on very frankly, that he must not look to being set
up in business by _him_: with seven sons, and one of them a very healthy
and well-developed idiot, who consumed a dumpling about eight inches in
diameter every day, it was pretty well if they got a hundred apiece at
his death. Under these circumstances, what was David to do? It was
certainly hard that he should take his mother's money; but he saw no
other ready means of getting any, and it was not to be expected that a
young man of his merit should put up with inconveniences that could be
avoided. Besides, it is not robbery to take property belonging to your
mother: she doesn't prosecute you. And David was very well behaved to
his mother; he comforted her by speaking highly of himself to her, and
assuring her that he never fell into the vices he saw practised by other
youths of his own age, and that he was particularly fond of honesty. If
his mother would have given him her twenty guineas as a reward of this
noble disposition, he really would not have stolen them from her, and it
would have been more agreeable to his feelings. Nevertheless, to an
active mind like David's, ingenuity is not without its pleasures: it was
rather an interesting occupation to become stealthily acquainted with the
wards of his mother's simple key (not in the least like Chubb's patent),
and to get one that would do its work equally well; and also to arrange a
little drama by which he would escape suspicion, and run no risk of
forfeiting the prospective hundred at his father's death, which would be
convenient in the improbable case of his _not_ making a large fortune in
the "Indies."

First, he spoke freely of his intention to start shortly for Liverpool
and take ship for America; a resolution which cost his good mother some
pain, for, after Jacob the idiot, there was not one of her sons to whom
her heart clung more than to her youngest-born, David. Next, it appeared
to him that Sunday afternoon, when everybody was gone to church except
Jacob and the cowboy, was so singularly favourable an opportunity for
sons who wanted to appropriate their mothers' guineas, that he half
thought it must have been kindly intended by Providence for such
purposes. Especially the third Sunday in Lent; because Jacob had been
out on one of his occasional wanderings for the last two days; and David,
being a timid young man, had a considerable dread and hatred of Jacob, as
of a large personage who went about ha