"By gum! you've got it.

That's what I was a-driving at.

That's Silas.

I call to mind when he was a boy--pretty dirty and ragged he was too--as he used to lean over the parapet of Blackfriars Bridge and watch the current sort of swirling round the piers, and he used to say as how he could hear what the river was saying.

I used to think him loony.