When they first came together it was agreed between them to quit that part of the town where they were both known, and they afterwards lodged in a very pretty little house on the edge of Red Lion Fields.  On the morning Tim made this discovery, his cash was reduced to a single crown.  It is true he had abundance of things of value, but when once they began to go, he was conscious to himself that starving would be quickly their lot, and what added more to his misfortunes was that his mistress, amidst all her sighs and afflictions, declared she would rather continue with him than go home to her relations, though from the indulgence of a mother she did not doubt of meeting with a good reception.

However, they came to this resolution, that Jenny should go and raise five guineas upon a diamond ring of his, and while she was gone on this errand, poor Benson sat leaning with his head upon his arm in a window that looked towards the fields.  Casting up his eyes by chance, he saw a gentleman walking up and down as if for his diversion, whereupon a thought immediately struck him, that it would be an easy matter to rob him, and by his appearance it was not unlikely but that he might prove a good prize.  Without reflecting, he resolved upon the thing, and putting on over his nightgown an old great coat which he had in his closet and with a case of pistols in his breast, he slipped out at the garden gate without being perceived, and was up with him in an instant.  Then, taking the button of his hat in his teeth, he mumbled out, Deliver or you’re a dead man. The gentleman in great confusion gave him a green purse of gold, and was going to pull his ring off from his finger, and his watch out of his pocket, but Tim stopped him and said he had enough, only commanded him to turn his back towards him, and not to alter his position for fifteen minutes by his own watch.  This the gentleman religiously observed, and Tim made all the haste he could through the garden into his own chamber, where having hid the cloak at the back of the bed, he began to examine the value of the plunder, and found that the purse contained seventy guineas and two diamond rings, one a single stone and a very fine one, the other consisting of seven, but small and of no great value.  These he went down and buried in the garden, having first burnt the purse in the fire.

The hurry of the fact being over, he sat down once again in his own room, and had leisure to reflect a little on what he had done, which threw him into such an agony that he was scarce able to sit upon the chair.  Shame at the villainy he had committed, the fear of being apprehended, and the apprehensions of Tyburn, gave so many wounds to his imagination that he thought his former uneasiness a state of quiet to the pangs which he now felt, which were much more bitter, as well as of a very different nature from anything he had known before.