield, or Record, Tower, where the Crown jewels were kept, and accommodated with a seat. The day was so dark, and the consequent difficulties of locomotion were so great, that only very few visitors came to the tower at all. These few were chiefly of the country cousin sort, and those who came into the Record Tower did not scruple to crowd round Sep, and to pass their opinion, in loud whispers, on the merits of the series of neat little pen-and-ink drawings which he was making from different points of view, so that from time to time the warder, who stood at the door, had to come forward and beg them not to interrupt the gentleman.