At first, these reports caused much amusement to Falcon; but gradually he began to entertain the notion that a spirit might sometime reveal a treasure to him, and he no longer contradicted his acquaintances when they twitted him on the subject. He continued his usual occupations, but with far less zeal than before, and often consumed a great part of the time, that he had formerly passed in fishing or other useful avocations, in idle search for some kind of an adventure by which he should suddenly become rich. To still further complete this unfortunate tendency of his mind, it happened that as he was standing one day on the lonely sea-shore, looking out on the restless sea as if he were expecting his good fortune would come from thence, a large wave rolled a yellow ball to his feet amongst a mass of moss and loosened stone--a ball of gold! Falcon stood as if bewitched. His hopes, then, had not been unsubstantial dreams; the sea had given him gold, beautiful shining gold, the fragment probably of a heavy bar of gold which the sea had rolled on its bottom into the size and shape of a musket ball. And now it was clear to his mind that somewhere on this coast there must have been a treasure ship wrecked, and that he had been selected as the chosen one to raise this buried treasure from the sea. From this time forth, this search for treasure became the passion of his life. He strove to conceal the golden nugget even from his friend, so that others might not discover his purpose. He neglected everything else, and spent his days and nights on this coast, not casting his net for fishes, but throwing out a scoop, that he had specially prepared for the purpose, for gold. But he found poverty instead of wealth; for he earned nothing now himself, and Kaspar's sleepy efforts would not support them both. In the search for the larger mass of gold, not only the nugget was used up, but the entire property of the two men as well. But as Strumpf had formerly received the largest part of his living by Falcon's efforts, taking it all as a matter of course, so now he looked on the profitless undertaking of his friend silently and without a murmur; and it was just this meek forbearance on the part of his friend that spurred Falcon on to continue his restless search for wealth. But what made him still more active in his search was, that as often as he laid down to rest and closed his eyes in sleep, a word was sounded in his ear that he seemed to have heard very plainly, and that always appeared to be the same word, and yet he could never recall it. To be sure, he did not see what connection this circumstance, singular as it was, might have with his present purpose; but upon a spirit like William Falcon's everything made an impression, and even this mysterious whisper helped to strengthen his belief that great good luck was in store for him, which he expected to find only in a heap of gold.