rob a goose's nest; he has some loose silver
change in his wet hand, and my boy understands that it has come out of
one of the goose eggs. This fact, which he never thought of questioning,
gets mixed up in his mind with an idea of riches, of treasure-trove, in
the cellar of an old house that has been torn down near the end of the
bridge.

On the bridge he first saw the crazy man who belongs in every boy's
town. In this one he was a hapless, harmless creature, whom the boys
knew as Solomon Whistler, perhaps because his name was Whistler, perhaps
because he whistled; though when my boy met him midway of the bridge, he
marched swiftly and silently by, with his head high and looking neither
to the right nor to the left, with an insensibility to the boy's
presence that froze his blood and shrivelled him up with terror. As his
fancy early became the sport of playfellows not endowed with one so
vivid, he was taught to expect that Solomon Whistler would get him some
day, though what he would do with him when he had got him his anguish
must have been too great even to let him guess. Some of the boys said
Solomon had gone crazy from fear of being drafted in the war of 1812;
others that he had been crossed in love; but my boy did not quite know
then what either meant. He only knew that Solomon Whistler lived at the
poor-house beyond the eastern border of the town, and that he ranged
between this sojourn and the illimitable wilderness north of the town on
the western shore of the river. The crazy man was often in the boy's
dreams, the memories of which blend so with the memories of real
occurrences: he could not tell later whether he once crossed the bridge
when the footway had been partly taken up, and he had to walk on the
girders, or whether he only dreamed of that awful passage. It was quite
fearful enough to cross when the footway was all down, and he could see
the blue gleam of the river far underneath through the cracks between
the boards. It made his brain reel; and he felt that he took his life in
his hand whenever he entered the bridge, even when he had grown old
enough to be making an excursion with some of his playmates to the farm
of an uncle of theirs who lived two miles up the river. The farmer gave
them all the watermelons they wanted to eat, and on the way home, when
they lay resting under the sycamores on the river-bank, Solomon Whistler
passed by in the middle of the road, silent, swift, straight onward. I
do not