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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dolliver Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+#10 in our series by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
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+Title: The Dolliver Romance
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7119]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 12, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Mark Zinthefer, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+BY
+
+NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+A SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+ANOTHER SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+ANOTHER FRAGMENT OF THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
+
+THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
+
+
+In "The Dolliver Romance," only three chapters of which the author lived
+to complete, we get an intimation as to what would have been the ultimate
+form given to that romance founded on the Elixir of Life, for which
+"Septimius Felton" was the preliminary study. Having abandoned this study,
+and apparently forsaken the whole scheme in 1862, Hawthorne was moved to
+renew his meditation upon it in the following year; and as the plan of the
+romance had now seemingly developed to his satisfaction, he listened to
+the publisher's proposal that it should begin its course as a serial story
+in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1864--the first instance in which
+he had attempted such a mode of publication.
+
+But the change from England to Massachusetts had been marked by, and had
+perhaps in part caused, a decline in his health. Illness in his family,
+the depressing and harrowing effect of the Civil War upon his
+sensibilities, and anxiety with regard to pecuniary affairs, all combined
+to make still further inroads upon his vitality; and so early as the
+autumn of 1862 Mrs. Hawthorne noted in her private diary that her husband
+was looking "miserably ill." At no time since boyhood had he suffered any
+serious sickness, and his strong constitution enabled him to rally from
+this first attack; but the gradual decline continued. After sending forth
+"Our Old Home," he had little strength for any employment more arduous
+than reading, or than walking his accustomed path among the pines and
+sweetfern on the hill behind The Wayside, known to his family as the Mount
+of Vision. The projected work, therefore, advanced but slowly. He wrote to
+Mr. Fields:--
+
+"I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the
+Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters
+ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel
+as if I should never carry it through."
+
+The presentiment proved to be only too well founded. He had previously
+written:--
+
+"There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at
+the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to be
+encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a
+sunshiny book."
+
+And again, in November, he says: "I foresee that there is little
+probability of my getting the first chapter ready by the 15th, although I
+have a resolute purpose to write it by the end of the month." He did
+indeed send it by that time, but it began to be apparent in January that
+he could not go on.
+
+"Seriously," he says, in one letter, "my mind has, for the present, lost
+its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better
+keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor if I wait quietly
+for it; perhaps not." In another: "I hardly know what to say to the public
+about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will
+be. I shall never finish it.... I cannot finish it unless a great change
+comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my
+death."
+
+Finally, work had to be given over indefinitely. In April he went
+southward with Mr. Ticknor, the senior partner of his publishing house;
+but Mr. Ticknor died suddenly in Philadelphia, and Hawthorne returned to
+The Wayside more feeble than ever. He lingered there a little while. Then,
+early in May, came the last effort to recover tone, by means of a
+carriage-journey, with his friend Ex-President Pierce, through the
+southern part of New Hampshire. A week passed, and all was ended: at the
+hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he and his companion had stopped
+to rest, he died in the night, between the 18th and the 19th of May, 1864.
+Like Thackeray and Dickens, he was touched by death's "petrific mace"
+before he had had time to do more than lay the groundwork and begin the
+main structure of the fiction he had in hand; and, as in the case of
+Thackeray, the suddenness of his decease has never been clearly accounted
+for. The precise nature of his malady was not known, since with quiet
+hopelessness he had refused to take medical advice. His friend Dr. Oliver
+Wendell Holmes was the only physician who had an opportunity to take even
+a cursory view of his case, which he did in the course of a brief walk and
+conversation in Boston before Hawthorne started with Mr. Pierce; but he
+was unable, with that slight opportunity, to reach any definite
+conclusion. Dr. Holmes prescribed and had put up for him a remedy to
+palliate some of the poignant symptoms, and this Hawthorne carried with
+him; but "I feared," Dr. Holmes writes to the editor, "that there was some
+internal organic--perhaps malignant--disease; for he looked wasted and as
+if stricken with a mortal illness."
+
+The manuscript of the unfinished "Dolliver Romance" lay upon his coffin
+during the funeral services at Concord, but, contrary to the impression
+sometimes entertained on this point, was not buried with him. It is
+preserved in the Concord Public Library. The first chapter was published
+in the "Atlantic" as an isolated portion, soon after his death; and
+subsequently the second chapter, which he had been unable to revise,
+appeared in the same periodical. Between this and the third fragment there
+is a gap, for bridging which no material was found among his papers; but,
+after hesitating for several years, Mrs. Hawthorne copied and placed in
+the publishers' hands that final portion, which, with the two parts
+previously printed, constitutes the whole of what Hawthorne had put into
+tangible form.
+
+Hawthorne had purposed prefixing a sketch of Thoreau, "because, from a
+tradition which he told me about this house of mine, I got the idea of a
+deathless man, which is now taking a shape very different from the
+original one." This refers to the tradition mentioned in the editor's
+note to "Septimius Felton," and forms a link in the interesting chain of
+evidence connecting that romance with the "Dolliver Romance." With the
+plan respecting Thoreau he combined the idea of writing an
+autobiographical preface, wherein The Wayside was to be described, after
+the manner of his Introduction to the "Mosses from an Old Manse"; but, so
+far as is known, nothing of this was ever actually committed to paper.
+
+Beginning with the idea of producing an English romance, fragments of
+which remain to us in "The Ancestral Footstep," and the incomplete work
+known as "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret," he replaced these by another design,
+of which "Septimius Felton" represents the partial execution. But that
+elaborate study yielded, in its turn, to "The Dolliver Romance." The last-
+named work, had the author lived to carry it out, would doubtless have
+become the vehicle of a profound and pathetic drama, based on the
+instinctive yearning of man for an immortal existence, the attempted
+gratification of which would have been set forth in a variety of ways:
+First, through the selfish old sensualist, Colonel Dabney, who greedily
+seized the mysterious elixir and took such a draught of it that he
+perished on the spot; then, through the simple old Grandsir, anxious to
+live for Pansie's sake; and, perhaps, through Pansie herself, who, coming
+into the enjoyment of some ennobling love, would wish to defeat death, so
+that she might always keep the perfection of her mundane happiness,--all
+these forms of striving to be made the adumbration of a higher one, the
+shadow-play that should direct our minds to the true immortality beyond
+this world.
+
+G. P. L.
+
+
+
+
+THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
+
+A SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
+
+
+Dr. Dolliver, a worthy personage of extreme antiquity, was aroused rather
+prematurely, one summer morning, by the shouts of the child Pansie, in an
+adjoining chamber, summoning old Martha (who performed the duties of
+nurse, housekeeper, and kitchen-maid, in the Doctor's establishment) to
+take up her little ladyship and dress her. The old gentleman woke with
+more than his customary alacrity, and, after taking a moment to gather his
+wits about him, pulled aside the faded moreen curtains of his ancient bed,
+and thrust his head into a beam of sunshine that caused him to wink and
+withdraw it again. This transitory glimpse of good Dr. Dolliver showed a
+flannel night-cap, fringed round with stray locks of silvery white hair,
+and surmounting a meagre and duskily yellow visage, which was crossed and
+criss-crossed with a record of his long life in wrinkles, faithfully
+written, no doubt, but with such cramped chirography of Father Time that
+the purport was illegible. It seemed hardly worth while for the patriarch
+to get out of bed any more, and bring his forlorn shadow into the summer
+day that was made for younger folks. The Doctor, however, was by no means
+of that opinion, being considerably encouraged towards the toil of living
+twenty-four hours longer by the comparative ease with which he found
+himself going through the usually painful process of bestirring his rusty
+joints (stiffened by the very rest and sleep that should have made them
+pliable) and putting them in a condition to bear his weight upon the
+floor. Nor was he absolutely disheartened by the idea of those tonsorial,
+ablutionary, and personally decorative labors which are apt to become so
+intolerably irksome to an old gentleman, after performing them daily and
+daily for fifty, sixty, or seventy years, and finding them still as
+immitigably recurrent as at first. Dr. Dolliver could nowise account for
+this happy condition of his spirits and physical energies, until he
+remembered taking an experimental sip of a certain cordial which was long
+ago prepared by his grandson, and carefully sealed up in a bottle, and had
+been reposited in a dark closet, among a parcel of effete medicines, ever
+since that gifted young man's death.
+
+"It may have wrought effect upon me," thought the doctor, shaking his head
+as he lifted it again from the pillow. "It may be so; for poor Edward
+oftentimes instilled a strange efficacy into his perilous drugs. But I
+will rather believe it to be the operation of God's mercy, which may have
+temporarily invigorated my feeble age for little Pansie's sake."
+
+A twinge of his familiar rheumatism, as he put his foot out of bed, taught
+him that he must not reckon too confidently upon even a day's respite from
+the intrusive family of aches and infirmities, which, with their
+proverbial fidelity to attachments once formed, had long been the closest
+acquaintances that the poor old gentleman had in the world. Nevertheless,
+he fancied the twinge a little less poignant than those of yesterday; and,
+moreover, after stinging him pretty smartly, it passed gradually off with
+a thrill, which, in its latter stages, grew to be almost agreeable. Pain
+is but pleasure too strongly emphasized. With cautious movements, and only
+a groan or two, the good Doctor transferred himself from the bed to the
+floor, where he stood awhile, gazing from one piece of quaint furniture to
+another (such as stiff-backed Mayflower chairs, an oaken chest-of-drawers
+carved cunningly with shapes of animals and wreaths of foliage, a table
+with multitudinous legs, a family record in faded embroidery, a shelf of
+black-bound books, a dirty heap of gallipots and phials in a dim
+corner),--gazing at these things, and steadying himself by the bedpost,
+while his inert brain, still partially benumbed with sleep, came slowly
+into accordance with the realities about him. The object which most helped
+to bring Dr. Dolliver completely to his waking perceptions was one that
+common observers might suppose to have been snatched bodily out of his
+dreams. The same sunbeam that had dazzled the doctor between the bed-
+curtains gleamed on the weather-beaten gilding which had once adorned this
+mysterious symbol, and showed it to be an enormous serpent, twining round
+a wooden post, and reaching quite from the floor of the chamber to its
+ceiling.
+
+It was evidently a thing that could boast of considerable antiquity, the
+dry-rot having eaten out its eyes and gnawed away the tip of its tail; and
+it must have stood long exposed to the atmosphere, for a kind of gray moss
+had partially overspread its tarnished gilt surface, and a swallow, or
+other familiar little bird in some by-gone summer, seemed to have built
+its nest in the yawning and exaggerated mouth. It looked like a kind of
+Manichean idol, which might have been elevated on a pedestal for a century
+or so, enjoying the worship of its votaries in the open air, until the
+impious sect perished from among men,--all save old Dr. Dolliver, who had
+set up the monster in his bedchamber for the convenience of private
+devotion. But we are unpardonable in suggesting such a fantasy to the
+prejudice of our venerable friend, knowing him to have been as pious and
+upright a Christian, and with as little of the serpent in his character,
+as ever came of Puritan lineage. Not to make a further mystery about a
+very simple matter, this bedimmed and rotten reptile was once the medical
+emblem or apothecary's sign of the famous Dr. Swinnerton, who practised
+physic in the earlier days of New England, when a head of Aesculapius or
+Hippocrates would have vexed the souls of the righteous as savoring of
+heathendom. The ancient dispenser of drugs had therefore set up an image
+of the Brazen Serpent, and followed his business for many years with great
+credit, under this Scriptural device; and Dr. Dolliver, being the
+apprentice, pupil, and humble friend of the learned Swinnerton's old age,
+had inherited the symbolic snake, and much other valuable property by his
+bequest.
+
+While the patriarch was putting on his small-clothes, he took care to
+stand in the parallelogram of bright sunshine that fell upon the
+uncarpeted floor. The summer warmth was very genial to his system, and yet
+made him shiver; his wintry veins rejoiced at it, though the reviving
+blood tingled through them with a half-painful and only half-pleasurable
+titillation. For the first few moments after creeping out of bed, he kept
+his back to the sunny window, and seemed mysteriously shy of glancing
+thitherward; but, as the June fervor pervaded him more and more
+thoroughly, he turned bravely about, and looked forth at a burial-ground
+on the corner of which he dwelt. There lay many an old acquaintance, who
+had gone to sleep with the flavor of Dr. Dolliver's tinctures and powders
+upon his tongue; it was the patient's final bitter taste of this world,
+and perhaps doomed to be a recollected nauseousness in the next.
+Yesterday, in the chill of his forlorn old age, the Doctor expected soon
+to stretch out his weary bones among that quiet community, and might
+scarcely have shrunk from the prospect on his own account, except, indeed,
+that he dreamily mixed up the infirmities of his present condition with
+the repose of the approaching one, being haunted by a notion that the damp
+earth, under the grass and dandelions, must needs be pernicious for his
+cough and his rheumatism. But, this morning, the cheerful sunbeams, or the
+mere taste of his grandson's cordial that he had taken at bedtime, or the
+fitful vigor that often sports irreverently with aged people, had caused
+an unfrozen drop of youthfulness, somewhere within him, to expand.
+
+"Hem! ahem!" quoth the Doctor, hoping with one effort to clear his throat
+of the dregs of a ten-years' cough. "Matters are not so far gone with me
+as I thought. I have known mighty sensible men, when only a little age-
+stricken or otherwise out of sorts, to die of mere faint-heartedness, a
+great deal sooner than they need."
+
+He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass, as if to
+impress the apothegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and, for
+his part, he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he
+possibly could, if it were only for the sake of little Pansie, who stood
+as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the
+other. This child of three years old occupied all the unfossilized portion
+of Dr. Dolliver's heart. Every other interest that he formerly had, and
+the entire confraternity of persons whom he once loved, had long ago
+departed; and the poor Doctor could not follow them, because the grasp of
+Pansie's baby-fingers held him back.
+
+So he crammed a great silver watch into his fob, and drew on a patchwork
+morning-gown of an ancient fashion. Its original material was said to have
+been the embroidered front of his own wedding-waistcoat and the silken
+skirt of his wife's bridal attire, which his eldest granddaughter had
+taken from the carved chest-of-drawers, after poor Bessie, the beloved of
+his youth, had been half a century in the grave. Throughout many of the
+intervening years, as the garment got ragged, the spinsters of the old
+man's family had quilted their duty and affection into it in the shape of
+patches upon patches, rose-color, crimson, blue, violet, and green, and
+then (as their hopes faded, and their life kept growing shadier, and their
+attire took a sombre hue) sober gray and great fragments of funereal
+black, until the Doctor could revive the memory of most things that had
+befallen him by looking at his patchwork-gown, as it hung upon a chair.
+And now it was ragged again, and all the fingers that should have mended
+it were cold. It had an Eastern fragrance, too, a smell of drugs, strong-
+scented herbs, and spicy gums, gathered from the many potent infusions
+that had from time to time been spilt over it; so that, snuffing him afar
+off, you might have taken Dr. Dolliver for a mummy, and could hardly have
+been undeceived by his shrunken and torpid aspect, as he crept nearer.
+
+Wrapt in his odorous and many-colored robe, he took staff in hand, and
+moved pretty vigorously to the head of the staircase. As it was somewhat
+steep, and but dimly lighted, he began cautiously to descend, putting his
+left hand on the banister, and poking down his long stick to assist him in
+making sure of the successive steps; and thus he became a living
+illustration of the accuracy of Scripture, where it describes the aged as
+being "afraid of that which is high,"--a truth that is often found to have
+a sadder purport than its external one. Half-way to the bottom, however,
+the Doctor heard the impatient and authoritative tones of little Pansie,--
+Queen Pansie, as she might fairly have been styled, in reference to her
+position in the household,--calling amain for grandpapa and breakfast. He
+was startled into such perilous activity by the summons, that his heels
+slid on the stairs, the slippers were shuffled off his feet, and he saved
+himself from a tumble only by quickening his pace, and coming down at
+almost a run.
+
+"Mercy on my poor old bones!" mentally exclaimed the Doctor, fancying
+himself fractured in fifty places. "Some of them are broken, surely, and,
+methinks, my heart has leaped out of my mouth! What! all right? Well,
+well! but Providence is kinder to me than I deserve, prancing down this
+steep staircase like a kid of three months old!"
+
+He bent stiffly to gather up his slippers and fallen staff; and meanwhile
+Pansie had heard the tumult of her great-grandfather's descent, and was
+pounding against the door of the breakfast-room in her haste to come at
+him. The Doctor opened it, and there she stood, a rather pale and large-
+eyed little thing, quaint in her aspect, as might well be the case with a
+motherless child, dwelling in an uncheerful house, with no other playmates
+than a decrepit old man and a kitten, and no better atmosphere within-
+doors than the odor of decayed apothecary's stuff, nor gayer neighborhood
+than that of the adjacent burial-ground, where all her relatives, from her
+great-grandmother downward, lay calling to her, "Pansie, Pansie, it is
+bedtime!" even in the prime of the summer morning. For those dead women-
+folk, especially her mother and the whole row of maiden aunts and grand-
+aunts, could not but be anxious about the child, knowing that little
+Pansie would be far safer under a tuft of dandelions than if left alone,
+as she soon must be, in this difficult and deceitful world.
+
+Yet, in spite of the lack of damask roses in her cheeks, she seemed a
+healthy child, and certainly showed great capacity of energetic movement
+in the impulsive capers with which she welcomed her venerable progenitor.
+She shouted out her satisfaction, moreover (as her custom was, having
+never had any oversensitive auditors about her to tame down her voice),
+till even the Doctor's dull ears were full of the clamor.
+
+"Pansie, darling," said Dr. Dolliver, cheerily, patting her brown hair
+with his tremulous fingers, "thou hast put some of thine own friskiness
+into poor old grandfather, this fine morning! Dost know, child, that he
+came near breaking his neck down-stairs at the sound of thy voice? What
+wouldst thou have done then, little Pansie?"
+
+"Kiss poor grandpapa and make him well!" answered the child, remembering
+the Doctor's own mode of cure in similar mishaps to herself. "It shall do
+poor grandpapa good!" she added, putting up her mouth to apply the remedy.
+
+"Ah, little one, thou hast greater faith in thy medicines than ever I had
+in my drugs," replied the patriarch, with a giggle, surprised and
+delighted at his own readiness of response. "But the kiss is good for my
+feeble old heart, Pansie, though it might do little to mend a broken neck;
+so give grandpapa another dose, and let us to breakfast."
+
+In this merry humor they sat down to the table, great-grandpapa and Pansie
+side by side, and the kitten, as soon appeared, making a third in the
+party. First, she showed her mottled head out of Pansie's lap, delicately
+sipping milk from the child's basin without rebuke: then she took post on
+the old gentleman's shoulder, purring like a spinning-wheel, trying her
+claws in the wadding of his dressing-gown, and still more impressively
+reminding him of her presence by putting out a paw to intercept a warmed-
+over morsel of yesterday's chicken on its way to the Doctor's mouth. After
+skilfully achieving this feat, she scrambled down upon the breakfast-table
+and began to wash her face and hands. Evidently, these companions were all
+three on intimate terms, as was natural enough, since a great many
+childish impulses were softly creeping back on the simple-minded old man;
+insomuch that, if no worldly necessities nor painful infirmity had
+disturbed him, his remnant of life might have been as cheaply and cheerily
+enjoyed as the early playtime of the kitten and the child. Old Dr.
+Dolliver and his great-granddaughter (a ponderous title, which seemed
+quite to overwhelm the tiny figure of Pansie) had met one another at the
+two extremities of the life-circle: her sunrise served him for a sunset,
+illuminating his locks of silver and hers of golden brown with a
+homogeneous shimmer of twinkling light.
+
+Little Pansie was the one earthly creature that inherited a drop of the
+Dolliver blood. The Doctor's only child, poor Bessie's offspring, had died
+the better part of a hundred years before, and his grandchildren, a
+numerous and dimly remembered brood, had vanished along his weary track in
+their youth, maturity, or incipient age, till, hardly knowing, how it had
+all happened, he found himself tottering onward with an infant's small
+fingers in his nerveless grasp. So mistily did his dead progeny come and
+go in the patriarch's decayed recollection, that this solitary child
+represented for him the successive babyhoods of the many that had gone
+before. The emotions of his early paternity came back to him. She seemed
+the baby of a past age oftener than she seemed Pansie. A whole family of
+grand-aunts (one of whom had perished in her cradle, never so mature as
+Pansie now, another in her virgin bloom, another in autumnal maidenhood,
+yellow and shrivelled, with vinegar in her blood, and still another, a
+forlorn widow, whose grief outlasted even its vitality, and grew to be
+merely a torpid habit, and was saddest then),--all their hitherto
+forgotten features peeped through the face of the great-grandchild, and
+their long-inaudible voices sobbed, shouted, or laughed, in her familiar
+tones. But it often happened to Dr. Dolliver, while frolicking amid this
+throng of ghosts, where the one reality looked no more vivid than its
+shadowy sisters,--it often happened that his eyes filled with tears at a
+sudden perception of what a sad and poverty-stricken old man he was,
+already remote from his own generation, and bound to stray further onward
+as the sole playmate and protector of a child!
+
+As Dr. Dolliver, in spite of his advanced epoch of life, is likely to
+remain a considerable time longer upon our hands, we deem it expedient to
+give a brief sketch of his position, in order that the story may get
+onward with the greater freedom when he rises from the breakfast-table.
+Deeming it a matter of courtesy, we have allowed him the honorary title of
+Doctor, as did all his towns-people and contemporaries, except, perhaps,
+one or two formal old physicians, stingy of civil phrases and over-jealous
+of their own professional dignity. Nevertheless, these crusty graduates
+were technically right in excluding Dr. Dolliver from their fraternity. He
+had never received the degree of any medical school, nor (save it might be
+for the cure of a toothache, or a child's rash, or a whitlow on a
+seamstress's finger, or some such trifling malady) had he ever been even a
+practitioner of the awful science with which his popular designation
+connected him. Our old friend, in short, even at his highest social
+elevation, claimed to be nothing more than an apothecary, and, in these
+later and far less prosperous days, scarcely so much. Since the death of
+his last surviving grandson (Pansie's father, whom he had instructed in
+all the mysteries of his science, and who, being distinguished by an
+experimental and inventive tendency, was generally believed to have
+poisoned himself with an infallible panacea of his own distillation),--
+since that final bereavement, Dr. Dolliver's once pretty flourishing
+business had lamentably declined. After a few months of unavailing
+struggle, he found it expedient to take down the Brazen Serpent from the
+position to which Dr. Swinnerton had originally elevated it, in front of
+his shop in the main street, and to retire to his private dwelling,
+situated in a by-lane and on the edge of a burial-ground.
+
+This house, as well as the Brazen Serpent, some old medical books, and a
+drawer full of manuscripts, had come to him by the legacy of Dr.
+Swinnerton. The dreariness of the locality had been of small importance to
+our friend in his young manhood, when he first led his fair wife over the
+threshold, and so long as neither of them had any kinship with the human
+dust that rose into little hillocks, and still kept accumulating beneath
+their window. But, too soon afterwards, when poor Bessie herself had gone
+early to rest there, it is probable that an influence from her grave may
+have prematurely calmed and depressed her widowed husband, taking away
+much of the energy from what should have been the most active portion of
+his life. Thus he never grew rich. His thrifty townsmen used to tell him,
+that, in any other man's hands, Dr. Swinnerton's Brazen Serpent (meaning,
+I presume, the inherited credit and good-will of that old worthy's trade)
+would need but ten years' time to transmute its brass into gold. In Dr.
+Dolliver's keeping, as we have seen, the inauspicious symbol lost the
+greater part of what superficial gilding it originally had. Matters had
+not mended with him in more advanced life, after he had deposited a
+further and further portion of his heart and its affections in each
+successive one of a long row of kindred graves; and as he stood over the
+last of them, holding Pansie by the hand and looking down upon the coffin
+of his grandson, it is no wonder that the old man wept, partly for those
+gone before, but not so bitterly as for the little one that stayed behind.
+Why had not God taken her with the rest? And then, so hopeless as he was,
+so destitute of possibilities of good, his weary frame, his decrepit
+bones, his dried-up heart, might have crumbled into dust at once, and have
+been scattered by the next wind over all the heaps of earth that were akin
+to him.
+
+This intensity of desolation, however, was of too positive a character to
+be long sustained by a person of Dr. Dolliver's original gentleness and
+simplicity, and now so completely tamed by age and misfortune. Even before
+he turned away from the grave, he grew conscious of a slightly cheering
+and invigorating effect from the tight grasp of the child's warm little
+hand. Feeble as he was, she seemed to adopt him willingly for her
+protector. And the Doctor never afterwards shrank from his duty nor
+quailed beneath it, but bore himself like a man, striving, amid the sloth
+of age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency which he
+had failed to accumulate even in his most vigorous days.
+
+To the extent of securing a present subsistence for Pansie and himself, he
+was successful. After his son's death, when the Brazen Serpent fell into
+popular disrepute, a small share of tenacious patronage followed the old
+man into his retirement. In his prime, he had been allowed to possess more
+skill than usually fell to the share of a Colonial apothecary, having been
+regularly apprenticed to Dr. Swinnerton, who, throughout his long
+practice, was accustomed personally to concoct the medicines which he
+prescribed and dispensed. It was believed, indeed, that the ancient
+physician had learned the art at the world-famous drug-manufactory of
+Apothecary's Hall, in London, and, as some people half-malignly whispered,
+had perfected himself under masters more subtle than were to be found even
+there. Unquestionably, in many critical cases he was known to have
+employed remedies of mysterious composition and dangerous potency, which,
+in less skilful hands, would have been more likely to kill than cure. He
+would willingly, it is said, have taught his apprentice the secrets of
+these prescriptions, but the latter, being of a timid character and
+delicate conscience, had shrunk from acquaintance with them. It was
+probably as the result of the same scrupulosity that Dr. Dolliver had
+always declined to enter the medical profession, in which his old
+instructor had set him such heroic examples of adventurous dealing with
+matters of life and death. Nevertheless, the aromatic fragrance, so to
+speak, of the learned Swinnerton's reputation, had clung to our friend
+through life; and there were elaborate preparations in the pharmacopoia of
+that day, requiring such minute skill and conscientious fidelity in the
+concocter that the physicians were still glad to confide them to one in
+whom these qualities were so evident.
+
+Moreover, the grandmothers of the community were kind to him, and mindful
+of his perfumes, his rose-water, his cosmetics, tooth-powders, pomanders,
+and pomades, the scented memory of which lingered about their toilet-
+tables, or came faintly back from the days when they were beautiful. Among
+this class of customers there was still a demand for certain comfortable
+little nostrums (delicately sweet and pungent to the taste, cheering to
+the spirits, and fragrant in the breath), the proper distillation of which
+was the airiest secret that the mystic Swinnerton had left behind him.
+And, besides, these old ladies had always liked the manners of Dr.
+Dolliver, and used to speak of his gentle courtesy behind the counter as
+having positively been something to admire; though of later years, an
+unrefined, and almost rustic simplicity, such as belonged to his humble
+ancestors, appeared to have taken possession of him, as it often does of
+prettily mannered men in their late decay.
+
+But it resulted from all these favorable circumstances that the Doctor's
+marble mortar, though worn with long service and considerably damaged by a
+crack that pervaded it, continued to keep up an occasional intimacy with
+the pestle; and he still weighed drachms and scruples in his delicate
+scales, though it seemed impossible, dealing with such minute quantities,
+that his tremulous fingers should not put in too little or too much,
+leaving out life with the deficiency, or spilling in death with the
+surplus. To say the truth, his stanchest friends were beginning to think
+that Dr. Dolliver's fits of absence (when his mind appeared absolutely to
+depart from him, while his frail old body worked on mechanically) rendered
+him not quite trustworthy without a close supervision of his proceedings.
+It was impossible, however, to convince the aged apothecary of the
+necessity for such vigilance; and if anything could stir up his gentle
+temper to wrath, or, as oftener happened, to tears, it was the attempt
+(which he was marvellously quick to detect) thus to interfere with his
+long-familiar business.
+
+The public, meanwhile, ceasing to regard Dr. Dolliver in his professional
+aspect, had begun to take an interest in him as perhaps their oldest
+fellow-citizen. It was he that remembered the Great Fire and the Great
+Snow, and that had been a grown-up stripling at the terrible epoch of
+Witch-Times, and a child just breeched at the breaking out of King
+Philip's Indian War. He, too, in his school-boy days, had received a
+benediction from the patriarchal Governor Bradstreet, and thus could boast
+(somewhat as Bishops do of their unbroken succession from the Apostles) of
+a transmitted blessing from the whole company of sainted Pilgrims, among
+whom the venerable magistrate had been an honored companion. Viewing their
+townsman in this aspect, the people revoked the courteous Doctorate with
+which they had heretofore decorated him, and now knew him most familiarly
+as Grandsir Dolliver. His white head, his Puritan band, his threadbare
+garb (the fashion of which he had ceased to change, half a century ago),
+his gold-headed staff, that had been Dr. Swinnerton's, his shrunken,
+frosty figure, and its feeble movement,--all these characteristics had a
+wholeness and permanence in the public recognition, like the meeting-house
+steeple or the town-pump. All the younger portion of the inhabitants
+unconsciously ascribed a sort of aged immortality to Grandsir Dolliver's
+infirm and reverend presence. They fancied that he had been born old (at
+least, I remember entertaining some such notions about age-stricken
+people, when I myself was young), and that he could the better tolerate
+his aches and incommodities, his dull ears and dim eyes, his remoteness
+from human intercourse within the crust of indurated years, the cold
+temperature that kept him always shivering and sad, the heavy burden that
+invisibly bent down his shoulders,--that all these intolerable things
+might bring a kind of enjoyment to Grandsir Dolliver, as the lifelong
+conditions of his peculiar existence.
+
+But, alas! it was a terrible mistake. This weight of years had a perennial
+novelty for the poor sufferer. He never grew accustomed to it, but, long
+as he had now borne the fretful torpor of his waning life, and patient as
+he seemed, he still retained an inward consciousness that these stiffened
+shoulders, these quailing knees, this cloudiness of sight and brain, this
+confused forgetfulness of men and affairs, were troublesome accidents that
+did not really belong to him. He possibly cherished a half-recognized idea
+that they might pass away. Youth, however eclipsed for a season, is
+undoubtedly the proper, permanent, and genuine condition of man; and if we
+look closely into this dreary delusion of growing old, we shall find that
+it never absolutely succeeds in laying hold of our innermost convictions.
+A sombre garment, woven of life's unrealities, has muffled us from our
+true self, but within it smiles the young man whom we knew; the ashes of
+many perishable things have fallen upon our youthful fire, but beneath
+them lurk the seeds of inextinguishable flame. So powerful is this
+instinctive faith, that men of simple modes of character are prone to
+antedate its consummation. And thus it happened with poor Grandsir
+Dolliver, who often awoke from an old man's fitful sleep with a sense that
+his senile predicament was but a dream of the past night; and hobbling
+hastily across the cold floor to the looking-glass, he would be grievously
+disappointed at beholding the white hair, the wrinkles and furrows, the
+ashen visage and bent form, the melancholy mask of Age, in which, as he
+now remembered, some strange and sad enchantment had involved him for
+years gone by!
+
+To other eyes than his own, however, the shrivelled old gentleman looked
+as if there were little hope of his throwing off this too artfully wrought
+disguise, until, at no distant day, his stooping figure should be
+straightened out, his hoary locks be smoothed over his brows, and his
+much-enduring bones be laid safely away, with a green coverlet spread over
+them, beside his Bessie, who doubtless would recognize her youthful
+companion in spite of his ugly garniture of decay. He longed to be gazed
+at by the loving eyes now closed; he shrank from the hard stare of them
+that loved him not. Walking the streets seldom and reluctantly, he felt a
+dreary impulse to elude the people's observation, as if with a sense that
+he had gone irrevocably out of fashion, and broken his connecting links
+with the net-work of human life; or else it was that nightmare-feeling
+which we sometimes have in dreams, when we seem to find ourselves
+wandering through a crowded avenue, with the noonday sun upon us, in some
+wild extravagance of dress or nudity. He was conscious of estrangement
+from his towns-people, but did not always know how nor wherefore, nor why
+he should be thus groping through the twilight mist in solitude. If they
+spoke loudly to him, with cheery voices, the greeting translated itself
+faintly and mournfully to his ears; if they shook him by the hand, it was
+as if a thick, insensible glove absorbed the kindly pressure and the
+warmth. When little Pansie was the companion of his walk, her childish
+gayety and freedom did not avail to bring him into closer relationship
+with men, but seemed to follow him into that region of indefinable
+remoteness, that dismal Fairy-Land of aged fancy, into which old Grandsir
+Dolliver had so strangely crept away.
+
+Yet there were moments, as many persons had noticed, when the great-
+grandpapa would suddenly take stronger hues of life. It was as if his
+faded figure had been colored over anew, or at least, as he and Pansie
+moved along the street, as if a sunbeam had fallen across him, instead of
+the gray gloom of an instant before. His chilled sensibilities had
+probably been touched and quickened by the warm contiguity of his little
+companion through the medium of her hand, as it stirred within his own, or
+some inflection of her voice that set his memory ringing and chiming with
+forgotten sounds. While that music lasted, the old man was alive and
+happy. And there were seasons, it might be, happier than even these, when
+Pansie had been kissed and put to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sat by his
+fireside gazing in among the massive coals, and absorbing their glow into
+those cavernous abysses with which all men communicate. Hence come angels
+or fiends into our twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them
+in by-gone years. Over our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the fire-
+gleam, stole an expression of repose and perfect trust that made him as
+beautiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child Pansie on her
+pillow; and sometimes the spirits that were watching him beheld a calm
+surprise draw slowly over his features and brighten into joy, yet not so
+vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had been
+kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a glimpse
+within. All the night afterwards, he would be semi-conscious of an
+intangible bliss diffused through the fitful lapses of an old man's
+slumber, and would awake, at early dawn, with a faint thrilling of the
+heart-strings, as if there had been music just now wandering over them.
+
+
+
+
+ANOTHER SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+
+[Footnote: This scene was not revised by the author, but is printed from
+his first draught.]
+
+We may now suppose Grandsir Dolliver to have finished his breakfast, with
+a better appetite and sharper perception of the qualities of his food than
+he has generally felt of late years, whether it were due to old Martha's
+cookery or to the cordial of the night before. Little Pansie had also made
+an end of her bread and milk with entire satisfaction, and afterwards
+nibbled a crust, greatly enjoying its resistance to her little white
+teeth.
+
+How this child came by the odd name of Pansie, and whether it was really
+her baptismal name, I have not ascertained. More probably it was one of
+those pet appellations that grow out of a child's character, or out of
+some keen thrill of affection in the parents, an unsought-for and
+unconscious felicity, a kind of revelation, teaching them the true name by
+which the child's guardian angel would know it,--a name with playfulness
+and love in it, that we often observe to supersede, in the practice of
+those who love the child best, the name that they carefully selected, and
+caused the clergyman to plaster indelibly on the poor little forehead at
+the font,--the love-name, whereby, if the child lives, the parents know
+it in their hearts, or by which, if it dies, God seems to have called it
+away, leaving the sound lingering faintly and sweetly through the house.
+In Pansie's case, it may have been a certain pensiveness which was
+sometimes seen under her childish frolic, and so translated itself into
+French (_pensee_), her mother having been of Acadian kin; or, quite
+as probably, it alluded merely to the color of her eyes, which, in some
+lights, were very like the dark petals of a tuft of pansies in the
+Doctor's garden. It might well be, indeed, on account of the suggested
+pensiveness; for the child's gayety had no example to sustain it, no
+sympathy of other children or grown people,--and her melancholy, had it
+been so dark a feeling, was but the shadow of the house, and of the old
+man. If brighter sunshine came, she would brighten with it. This morning,
+surely, as the three companions, Pansie, puss, and Grandsir Dolliver,
+emerged from the shadow of the house into the small adjoining enclosure,
+they seemed all frolicsome alike.
+
+The Doctor, however, was intent over something that had reference to his
+lifelong business of drugs. This little spot was the place where he was
+wont to cultivate a variety of herbs supposed to be endowed with medicinal
+virtue. Some of them had been long known in the pharmacopoia of the Old
+World; and others, in the early days of the country, had been adopted by
+the first settlers from the Indian medicine-men, though with fear and even
+contrition, because these wild doctors were supposed to draw their
+pharmaceutic knowledge from no gracious source, the Black Man himself
+being the principal professor in their medical school. From his own
+experience, however, Dr. Dolliver had long since doubted, though he was
+not bold enough quite to come to the conclusion, that Indian shrubs, and
+the remedies prepared from them, were much less perilous than those so
+freely used in European practice, and singularly apt to be followed by
+results quite as propitious. Into such heterodoxy our friend was the more
+liable to fall, because it had been taught him early in life by his old
+master, Dr. Swinnerton, who, at those not infrequent times when he
+indulged a certain unhappy predilection for strong waters, had been
+accustomed to inveigh in terms of the most cynical contempt and coarsest
+ridicule against the practice by which he lived, and, as he affirmed,
+inflicted death on his fellow-men. Our old apothecary, though too loyal to
+the learned profession with which he was connected fully to believe this
+bitter judgment, even when pronounced by his revered master, was still so
+far influenced that his conscience was possibly a little easier when
+making a preparation from forest herbs and roots than in the concoction of
+half a score of nauseous poisons into a single elaborate drug, as the
+fashion of that day was.
+
+But there were shrubs in the garden of which he had never ventured to make
+a medical use, nor, indeed, did he know their virtue, although from year
+to year he had tended and fertilized, weeded and pruned them, with
+something like religious care. They were of the rarest character, and had
+been planted by the learned and famous Dr. Swinnerton, who, on his death-
+bed, when he left his dwelling and all his abstruse manuscripts to his
+favorite pupil, had particularly directed his attention to this row of
+shrubs. They had been collected by himself from remote countries, and had
+the poignancy of torrid climes in them; and he told him, that, properly
+used, they would be worth all the rest of the legacy a hundred-fold. As
+the apothecary, however, found the manuscripts, in which he conjectured
+there was a treatise on the subject of these shrubs, mostly illegible, and
+quite beyond his comprehension in such passages as he succeeded in
+puzzling out (partly, perhaps, owing to his very imperfect knowledge of
+Latin, in which language they were written), he had never derived from
+them any of the promised benefit. And, to say the truth, remembering that
+Dr. Swinnerton himself never appeared to triturate or decoct or do
+anything else with the mysterious herbs, our old friend was inclined to
+imagine the weighty commendation of their virtues to have been the idly
+solemn utterance of mental aberration at the hour of death. So, with the
+integrity that belonged to his character, he had nurtured them as tenderly
+as was possible in the ungenial climate and soil of New England, putting
+some of them into pots for the winter; but they had rather dwindled than
+flourished, and he had reaped no harvests from them, nor observed them
+with any degree of scientific interest.
+
+His grandson, however, while yet a school-boy, had listened to the old
+man's legend of the miraculous virtues of these plants; and it took so
+firm a hold of his mind, that the row of outlandish vegetables seemed
+rooted in it, and certainly flourished there with richer luxuriance than
+in the soil where they actually grew. The story, acting thus early upon
+his imagination, may be said to have influenced his brief career in life,
+and, perchance, brought about its early close. The young man, in the
+opinion of competent judges, was endowed with remarkable abilities, and
+according to the rumor of the people had wonderful gifts, which were
+proved by the cures he had wrought with remedies of his own invention. His
+talents lay in the direction of scientific analysis and inventive
+combination of chemical powers. While under the pupilage of his
+grandfather, his progress had rapidly gone quite beyond his instructor's
+hope,--leaving him even to tremble at the audacity with which he
+overturned and invented theories, and to wonder at the depth at which he
+wrought beneath the superficialness and mock-mystery of the medical
+science of those days, like a miner sinking his shaft and running a
+hideous peril of the earth caving in above him. Especially did he devote
+himself to these plants; and under his care they had thriven beyond all
+former precedent, bursting into luxuriance of bloom, and most of them
+bearing beautiful flowers, which, however, in two or three instances, had
+the sort of natural repulsiveness that the serpent has in its beauty,
+compelled against its will, as it were, to warn the beholder of an
+unrevealed danger. The young man had long ago, it must be added, demanded
+of his grandfather the documents included in the legacy of Professor
+Swinnerton, and had spent days and nights upon them, growing pale over
+their mystic lore, which seemed the fruit not merely of the Professor's
+own labors, but of those of more ancient sages than he; and often a whole
+volume seemed to be compressed within the limits of a few lines of crabbed
+manuscript, judging from the time which it cost even the quick-minded
+student to decipher them.
+
+Meantime these abstruse investigations had not wrought such disastrous
+effects as might have been feared, in causing Edward Dolliver to neglect
+the humble trade, the conduct of which his grandfather had now
+relinquished almost entirely into his hands. On the contrary, with the
+mere side results of his study, or what may be called the chips and
+shavings of his real work, he created a prosperity quite beyond anything
+that his simple-minded predecessor had ever hoped for, even at the most
+sanguine epoch of his life. The young man's adventurous endowments were
+miraculously alive, and connecting themselves with his remarkable ability
+for solid research, and perhaps his conscience being as yet imperfectly
+developed (as it sometimes lies dormant in the young), he spared not to
+produce compounds which, if the names were anywise to be trusted, would
+supersede all other remedies, and speedily render any medicine a needless
+thing, making the trade of apothecary an untenable one, and the title of
+Doctor obsolete. Whether there was real efficacy in these nostrums, and
+whether their author himself had faith in them, is more than can safely be
+said; but, at all events, the public believed in them, and thronged to the
+old and dim sign of the Brazen Serpent, which, though hitherto familiar to
+them and their forefathers, now seemed to shine with auspicious lustre, as
+if its old Scriptural virtues were renewed. If any faith was to be put in
+human testimony, many marvellous cures were really performed, the fame of
+which spread far and wide, and caused demands for these medicines to come
+in from places far beyond the precincts of the little town. Our old
+apothecary, now degraded by the overshadowing influence of his grandson's
+character to a position not much above that of a shop-boy, stood behind
+the counter with a face sad and distrustful, and yet with an odd kind of
+fitful excitement in it, as if he would have liked to enjoy this new
+prosperity, had he dared. Then his venerable figure was to be seen
+dispensing these questionable compounds by the single bottle and by the
+dozen, wronging his simple conscience as he dealt out what he feared was
+trash or worse, shrinking from the reproachful eyes of every ancient
+physician who might chance to be passing by, but withal examining closely
+the silver, or the New England coarsely printed bills, which he took in
+payment, as if apprehensive that the delusive character of the commodity
+which he sold might be balanced by equal counterfeiting in the money
+received, or as if his faith in all things were shaken.
+
+Is it not possible that this gifted young man had indeed found out those
+remedies which Nature has provided and laid away for the cure of every
+ill?
+
+The disastrous termination of the most brilliant epoch that ever came to
+the Brazen Serpent must be told in a few words. One night, Edward
+Dolliver's young wife awoke, and, seeing the gray dawn creeping into the
+chamber, while her husband, it should seem, was still engaged in his
+laboratory, arose in her nightdress, and went to the door of the room to
+put in her gentle remonstrance against such labor. There she found him
+dead,--sunk down out of his chair upon the hearth, where were some ashes,
+apparently of burnt manuscripts, which appeared to comprise most of those
+included in Dr. Swinnerton's legacy, though one or two had fallen near the
+heap, and lay merely scorched beside it. It seemed as if he had thrown
+them into the fire, under a sudden impulse, in a great hurry and passion.
+It may be that he had come to the perception of something fatally false
+and deceptive in the successes which he had appeared to win, and was too
+proud and too conscientious to survive it. Doctors were called in, but had
+no power to revive him. An inquest was held, at which the jury, under the
+instruction, perhaps, of those same revengeful doctors, expressed the
+opinion that the poor young man, being given to strange contrivances with
+poisonous drugs, had died by incautiously tasting them himself. This
+verdict, and the terrible event itself, at once deprived the medicines of
+all their popularity; and the poor old apothecary was no longer under any
+necessity of disturbing his conscience by selling them. They at once lost
+their repute, and ceased to be in any demand. In the few instances in
+which they were tried the experiment was followed by no good results; and
+even those individuals who had fancied themselves cured, and had been
+loudest in spreading the praises of these beneficent compounds, now, as if
+for the utter demolition of the poor youth's credit, suffered under a
+recurrence of the worst symptoms, and, in more than one case, perished
+miserably: insomuch (for the days of witchcraft were still within the
+memory of living men and women) it was the general opinion that Satan had
+been personally concerned in this affliction, and that the Brazen Serpent,
+so long honored among them, was really the type of his subtle malevolence
+and perfect iniquity. It was rumored even that all preparations that came
+from the shop were harmful: that teeth decayed that had been made pearly
+white by the use of the young chemist's dentifrice; that cheeks were
+freckled that had been changed to damask roses by his cosmetics; that hair
+turned gray or fell off that had become black, glossy, and luxuriant from
+the application of his mixtures; that breath which his drugs had sweetened
+had now a sulphurous smell. Moreover, all the money heretofore amassed by
+the sale of them had been exhausted by Edward Dolliver in his lavish
+expenditure for the processes of his study; and nothing was left for
+Pansie, except a few valueless and unsalable bottles of medicine, and one
+or two others, perhaps more recondite than their inventor had seen fit to
+offer to the public.
+
+Little Pansie's mother lived but a short time after the shock of the
+terrible catastrophe; and, as we began our story with saying, she was left
+with no better guardianship or support than might be found in the efforts
+of a long superannuated man.
+
+Nothing short of the simplicity, integrity, and piety of Grandsir
+Dolliver's character, known and acknowledged as far back as the oldest
+inhabitants remembered anything, and inevitably discoverable by the
+dullest and most prejudiced observers, in all its natural manifestations,
+could have protected him in still creeping about the streets. So far as he
+was personally concerned, however, all bitterness and suspicion had
+speedily passed away; and there remained still the careless and neglectful
+good-will, and the prescriptive reverence, not altogether reverential,
+which the world heedlessly awards to the unfortunate individual who
+outlives his generation.
+
+And now that we have shown the reader sufficiently, or at least to the
+best of our knowledge, and perhaps at tedious length, what was the present
+position of Grandsir Dolliver, we may let our story pass onward, though at
+such a pace as suits the feeble gait of an old man.
+
+The peculiarly brisk sensation of this morning, to which we have more than
+once alluded, enabled the Doctor to toil pretty vigorously at his
+medicinal herbs,--his catnip, his vervain, and the like; but he did not
+turn his attention to the row of mystic plants, with which so much of
+trouble and sorrow either was, or appeared to be, connected. In truth, his
+old soul was sick of them, and their very fragrance, which the warm
+sunshine made strongly perceptible, was odious to his nostrils. But the
+spicy, homelike scent of his other herbs, the English simples, was
+grateful to him, and so was the earth-smell, as he turned up the soil
+about their roots, and eagerly snuffed it in. Little Pansie, on the other
+hand, perhaps scandalized at great-grandpapa's neglect of the prettiest
+plants in his garden, resolved to do her small utmost towards balancing
+his injustice; so with an old shingle, fallen from the roof, which she had
+appropriated as her agricultural tool, she began to dig about them,
+pulling up the weeds, as she saw grandpapa doing. The kitten, too, with a
+look of elfish sagacity, lent her assistance, plying her paws with vast
+haste and efficiency at the roots of one of the shrubs. This particular
+one was much smaller than the rest, perhaps because it was a native of the
+torrid zone, and required greater care than the others to make it
+flourish; so that, shrivelled, cankered, and scarcely showing a green
+leaf, both Pansie and the kitten probably mistook it for a weed. After
+their joint efforts had made a pretty big trench about it, the little girl
+seized the shrub with both hands, bestriding it with her plump little
+legs, and giving so vigorous a pull, that, long accustomed to be
+transplanted annually, it came up by the roots, and little Pansie came
+down in a sitting posture, making a broad impress on the soft earth. "See,
+see, Doctor!" cries Pansie, comically enough giving him his title of
+courtesy,--"look, grandpapa, the big, naughty weed!"
+
+Now the Doctor had at once a peculiar dread and a peculiar value for this
+identical shrub, both because his grandson's investigations had been
+applied more ardently to it than to all the rest, and because it was
+associated in his mind with an ancient and sad recollection. For he had
+never forgotten that his wife, the early lost, had once taken a fancy to
+wear its flowers, day after day, through the whole season of their bloom,
+in her bosom, where they glowed like a gem, and deepened her somewhat
+pallid beauty with a richness never before seen in it. At least such was
+the effect which this tropical flower imparted to the beloved form in his
+memory, and thus it somehow both brightened and wronged her. This had
+happened not long before her death; and whenever, in the subsequent years,
+this plant had brought its annual flower, it had proved a kind of talisman
+to bring up the image of Bessie, radiant with this glow that did not
+really belong to her naturally passive beauty, quickly interchanging with
+another image of her form, with the snow of death on cheek and forehead.
+This reminiscence had remained among the things of which the Doctor was
+always conscious, but had never breathed a word, through the whole of his
+long life,--a sprig of sensibility that perhaps helped to keep him
+tenderer and purer than other men, who entertain no such follies. And the
+sight of the shrub often brought back the faint, golden gleam of her hair,
+as if her spirit were in the sunlights of the garden, quivering into view
+and out of it. And therefore, when he saw what Pansie had done, he sent
+forth a strange, inarticulate, hoarse, tremulous exclamation, a sort of
+aged and decrepit cry of mingled emotion. "Naughty Pansie, to pull up
+grandpapa's flower!" said he, as soon as he could speak. "Poison, Pansie,
+poison! Fling it away, child!"
+
+And dropping his spade, the old gentleman scrambled towards the little
+girl as quickly as his rusty joints would let him,--while Pansie, as
+apprehensive and quick of motion as a fawn, started up with a shriek of
+mirth and fear to escape him. It so happened that the garden-gate was
+ajar; and a puff of wind blowing it wide open, she escaped through this
+fortuitous avenue, followed by great-grandpapa and the kitten.
+
+"Stop, naughty Pansie, stop!" shouted our old friend. "You will tumble
+into the grave!" The kitten, with the singular sensitiveness that seems to
+affect it at every kind of excitement, was now on her back.
+
+And, indeed, this portentous warning was better grounded and had a more
+literal meaning than might be supposed; for the swinging gate communicated
+with the burial-ground, and almost directly in little Pansie's track there
+was a newly dug grave, ready to receive its tenant that afternoon. Pansie,
+however, fled onward with outstretched arms, half in fear, half in fun,
+plying her round little legs with wonderful promptitude, as if to escape
+Time or Death, in the person of Grandsir Dolliver, and happily avoiding
+the ominous pitfall that lies in every person's path, till, hearing a
+groan from her pursuer, she looked over her shoulder, and saw that poor
+grandpapa had stumbled over one of the many hillocks. She then suddenly
+wrinkled up her little visage, and sent forth a full-breathed roar of
+sympathy and alarm.
+
+"Grandpapa has broken his neck now!" cried little Pansie, amid her sobs.
+
+"Kiss grandpapa, and make it well, then," said the old gentleman,
+recollecting her remedy, and scrambling up more readily than could be
+expected. "Well," he murmured to himself, "a hair's-breadth more, and I
+should have been tumbled into yonder grave. Poor little Pansie! what
+wouldst thou have done then?"
+
+"Make the grass grow over grandpapa," answered Pansie, laughing up in his
+face.
+
+"Poh, poh, child, that is not a pretty thing to say," said grandpapa,
+pettishly and disappointed, as people are apt to be when they try to
+calculate on the fitful sympathies of childhood. "Come, you must go in to
+old Martha now."
+
+The poor old gentleman was in the more haste to leave the spot because he
+found himself standing right in front of his own peculiar row of
+gravestones, consisting of eight or nine slabs of slate, adorned with
+carved borders rather rudely cut, and the earliest one, that of his
+Bessie, bending aslant, because the frost of so many winters had slowly
+undermined it. Over one grave of the row, that of his gifted grandson,
+there was no memorial. He felt a strange repugnance, stronger than he had
+ever felt before, to linger by these graves, and had none of the tender
+sorrow, mingled with high and tender hopes, that had sometimes made it
+seem good to him to be there. Such moods, perhaps, often come to the aged,
+when the hardened earth-crust over their souls shuts them out from
+spiritual influences.
+
+Taking the child by the hand,--her little effervescence of infantile fun
+having passed into a downcast humor, though not well knowing as yet what a
+dusky cloud of disheartening fancies arose from these green hillocks,--he
+went heavily toward the garden-gate. Close to its threshold, so that one
+who was issuing forth or entering must needs step upon it or over it, lay
+a small flat stone, deeply imbedded in the ground, and partly covered with
+grass, inscribed with the name of "Dr. John Swinnerton, Physician."
+
+"Ay," said the old man, as the well-remembered figure of his ancient
+instructor seemed to rise before him in his grave-apparel, with beard and
+gold-headed cane, black velvet doublet and cloak, "here lies a man who, as
+people have thought, had it in his power to avoid the grave! He had no
+little grandchild to tease him. He had the choice to die, and chose it."
+
+So the old gentleman led Pansie over the stone, and carefully closed the
+gate; and, as it happened, he forgot the uprooted shrub, which Pansie, as
+she ran, had flung away, and which had fallen into the open grave; and
+when the funeral came that afternoon, the coffin was let down upon it, so
+that its bright, inauspicious flower never bloomed again.
+
+
+
+
+ANOTHER FRAGMENT OF THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
+
+
+"Be secret!" and he kept his stern eye fixed upon him, as the coach began
+to move.
+
+"Be secret!" repeated the apothecary. "I know not any secret that he has
+confided to me thus far, and as for his nonsense (as I will be bold to
+style it now he is gone) about a medicine of long life, it is a thing I
+forget in spite of myself, so very empty and trashy it is. I wonder, by
+the by, that it never came into my head to give the Colonel a dose of the
+cordial whereof I partook last night. I have no faith that it is a
+valuable medicine--little or none--and yet there has been an unwonted
+briskness in me all the morning."
+
+Then a simple joy broke over his face--a flickering sunbeam among his
+wrinkles--as he heard the laughter of the little girl, who was running
+rampant with a kitten in the kitchen.
+
+"Pansie! Pansie!" cackled he, "grandpapa has sent away the ugly man now.
+Come, let us have a frolic in the garden."
+
+And he whispered to himself again, "That is a cordial yonder, and I will
+take it according to the prescription, knowing all the ingredients." Then,
+after a moment's thought, he added, "All, save one."
+
+So, as he had declared to himself his intention, that night, when little
+Pansie had long been asleep, and his small household was in bed, and most
+of the quiet, old-fashioned townsfolk likewise, this good apothecary went
+into his laboratory, and took out of a cupboard in the wall a certain
+ancient-looking bottle, which was cased over with a net-work of what
+seemed to be woven silver, like the wicker-woven bottles of our days. He
+had previously provided a goblet of pure water. Before opening the bottle,
+however, he seemed to hesitate, and pondered and babbled to himself;
+having long since come to that period of life when the bodily frame,
+having lost much of its value, is more tenderly cared for than when it was
+a perfect and inestimable machine.
+
+"I triturated, I infused, I distilled it myself in these very rooms, and
+know it--know it all--all the ingredients, save one. They are common
+things enough--comfortable things--some of them a little queer--one or two
+that folks have a prejudice against--and then there is that one thing
+that I don't know. It is foolish in me to be dallying with such a mess,
+which I thought was a piece of quackery, while that strange visitor bade
+me do it,--and yet, what a strength has come from it! He said it was a
+rare cordial, and, methinks, it has brightened up my weary life all day,
+so that Pansie has found me the fitter playmate. And then the dose--it is
+so absurdly small! I will try it again."
+
+He took the silver stopple from the bottle, and with a practised hand,
+tremulous as it was with age, so that one would have thought it must have
+shaken the liquor into a perfect shower of misapplied drops, he dropped--I
+have heard it said--only one single drop into the goblet of water. It fell
+into it with a dazzling brightness, like a spark of ruby flame, and subtly
+diffusing itself through the whole body of water, turned it to a rosy hue
+of great brilliancy. He held it up between his eyes and the light, and
+seemed to admire and wonder at it.
+
+"It is very odd," said he, "that such a pure, bright liquor should have
+come out of a parcel of weeds that mingled their juices here. The thing is
+a folly,--it is one of those compositions in which the chemists--the
+cabalists, perhaps--used to combine what they thought the virtues of many
+plants, thinking that something would result in the whole, which was not
+in either of them, and a new efficacy be created. Whereas, it has been the
+teaching of my experience that one virtue counteracts another, and is the
+enemy of it. I never believed the former theory, even when that strange
+madman bade me do it. And what a thick, turbid matter it was, until that
+last ingredient,--that powder which he put in with his own hand! Had he
+let me see it, I would first have analyzed it, and discovered its
+component parts. The man was mad, undoubtedly, and this may have been
+poison. But its effect is good. Poh! I will taste again, because of this
+weak, agued, miserable state of mine; though it is a shame in me, a man of
+decent skill in my way, to believe in a quack's nostrum. But it is a
+comfortable kind of thing."
+
+Meantime, that single drop (for good Dr. Dolliver had immediately put a
+stopper into the bottle) diffused a sweet odor through the chamber, so
+that the ordinary fragrances and scents of apothecaries' stuff seemed to
+be controlled and influenced by it, and its bright potency also dispelled
+a certain dimness of the antiquated room.
+
+The Doctor, at the pressure of a great need, had given incredible pains to
+the manufacture of this medicine; so that, reckoning the pains rather than
+the ingredients (all except one, of which he was not able to estimate the
+cost nor value), it was really worth its weight in gold. And, as it
+happened, he had bestowed upon it the hard labor of his poor life, and the
+time that was necessary for the support of his family, without return; for
+the customers, after playing off this cruel joke upon the old man, had
+never come back; and now, for seven years, the bottle had stood in a
+corner of the cupboard. To be sure, the silver-cased bottle was worth a
+trifle for its silver, and still more, perhaps, as an antiquarian knick-
+knack. But, all things considered, the honest and simple apothecary
+thought that he might make free with the liquid to such small extent as
+was necessary for himself. And there had been something in the concoction
+that had struck him; and he had been fast breaking lately; and so, in the
+dreary fantasy and lonely recklessness of his old age, he had suddenly
+bethought himself of this medicine (cordial,--as the strange man called
+it, which had come to him by long inheritance in his family) and he had
+determined to try it. And again, as the night before, he took out the
+receipt--a roll of antique parchment, out of which, provokingly, one fold
+had been lost--and put on his spectacles to puzzle out the passage.
+
+Guttam unicam in aquam puram, two gills. "If the Colonel should hear of
+this," said Dr. Dolliver, "he might fancy it his nostrum of long life, and
+insist on having the bottle for his own use. The foolish, fierce old
+gentleman! He has grown very earthly, of late, else he would not desire
+such a thing. And a strong desire it must be to make him feel it
+desirable. For my part, I only wish for something that, for a short time,
+may clear my eyes, so that I may see little Pansie's beauty, and quicken
+my ears, that I may hear her sweet voice, and give me nerve, while God
+keeps me here, that I may live longer to earn bread for dear Pansie. She
+provided for, I would gladly lie down yonder with Bessie and our children.
+Ah! the vanity of desiring lengthened days!--There!--I have drunk it,
+and methinks its final, subtle flavor hath strange potency in it."
+
+The old man shivered a little, as those shiver who have just swallowed
+good liquor, while it is permeating their vitals. Yet he seemed to be in a
+pleasant state of feeling, and, as was frequently the case with this
+simple soul, in a devout frame of mind. He read a chapter in the Bible,
+and said his prayers for Pansie and himself, before he went to bed, and
+had much better sleep than usually comes to people of his advanced age;
+for, at that period, sleep is diffused through their wakefulness, and a
+dim and tiresome half-perception through their sleep, so that the only
+result is weariness.
+
+Nothing very extraordinary happened to Dr. Dolliver or his small household
+for some time afterwards. He was favored with a comfortable winter, and
+thanked Heaven for it, and put it to a good use (at least he intended it
+so) by concocting drugs; which perhaps did a little towards peopling the
+graveyard, into which his windows looked; but that was neither his purpose
+nor his fault. None of the sleepers, at all events, interrupted their
+slumbers to upbraid him. He had done according to his own artless
+conscience and the recipes of licensed physicians, and he looked no
+further, but pounded, triturated, infused, made electuaries, boluses,
+juleps, or whatever he termed his productions, with skill and diligence,
+thanking Heaven that he was spared to do so, when his contemporaries
+generally were getting incapable of similar efforts. It struck him with
+some surprise, but much gratitude to Providence, that his sight seemed to
+be growing rather better than worse. He certainly could read the crabbed
+handwriting and hieroglyphics of the physicians with more readiness than
+he could a year earlier. But he had been originally near-sighted, with
+large, projecting eyes; and near-sighted eyes always seem to get a new
+lease of light as the years go on. One thing was perceptible about the
+Doctor's eyes, not only to himself in the glass, but to everybody else;
+namely, that they had an unaccustomed gleaming brightness in them; not so
+very bright either, but yet so much so, that little Pansie noticed it, and
+sometimes, in her playful, roguish way, climbed up into his lap, and put
+both her small palms over them; telling Grandpapa that he had stolen
+somebody else's eyes, and given away his own, and that she liked his old
+ones better. The poor old Doctor did his best to smile through his eyes,
+and so to reconcile Pansie to their brightness: but still she continually
+made the same silly remonstrance, so that he was fain to put on a pair of
+green spectacles when he was going to play with Pansie, or took her on his
+knee. Nay, if he looked at her, as had always been his custom, after she
+was asleep, in order to see that all was well with her, the little child
+would put up her hands, as if he held a light that was flashing on her
+eyeballs; and unless he turned away his gaze quickly, she would wake up in
+a fit of crying.
+
+On the whole, the apothecary had as comfortable a time as a man of his
+years could expect. The air of the house and of the old graveyard seemed
+to suit him. What so seldom happens in man's advancing age, his night's
+rest did him good, whereas, generally, an old man wakes up ten times as
+nervous and dispirited as he went to bed, just as if, during his sleep he
+had been working harder than ever he did in the daytime. It had been so
+with the Doctor himself till within a few months. To be sure, he had
+latterly begun to practise various rules of diet and exercise, which
+commended themselves to his approbation. He sawed some of his own fire-
+wood, and fancied that, as was reasonable, it fatigued him less day by
+day. He took walks with Pansie, and though, of course, her little
+footsteps, treading on the elastic air of childhood, far outstripped his
+own, still the old man knew that he was not beyond the recuperative period
+of life, and that exercise out of doors and proper food can do somewhat
+towards retarding the approach of age. He was inclined, also, to impute
+much good effect to a daily dose of Santa Cruz rum (a liquor much in vogue
+in that day), which he was now in the habit of quaffing at the meridian
+hour. All through the Doctor's life he had eschewed strong spirits: "But
+after seventy," quoth old Dr. Dolliver, "a man is all the better in head
+and stomach for a little stimulus"; and it certainly seemed so in his
+case. Likewise, I know not precisely how often, but complying
+punctiliously with the recipe, as an apothecary naturally would, he took
+his drop of the mysterious cordial.
+
+He was inclined, however, to impute little or no efficacy to this, and to
+laugh at himself for having ever thought otherwise. The dose was so very
+minute! and he had never been sensible of any remarkable effect on taking
+it, after all. A genial warmth, he sometimes fancied, diffused itself
+throughout him, and perhaps continued during the next day. A quiet and
+refreshing night's rest followed, and alacritous waking in the morning;
+but all this was far more probably owing, as has been already hinted, to
+excellent and well-considered habits of diet and exercise. Nevertheless he
+still continued the cordial with tolerable regularity,--the more, because
+on one or two occasions, happening to omit it, it so chanced that he slept
+wretchedly, and awoke in strange aches and pains, torpors, nervousness,
+shaking of the hands, bleared-ness of sight, lowness of spirits and other
+ills, as is the misfortune of some old men,--who are often threatened by a
+thousand evil symptoms that come to nothing, foreboding no particular
+disorder, and passing away as unsatisfactorily as they come. At another
+time, he took two or three drops at once, and was alarmingly feverish in
+consequence. Yet it was very true, that the feverish symptoms were pretty
+sure to disappear on his renewal of the medicine. "Still it could not be
+that," thought the old man, a hater of empiricism (in which, however, is
+contained all hope for man), and disinclined to believe in anything that
+was not according to rule and art. And then, as aforesaid, the dose was so
+ridiculously small!
+
+Sometimes, however, he took, half laughingly, another view of it, and felt
+disposed to think that chance might really have thrown in his way a very
+remarkable mixture, by which, if it had happened to him earlier in life,
+he might have amassed a larger fortune, and might even have raked together
+such a competency as would have prevented his feeling much uneasiness
+about the future of little Pansie. Feeling as strong as he did nowadays,
+he might reasonably count upon ten years more of life, and in that time
+the precious liquor might be exchanged for much gold. "Let us see!" quoth
+he, "by what attractive name shall it be advertised? 'The old man's
+cordial?' That promises too little. Poh, poh! I would stain my honesty, my
+fair reputation, the accumulation of a lifetime, and befool my neighbor
+and the public, by any name that would make them imagine I had found that
+ridiculous talisman that the alchemists have sought. The old man's
+cordial,--that is best. And five shillings sterling the bottle. That
+surely were not too costly, and would give the medicine a better
+reputation and higher vogue (so foolish is the world) than if I were to
+put it lower. I will think further of this. But pshaw, pshaw!"
+
+"What is the matter. Grandpapa," said little Pansie, who had stood by him,
+wishing to speak to him at least a minute, but had been deterred by his
+absorption; "why do you say 'Pshaw'?"
+
+"Pshaw!" repeated Grandpapa, "there is one ingredient that I don't know."
+
+So this very hopeful design was necessarily given up, but that it had
+occurred to Dr. Dolliver was perhaps a token that his mind was in a very
+vigorous state; for it had been noted of him through life, that he had
+little enterprise, little activity, and that, for the want of these
+things, his very considerable skill in his art had been almost thrown
+away, as regarded his private affairs, when it might easily have led him
+to fortune. Whereas, here in his extreme age, he had first bethought
+himself of a way to grow rich. Sometimes this latter spring causes--as
+blossoms come on the autumnal tree--a spurt of vigor, or untimely
+greenness, when Nature laughs at her old child, half in kindness and half
+in scorn. It is observable, however, I fancy, that after such a spurt, age
+comes on with redoubled speed, and that the old man has only run forward
+with a show of force, in order to fall into his grave the sooner.
+
+Sometimes, as he was walking briskly along the street, with little Pansie
+clasping his hand, and perhaps frisking rather more than became a person
+of his venerable years, he had met the grim old wreck of Colonel Dabney,
+moving goutily, and gathering wrath anew with every touch of his painful
+foot to the ground; or driving by in his carriage, showing an ashen,
+angry, wrinkled face at the window, and frowning at him--the apothecary
+thought--with a peculiar fury, as if he took umbrage at his audacity in
+being less broken by age than a gentleman like himself. The apothecary
+could not help feeling as if there were some unsettled quarrel or dispute
+between himself and the Colonel, he could not tell what or why. The
+Colonel always gave him a haughty nod of half-recognition; and the people
+in the street, to whom he was a familiar object, would say, "The
+worshipful Colonel begins to find himself mortal like the rest of us. He
+feels his years." "He'd be glad, I warrant," said one, "to change with
+you, Doctor. It shows what difference a good life makes in men, to look at
+him and you. You are half a score of years his elder, me-thinks, and yet
+look what temperance can do for a man. By my credit, neighbor, seeing how
+brisk you have been lately, I told my wife you seemed to be growing
+younger. It does me good to see it. We are about of an age, I think, and I
+like to notice how we old men keep young and keep one another in heart. I
+myself--ahem--ahem--feel younger this season than for these five years
+past."
+
+"It rejoices me that you feel so," quoth the apothecary, who had just been
+thinking that this neighbor of his had lost a great deal, both in mind and
+body, within a short period, and rather scorned him for it. "Indeed, I
+find old age less uncomfortable than I supposed. Little Pansie and I make
+excellent companions for one another."
+
+And then, dragged along by Pansie's little hand, and also impelled by a
+certain alacrity that rose with him in the morning, and lasted till his
+healthy rest at night, he bade farewell to his contemporary, and hastened
+on; while the latter, left behind, was somewhat irritated as he looked at
+the vigorous movement of the apothecary's legs.
+
+"He need not make such a show of briskness neither," muttered he to
+himself. "This touch of rheumatism troubles me a bit just now, but try it
+on a good day, and I'd walk with him for a shilling. Pshaw! I'll walk to
+his funeral yet."
+
+One day, while the Doctor, with the activity that bestirred itself in him
+nowadays, was mixing and manufacturing certain medicaments that came in
+frequent demand, a carriage stopped at his door, and he recognized the
+voice of Colonel Dabney, talking in his customary stern tone to the woman
+who served him. And, a moment afterwards, the coach drove away, and he
+actually heard the old dignitary lumbering up stairs, and bestowing a
+curse upon each particular step, as if that were the method to make them
+soften and become easier when he should come down again. "Pray, your
+worship," said the Doctor from above, "let me attend you below stairs."
+
+"No," growled the Colonel, "I'll meet you on your own ground. I can climb
+a stair yet, and be hanged to you."
+
+So saying, he painfully finished the ascent, and came into the laboratory,
+where he let himself fall into the Doctor's easy-chair, with an anathema
+on the chair, the Doctor, and himself; and, staring round through the
+dusk, he met the wide-open, startled eyes of little Pansie, who had been
+reading a gilt picture-book in the corner.
+
+"Send away that child, Dolliver," cried the Colonel, angrily. "Confound
+her, she makes my bones ache. I hate everything young."
+
+"Lord, Colonel," the poor apothecary ventured to say, "there must be young
+people in the world as well as old ones. 'T is my mind, a man's
+grandchildren keep him warm round about him."
+
+"I have none, and want none," sharply responded the Colonel; "and as for
+young people, let me be one of them, and they may exist, otherwise not. It
+is a cursed bad arrangement of the world, that there are young and old
+here together."
+
+When Pansie had gone away, which she did with anything but reluctance,
+having a natural antipathy to this monster of a Colonel, the latter
+personage tapped with his crutch-handled cane on a chair that stood near,
+and nodded in an authoritative way to the apothecary to sit down in it.
+Dr. Dolliver complied submissively, and the Colonel, with dull, unkindly
+eyes, looked at him sternly, and with a kind of intelligence amid the aged
+stolidity of his aspect, that somewhat puzzled the Doctor. In this way he
+surveyed him all over, like a judge, when he means to hang a man, and for
+some reason or none, the apothecary felt his nerves shake, beneath this
+steadfast look.
+
+"Aha! Doctor!" said the Colonel at last, with a doltish sneer, "you bear
+your years well."
+
+"Decently well, Colonel; I thank Providence for it," answered the meek
+apothecary.
+
+"I should say," quoth the Colonel, "you are younger at this moment than
+when we spoke together two or three years ago. I noted then that your
+eyebrows were a handsome snow-white, such as befits a man who has passed
+beyond his threescore years and ten, and five years more. Why, they are
+getting dark again, Mr. Apothecary."
+
+"Nay, your worship must needs be mistaken there," said the Doctor, with a
+timorous chuckle. "It is many a year since I have taken a deliberate note
+of my wretched old visage in a glass, but I remember they were white when
+I looked last."
+
+"Come, Doctor, I know a thing or two," said the Colonel, with a bitter
+scoff; "and what's this, you old rogue? Why, you've rubbed away a wrinkle
+since we met. Take off those infernal spectacles, and look me in the face.
+Ha! I see the devil in your eye. How dare you let it shine upon me so?"
+
+"On my conscience, Colonel," said the apothecary, strangely struck with
+the coincidence of this accusation with little Pansie's complaint, "I know
+not what you mean. My sight is pretty well for a man of my age. We near-
+sighted people begin to know our best eyesight, when other people have
+lost theirs."
+
+"Ah! ah! old rogue," repeated the insufferable Colonel, gnashing his
+ruined teeth at him, as if, for some incomprehensible reason, he wished to
+tear him to pieces and devour him. "I know you. You are taking the life
+away from me, villain! and I told you it was my inheritance. And I told
+you there was a Bloody Footstep, bearing its track down through my race.
+
+"I remember nothing of it," said the Doctor, in a quake, sure that the
+Colonel was in one of his mad fits. "And on the word of an honest man, I
+never wronged you in my life, Colonel."
+
+"We shall see," said the Colonel, whose wrinkled visage grew absolutely
+terrible with its hardness; and his dull eyes, without losing their
+dulness, seemed to look through him.
+
+"Listen to me, sir. Some ten years ago, there came to you a man on a
+secret business. He had an old musty bit of parchment, on which were
+written some words, hardly legible, in an antique hand,--an old deed, it
+might have been,--some family document, and here and there the letters
+were faded away. But this man had spent his life over it, and he had made
+out the meaning, and he interpreted it to you, and left it with you, only
+there was one gap,--one torn or obliterated place. Well, sir,--and he bade
+you, with your poor little skill at the mortar, and for a certain sum,--
+ample repayment for such a service,--to manufacture this medicine,--this
+cordial. It was an affair of months. And just when you thought it
+finished, the man came again, and stood over your cursed beverage, and
+shook a powder, or dropped a lump into it, or put in some ingredient, in
+which was all the hidden virtue,--or, at least, it drew out all the hidden
+virtue of the mean and common herbs, and married them into a wondrous
+efficacy. This done, the man bade you do certain other things with the
+potation, and went away"--the Colonel hesitated a moment--"and never came
+back again."
+
+"Surely, Colonel, you are correct," said the apothecary; much startled,
+however, at the Colonel's showing himself so well acquainted with an
+incident which he had supposed a secret with himself alone. Yet he had a
+little reluctance in owning it, although he did not exactly understand
+why, since the Colonel had, apparently, no rightful claim to it, at all
+events.
+
+"That medicine, that receipt," continued his visitor, "is my hereditary
+property, and I challenge you, on your peril, to give it up."
+
+"But what if the original owner should call upon me for it," objected Dr.
+Dolliver.
+
+"I'll warrant you against that," said the Colonel; and the apothecary
+thought there was something ghastly in his look and tone. "Why, 't is ten
+year, you old fool; and do you think a man with a treasure like that in
+his possession would have waited so long?"
+
+"Seven years it was ago," said the apothecary. "Septem annis passatis: so
+says the Latin."
+
+"Curse your Latin," answers the Colonel. "Produce the stuff. You have been
+violating the first rule of your trade,--taking your own drugs,--your own,
+in one sense; mine by the right of three hundred years. Bring it forth, I
+say!"
+
+"Pray excuse me, worthy Colonel," pleaded the apothecary; for though
+convinced that the old gentleman was only in one of his insane fits, when
+he talked of the value of this concoction, yet he really did not like to
+give up the cordial, which perhaps had wrought him some benefit. Besides,
+he had at least a claim upon it for much trouble and skill expended in its
+composition. This he suggested to the Colonel, who scornfully took out of
+his pocket a net-work purse, with more golden guineas in it than the
+apothecary had seen in the whole seven years, and was rude enough to fling
+it in his face. "Take that," thundered he, "and give up the thing, or I
+will have you in prison before you are an hour older. Nay," he continued,
+growing pale, which was his mode of showing terrible wrath; since all
+through life, till extreme age quenched it, his ordinary face had been a
+blazing-red, "I'll put you to death, you villain, as I've a right!" And
+thrusting his hand into his waistcoat pocket, lo! the madman took a small
+pistol from it, which he cocked, and presented at the poor apothecary. The
+old fellow, quaked and cowered in his chair, and would indeed have given
+his whole shopful of better concocted medicines than this, to be out of
+this danger. Besides, there were the guineas; the Colonel had paid him a
+princely sum for what was probably worth nothing.
+
+"Hold! hold!" cried he as the Colonel, with stern eye pointed the pistol
+at his head. "You shall have it."
+
+So he rose all trembling, and crept to that secret cupboard, where the
+precious bottle--since precious it seemed to be--was reposited. In all his
+life, long as it had been, the apothecary had never before been threatened
+by a deadly weapon; though many as deadly a thing had he seen poured into
+a glass, without winking. And so it seemed to take his heart and life
+away, and he brought the cordial forth feebly, and stood tremulously
+before the Colonel, ashy pale, and looking ten years older than his real
+age, instead of five years younger, as he had seemed just before this
+disastrous interview with the Colonel.
+
+"You look as if you needed a drop of it yourself," said Colonel Dabney,
+with great scorn. "But not a drop shall you have. Already have you stolen
+too much," said he, lifting up the bottle, and marking the space to which
+the liquor had subsided in it in consequence of the minute doses with
+which the apothecary had made free. "Fool, had you taken your glass like a
+man, you might have been young again. Now, creep on, the few months you
+have left, poor, torpid knave, and die! Come--a goblet! quick!"
+
+He clutched the bottle meanwhile voraciously, miserly, eagerly, furiously,
+as if it were his life that he held in his grasp; angry, impatient, as if
+something long sought were within his reach, and not yet secure,--with
+longing thirst and desire; suspicious of the world and of fate; feeling as
+if an iron hand were over him, and a crowd of violent robbers round about
+him, struggling for it. At last, unable to wait longer, just as the
+apothecary was tottering away in quest of a drinking-glass, the Colonel
+took out the stopple, and lifted the flask itself to his lips.
+
+"For Heaven's sake, no!" cried the Doctor. "The dose is one single drop!--
+one drop, Colonel, one drop!"
+
+"Not a drop to save your wretched old soul," responded the Colonel;
+probably thinking that the apothecary was pleading for a small share of
+the precious liquor. He put it to his lips, and, as if quenching a
+lifelong thirst, swallowed deep draughts, sucking it in with desperation,
+till, void of breath, he set it down upon the table. The rich, poignant
+perfume spread itself through the air.
+
+The apothecary, with an instinctive carefulness that was rather ludicrous
+under the circumstances, caught up the stopper, which the Colonel had let
+fall, and forced it into the bottle to prevent any farther escape of
+virtue. He then fearfully watched the result of the madman's potation.
+
+The Colonel sat a moment in his chair, panting for breath; then started to
+his feet with a prompt vigor that contrasted widely with the infirm and
+rheumatic movements that had heretofore characterized him. He struck his
+forehead violently with one hand, and smote his chest with the other: he
+stamped his foot thunderously on the ground; then he leaped up to the
+ceiling, and came down with an elastic bound. Then he laughed, a wild,
+exulting ha! ha! with a strange triumphant roar that filled the house and
+reechoed through it; a sound full of fierce, animal rapture,--enjoyment of
+sensual life mixed up with a sort of horror. After all, real as it was, it
+was like the sounds a man makes in a dream. And this, while the potent
+draught seemed still to be making its way through his system; and the
+frightened apothecary thought that he intended a revengeful onslaught upon
+himself. Finally, he uttered a loud unearthly screech, in the midst of
+which his voice broke, as if some unseen hand were throttling him, and,
+starting forward, he fought frantically, as if he would clutch the life
+that was being rent away,--and fell forward with a dead thump upon the
+floor.
+
+"Colonel! Colonel!" cried the terrified Doctor.
+
+The feeble old man, with difficulty, turned over the heavy frame, and saw
+at once, with practised eye, that he was dead. He set him up, and the
+corpse looked at him with angry reproach. He was so startled, that his
+subsequent recollections of the moment were neither distinct nor
+steadfast; but he fancied, though he told the strange impression to no
+one, that on his first glimpse of the face, with a dark flush of what
+looked like rage still upon it, it was a young man's face that he saw,--a
+face with all the passionate energy of early manhood,--the capacity for
+furious anger which the man had lost half a century ago, crammed to the
+brim with vigor till it became agony. But the next moment, if it were so
+(which it could not have been), the face grew ashen, withered, shrunken,
+more aged than in life, though still the murderous fierceness remained,
+and seemed to be petrified forever upon it.
+
+After a moment's bewilderment, Dolliver ran to the window looking to the
+street, threw it open, and called loudly for assistance. He opened also
+another window, for the air to blow through, for he was almost stifled
+with the rich odor of the cordial which filled the room, and was now
+exuded from the corpse.
+
+He heard the voice of Pansie, crying at the door, which was locked, and,
+turning the key, he caught her in his arms, and hastened with her below
+stairs, to give her into the charge of Martha, who seemed half stupefied
+with a sense of something awful that had occurred.
+
+Meanwhile there was a rattling and a banging at the street portal, to
+which several people had been attracted both by the Doctor's outcry from
+the window, and by the awful screech in which the Colonel's spirit (if,
+indeed, he had that divine part) had just previously taken its flight.
+
+He let them in, and, pale and shivering, ushered them up to the death-
+chamber, where one or two, with a more delicate sense of smelling than the
+rest, snuffed the atmosphere, as if sensible of an unknown fragrance, yet
+appeared afraid to breathe, when they saw the terrific countenance leaning
+back against the chair, and eying them so truculently.
+
+I would fain quit the scene and have done with the Colonel, who, I am
+glad, has happened to die at so early a period of the narrative. I
+therefore hasten to say that a coroner's inquest was held on the spot,
+though everybody felt that it was merely ceremonial, and that the
+testimony of their good and ancient townsman, Dr. Dolliver, was amply
+sufficient to settle the matter. The verdict was, "Death by the visitation
+of God."
+
+The apothecary gave evidence that the Colonel, without asking leave, and
+positively against his advice, had drunk a quantity of distilled spirits;
+and one or two servants, or members of the Colonel's family, testified
+that he had been in a very uncomfortable state of mind for some days past,
+so that they fancied he was insane. Therefore nobody thought of blaming
+Dr. Dolliver for what had happened; and, if the plain truth must be told,
+everybody who saw the wretch was too well content to be rid of him, to
+trouble themselves more than was quite necessary about the way in which
+the incumbrance had been removed.
+
+The corpse was taken to the mansion in order to receive a magnificent
+funeral; and Dr. Dolliver was left outwardly in quiet, but much disturbed,
+and indeed almost overwhelmed inwardly, by what had happened.
+
+Yet it is to be observed, that he had accounted for the death with a
+singular dexterity of expression, when he attributed it to a dose of
+distilled spirits. What kind of distilled spirits were those, Doctor? and
+will you venture to take any more of them?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Dolliver Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dolliver Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+#10 in our series by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
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+
+
+Title: The Dolliver Romance
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7119]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 12, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Mark Zinthefer, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+BY
+
+NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+A SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+ANOTHER SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+ANOTHER FRAGMENT OF THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
+
+THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
+
+
+In "The Dolliver Romance," only three chapters of which the author lived
+to complete, we get an intimation as to what would have been the ultimate
+form given to that romance founded on the Elixir of Life, for which
+"Septimius Felton" was the preliminary study. Having abandoned this study,
+and apparently forsaken the whole scheme in 1862, Hawthorne was moved to
+renew his meditation upon it in the following year; and as the plan of the
+romance had now seemingly developed to his satisfaction, he listened to
+the publisher's proposal that it should begin its course as a serial story
+in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1864--the first instance in which
+he had attempted such a mode of publication.
+
+But the change from England to Massachusetts had been marked by, and had
+perhaps in part caused, a decline in his health. Illness in his family,
+the depressing and harrowing effect of the Civil War upon his
+sensibilities, and anxiety with regard to pecuniary affairs, all combined
+to make still further inroads upon his vitality; and so early as the
+autumn of 1862 Mrs. Hawthorne noted in her private diary that her husband
+was looking "miserably ill." At no time since boyhood had he suffered any
+serious sickness, and his strong constitution enabled him to rally from
+this first attack; but the gradual decline continued. After sending forth
+"Our Old Home," he had little strength for any employment more arduous
+than reading, or than walking his accustomed path among the pines and
+sweetfern on the hill behind The Wayside, known to his family as the Mount
+of Vision. The projected work, therefore, advanced but slowly. He wrote to
+Mr. Fields:--
+
+"I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the
+Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters
+ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel
+as if I should never carry it through."
+
+The presentiment proved to be only too well founded. He had previously
+written:--
+
+"There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at
+the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to be
+encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a
+sunshiny book."
+
+And again, in November, he says: "I foresee that there is little
+probability of my getting the first chapter ready by the 15th, although I
+have a resolute purpose to write it by the end of the month." He did
+indeed send it by that time, but it began to be apparent in January that
+he could not go on.
+
+"Seriously," he says, in one letter, "my mind has, for the present, lost
+its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better
+keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor if I wait quietly
+for it; perhaps not." In another: "I hardly know what to say to the public
+about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will
+be. I shall never finish it.... I cannot finish it unless a great change
+comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my
+death."
+
+Finally, work had to be given over indefinitely. In April he went
+southward with Mr. Ticknor, the senior partner of his publishing house;
+but Mr. Ticknor died suddenly in Philadelphia, and Hawthorne returned to
+The Wayside more feeble than ever. He lingered there a little while. Then,
+early in May, came the last effort to recover tone, by means of a
+carriage-journey, with his friend Ex-President Pierce, through the
+southern part of New Hampshire. A week passed, and all was ended: at the
+hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he and his companion had stopped
+to rest, he died in the night, between the 18th and the 19th of May, 1864.
+Like Thackeray and Dickens, he was touched by death's "petrific mace"
+before he had had time to do more than lay the groundwork and begin the
+main structure of the fiction he had in hand; and, as in the case of
+Thackeray, the suddenness of his decease has never been clearly accounted
+for. The precise nature of his malady was not known, since with quiet
+hopelessness he had refused to take medical advice. His friend Dr. Oliver
+Wendell Holmes was the only physician who had an opportunity to take even
+a cursory view of his case, which he did in the course of a brief walk and
+conversation in Boston before Hawthorne started with Mr. Pierce; but he
+was unable, with that slight opportunity, to reach any definite
+conclusion. Dr. Holmes prescribed and had put up for him a remedy to
+palliate some of the poignant symptoms, and this Hawthorne carried with
+him; but "I feared," Dr. Holmes writes to the editor, "that there was some
+internal organic--perhaps malignant--disease; for he looked wasted and as
+if stricken with a mortal illness."
+
+The manuscript of the unfinished "Dolliver Romance" lay upon his coffin
+during the funeral services at Concord, but, contrary to the impression
+sometimes entertained on this point, was not buried with him. It is
+preserved in the Concord Public Library. The first chapter was published
+in the "Atlantic" as an isolated portion, soon after his death; and
+subsequently the second chapter, which he had been unable to revise,
+appeared in the same periodical. Between this and the third fragment there
+is a gap, for bridging which no material was found among his papers; but,
+after hesitating for several years, Mrs. Hawthorne copied and placed in
+the publishers' hands that final portion, which, with the two parts
+previously printed, constitutes the whole of what Hawthorne had put into
+tangible form.
+
+Hawthorne had purposed prefixing a sketch of Thoreau, "because, from a
+tradition which he told me about this house of mine, I got the idea of a
+deathless man, which is now taking a shape very different from the
+original one." This refers to the tradition mentioned in the editor's
+note to "Septimius Felton," and forms a link in the interesting chain of
+evidence connecting that romance with the "Dolliver Romance." With the
+plan respecting Thoreau he combined the idea of writing an
+autobiographical preface, wherein The Wayside was to be described, after
+the manner of his Introduction to the "Mosses from an Old Manse"; but, so
+far as is known, nothing of this was ever actually committed to paper.
+
+Beginning with the idea of producing an English romance, fragments of
+which remain to us in "The Ancestral Footstep," and the incomplete work
+known as "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret," he replaced these by another design,
+of which "Septimius Felton" represents the partial execution. But that
+elaborate study yielded, in its turn, to "The Dolliver Romance." The last-
+named work, had the author lived to carry it out, would doubtless have
+become the vehicle of a profound and pathetic drama, based on the
+instinctive yearning of man for an immortal existence, the attempted
+gratification of which would have been set forth in a variety of ways:
+First, through the selfish old sensualist, Colonel Dabney, who greedily
+seized the mysterious elixir and took such a draught of it that he
+perished on the spot; then, through the simple old Grandsir, anxious to
+live for Pansie's sake; and, perhaps, through Pansie herself, who, coming
+into the enjoyment of some ennobling love, would wish to defeat death, so
+that she might always keep the perfection of her mundane happiness,--all
+these forms of striving to be made the adumbration of a higher one, the
+shadow-play that should direct our minds to the true immortality beyond
+this world.
+
+G. P. L.
+
+
+
+
+THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
+
+A SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
+
+
+Dr. Dolliver, a worthy personage of extreme antiquity, was aroused rather
+prematurely, one summer morning, by the shouts of the child Pansie, in an
+adjoining chamber, summoning old Martha (who performed the duties of
+nurse, housekeeper, and kitchen-maid, in the Doctor's establishment) to
+take up her little ladyship and dress her. The old gentleman woke with
+more than his customary alacrity, and, after taking a moment to gather his
+wits about him, pulled aside the faded moreen curtains of his ancient bed,
+and thrust his head into a beam of sunshine that caused him to wink and
+withdraw it again. This transitory glimpse of good Dr. Dolliver showed a
+flannel night-cap, fringed round with stray locks of silvery white hair,
+and surmounting a meagre and duskily yellow visage, which was crossed and
+criss-crossed with a record of his long life in wrinkles, faithfully
+written, no doubt, but with such cramped chirography of Father Time that
+the purport was illegible. It seemed hardly worth while for the patriarch
+to get out of bed any more, and bring his forlorn shadow into the summer
+day that was made for younger folks. The Doctor, however, was by no means
+of that opinion, being considerably encouraged towards the toil of living
+twenty-four hours longer by the comparative ease with which he found
+himself going through the usually painful process of bestirring his rusty
+joints (stiffened by the very rest and sleep that should have made them
+pliable) and putting them in a condition to bear his weight upon the
+floor. Nor was he absolutely disheartened by the idea of those tonsorial,
+ablutionary, and personally decorative labors which are apt to become so
+intolerably irksome to an old gentleman, after performing them daily and
+daily for fifty, sixty, or seventy years, and finding them still as
+immitigably recurrent as at first. Dr. Dolliver could nowise account for
+this happy condition of his spirits and physical energies, until he
+remembered taking an experimental sip of a certain cordial which was long
+ago prepared by his grandson, and carefully sealed up in a bottle, and had
+been reposited in a dark closet, among a parcel of effete medicines, ever
+since that gifted young man's death.
+
+"It may have wrought effect upon me," thought the doctor, shaking his head
+as he lifted it again from the pillow. "It may be so; for poor Edward
+oftentimes instilled a strange efficacy into his perilous drugs. But I
+will rather believe it to be the operation of God's mercy, which may have
+temporarily invigorated my feeble age for little Pansie's sake."
+
+A twinge of his familiar rheumatism, as he put his foot out of bed, taught
+him that he must not reckon too confidently upon even a day's respite from
+the intrusive family of aches and infirmities, which, with their
+proverbial fidelity to attachments once formed, had long been the closest
+acquaintances that the poor old gentleman had in the world. Nevertheless,
+he fancied the twinge a little less poignant than those of yesterday; and,
+moreover, after stinging him pretty smartly, it passed gradually off with
+a thrill, which, in its latter stages, grew to be almost agreeable. Pain
+is but pleasure too strongly emphasized. With cautious movements, and only
+a groan or two, the good Doctor transferred himself from the bed to the
+floor, where he stood awhile, gazing from one piece of quaint furniture to
+another (such as stiff-backed Mayflower chairs, an oaken chest-of-drawers
+carved cunningly with shapes of animals and wreaths of foliage, a table
+with multitudinous legs, a family record in faded embroidery, a shelf of
+black-bound books, a dirty heap of gallipots and phials in a dim
+corner),--gazing at these things, and steadying himself by the bedpost,
+while his inert brain, still partially benumbed with sleep, came slowly
+into accordance with the realities about him. The object which most helped
+to bring Dr. Dolliver completely to his waking perceptions was one that
+common observers might suppose to have been snatched bodily out of his
+dreams. The same sunbeam that had dazzled the doctor between the bed-
+curtains gleamed on the weather-beaten gilding which had once adorned this
+mysterious symbol, and showed it to be an enormous serpent, twining round
+a wooden post, and reaching quite from the floor of the chamber to its
+ceiling.
+
+It was evidently a thing that could boast of considerable antiquity, the
+dry-rot having eaten out its eyes and gnawed away the tip of its tail; and
+it must have stood long exposed to the atmosphere, for a kind of gray moss
+had partially overspread its tarnished gilt surface, and a swallow, or
+other familiar little bird in some by-gone summer, seemed to have built
+its nest in the yawning and exaggerated mouth. It looked like a kind of
+Manichean idol, which might have been elevated on a pedestal for a century
+or so, enjoying the worship of its votaries in the open air, until the
+impious sect perished from among men,--all save old Dr. Dolliver, who had
+set up the monster in his bedchamber for the convenience of private
+devotion. But we are unpardonable in suggesting such a fantasy to the
+prejudice of our venerable friend, knowing him to have been as pious and
+upright a Christian, and with as little of the serpent in his character,
+as ever came of Puritan lineage. Not to make a further mystery about a
+very simple matter, this bedimmed and rotten reptile was once the medical
+emblem or apothecary's sign of the famous Dr. Swinnerton, who practised
+physic in the earlier days of New England, when a head of Aesculapius or
+Hippocrates would have vexed the souls of the righteous as savoring of
+heathendom. The ancient dispenser of drugs had therefore set up an image
+of the Brazen Serpent, and followed his business for many years with great
+credit, under this Scriptural device; and Dr. Dolliver, being the
+apprentice, pupil, and humble friend of the learned Swinnerton's old age,
+had inherited the symbolic snake, and much other valuable property by his
+bequest.
+
+While the patriarch was putting on his small-clothes, he took care to
+stand in the parallelogram of bright sunshine that fell upon the
+uncarpeted floor. The summer warmth was very genial to his system, and yet
+made him shiver; his wintry veins rejoiced at it, though the reviving
+blood tingled through them with a half-painful and only half-pleasurable
+titillation. For the first few moments after creeping out of bed, he kept
+his back to the sunny window, and seemed mysteriously shy of glancing
+thitherward; but, as the June fervor pervaded him more and more
+thoroughly, he turned bravely about, and looked forth at a burial-ground
+on the corner of which he dwelt. There lay many an old acquaintance, who
+had gone to sleep with the flavor of Dr. Dolliver's tinctures and powders
+upon his tongue; it was the patient's final bitter taste of this world,
+and perhaps doomed to be a recollected nauseousness in the next.
+Yesterday, in the chill of his forlorn old age, the Doctor expected soon
+to stretch out his weary bones among that quiet community, and might
+scarcely have shrunk from the prospect on his own account, except, indeed,
+that he dreamily mixed up the infirmities of his present condition with
+the repose of the approaching one, being haunted by a notion that the damp
+earth, under the grass and dandelions, must needs be pernicious for his
+cough and his rheumatism. But, this morning, the cheerful sunbeams, or the
+mere taste of his grandson's cordial that he had taken at bedtime, or the
+fitful vigor that often sports irreverently with aged people, had caused
+an unfrozen drop of youthfulness, somewhere within him, to expand.
+
+"Hem! ahem!" quoth the Doctor, hoping with one effort to clear his throat
+of the dregs of a ten-years' cough. "Matters are not so far gone with me
+as I thought. I have known mighty sensible men, when only a little age-
+stricken or otherwise out of sorts, to die of mere faint-heartedness, a
+great deal sooner than they need."
+
+He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass, as if to
+impress the apothegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and, for
+his part, he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he
+possibly could, if it were only for the sake of little Pansie, who stood
+as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the
+other. This child of three years old occupied all the unfossilized portion
+of Dr. Dolliver's heart. Every other interest that he formerly had, and
+the entire confraternity of persons whom he once loved, had long ago
+departed; and the poor Doctor could not follow them, because the grasp of
+Pansie's baby-fingers held him back.
+
+So he crammed a great silver watch into his fob, and drew on a patchwork
+morning-gown of an ancient fashion. Its original material was said to have
+been the embroidered front of his own wedding-waistcoat and the silken
+skirt of his wife's bridal attire, which his eldest granddaughter had
+taken from the carved chest-of-drawers, after poor Bessie, the beloved of
+his youth, had been half a century in the grave. Throughout many of the
+intervening years, as the garment got ragged, the spinsters of the old
+man's family had quilted their duty and affection into it in the shape of
+patches upon patches, rose-color, crimson, blue, violet, and green, and
+then (as their hopes faded, and their life kept growing shadier, and their
+attire took a sombre hue) sober gray and great fragments of funereal
+black, until the Doctor could revive the memory of most things that had
+befallen him by looking at his patchwork-gown, as it hung upon a chair.
+And now it was ragged again, and all the fingers that should have mended
+it were cold. It had an Eastern fragrance, too, a smell of drugs, strong-
+scented herbs, and spicy gums, gathered from the many potent infusions
+that had from time to time been spilt over it; so that, snuffing him afar
+off, you might have taken Dr. Dolliver for a mummy, and could hardly have
+been undeceived by his shrunken and torpid aspect, as he crept nearer.
+
+Wrapt in his odorous and many-colored robe, he took staff in hand, and
+moved pretty vigorously to the head of the staircase. As it was somewhat
+steep, and but dimly lighted, he began cautiously to descend, putting his
+left hand on the banister, and poking down his long stick to assist him in
+making sure of the successive steps; and thus he became a living
+illustration of the accuracy of Scripture, where it describes the aged as
+being "afraid of that which is high,"--a truth that is often found to have
+a sadder purport than its external one. Half-way to the bottom, however,
+the Doctor heard the impatient and authoritative tones of little Pansie,--
+Queen Pansie, as she might fairly have been styled, in reference to her
+position in the household,--calling amain for grandpapa and breakfast. He
+was startled into such perilous activity by the summons, that his heels
+slid on the stairs, the slippers were shuffled off his feet, and he saved
+himself from a tumble only by quickening his pace, and coming down at
+almost a run.
+
+"Mercy on my poor old bones!" mentally exclaimed the Doctor, fancying
+himself fractured in fifty places. "Some of them are broken, surely, and,
+methinks, my heart has leaped out of my mouth! What! all right? Well,
+well! but Providence is kinder to me than I deserve, prancing down this
+steep staircase like a kid of three months old!"
+
+He bent stiffly to gather up his slippers and fallen staff; and meanwhile
+Pansie had heard the tumult of her great-grandfather's descent, and was
+pounding against the door of the breakfast-room in her haste to come at
+him. The Doctor opened it, and there she stood, a rather pale and large-
+eyed little thing, quaint in her aspect, as might well be the case with a
+motherless child, dwelling in an uncheerful house, with no other playmates
+than a decrepit old man and a kitten, and no better atmosphere within-
+doors than the odor of decayed apothecary's stuff, nor gayer neighborhood
+than that of the adjacent burial-ground, where all her relatives, from her
+great-grandmother downward, lay calling to her, "Pansie, Pansie, it is
+bedtime!" even in the prime of the summer morning. For those dead women-
+folk, especially her mother and the whole row of maiden aunts and grand-
+aunts, could not but be anxious about the child, knowing that little
+Pansie would be far safer under a tuft of dandelions than if left alone,
+as she soon must be, in this difficult and deceitful world.
+
+Yet, in spite of the lack of damask roses in her cheeks, she seemed a
+healthy child, and certainly showed great capacity of energetic movement
+in the impulsive capers with which she welcomed her venerable progenitor.
+She shouted out her satisfaction, moreover (as her custom was, having
+never had any oversensitive auditors about her to tame down her voice),
+till even the Doctor's dull ears were full of the clamor.
+
+"Pansie, darling," said Dr. Dolliver, cheerily, patting her brown hair
+with his tremulous fingers, "thou hast put some of thine own friskiness
+into poor old grandfather, this fine morning! Dost know, child, that he
+came near breaking his neck down-stairs at the sound of thy voice? What
+wouldst thou have done then, little Pansie?"
+
+"Kiss poor grandpapa and make him well!" answered the child, remembering
+the Doctor's own mode of cure in similar mishaps to herself. "It shall do
+poor grandpapa good!" she added, putting up her mouth to apply the remedy.
+
+"Ah, little one, thou hast greater faith in thy medicines than ever I had
+in my drugs," replied the patriarch, with a giggle, surprised and
+delighted at his own readiness of response. "But the kiss is good for my
+feeble old heart, Pansie, though it might do little to mend a broken neck;
+so give grandpapa another dose, and let us to breakfast."
+
+In this merry humor they sat down to the table, great-grandpapa and Pansie
+side by side, and the kitten, as soon appeared, making a third in the
+party. First, she showed her mottled head out of Pansie's lap, delicately
+sipping milk from the child's basin without rebuke: then she took post on
+the old gentleman's shoulder, purring like a spinning-wheel, trying her
+claws in the wadding of his dressing-gown, and still more impressively
+reminding him of her presence by putting out a paw to intercept a warmed-
+over morsel of yesterday's chicken on its way to the Doctor's mouth. After
+skilfully achieving this feat, she scrambled down upon the breakfast-table
+and began to wash her face and hands. Evidently, these companions were all
+three on intimate terms, as was natural enough, since a great many
+childish impulses were softly creeping back on the simple-minded old man;
+insomuch that, if no worldly necessities nor painful infirmity had
+disturbed him, his remnant of life might have been as cheaply and cheerily
+enjoyed as the early playtime of the kitten and the child. Old Dr.
+Dolliver and his great-granddaughter (a ponderous title, which seemed
+quite to overwhelm the tiny figure of Pansie) had met one another at the
+two extremities of the life-circle: her sunrise served him for a sunset,
+illuminating his locks of silver and hers of golden brown with a
+homogeneous shimmer of twinkling light.
+
+Little Pansie was the one earthly creature that inherited a drop of the
+Dolliver blood. The Doctor's only child, poor Bessie's offspring, had died
+the better part of a hundred years before, and his grandchildren, a
+numerous and dimly remembered brood, had vanished along his weary track in
+their youth, maturity, or incipient age, till, hardly knowing, how it had
+all happened, he found himself tottering onward with an infant's small
+fingers in his nerveless grasp. So mistily did his dead progeny come and
+go in the patriarch's decayed recollection, that this solitary child
+represented for him the successive babyhoods of the many that had gone
+before. The emotions of his early paternity came back to him. She seemed
+the baby of a past age oftener than she seemed Pansie. A whole family of
+grand-aunts (one of whom had perished in her cradle, never so mature as
+Pansie now, another in her virgin bloom, another in autumnal maidenhood,
+yellow and shrivelled, with vinegar in her blood, and still another, a
+forlorn widow, whose grief outlasted even its vitality, and grew to be
+merely a torpid habit, and was saddest then),--all their hitherto
+forgotten features peeped through the face of the great-grandchild, and
+their long-inaudible voices sobbed, shouted, or laughed, in her familiar
+tones. But it often happened to Dr. Dolliver, while frolicking amid this
+throng of ghosts, where the one reality looked no more vivid than its
+shadowy sisters,--it often happened that his eyes filled with tears at a
+sudden perception of what a sad and poverty-stricken old man he was,
+already remote from his own generation, and bound to stray further onward
+as the sole playmate and protector of a child!
+
+As Dr. Dolliver, in spite of his advanced epoch of life, is likely to
+remain a considerable time longer upon our hands, we deem it expedient to
+give a brief sketch of his position, in order that the story may get
+onward with the greater freedom when he rises from the breakfast-table.
+Deeming it a matter of courtesy, we have allowed him the honorary title of
+Doctor, as did all his towns-people and contemporaries, except, perhaps,
+one or two formal old physicians, stingy of civil phrases and over-jealous
+of their own professional dignity. Nevertheless, these crusty graduates
+were technically right in excluding Dr. Dolliver from their fraternity. He
+had never received the degree of any medical school, nor (save it might be
+for the cure of a toothache, or a child's rash, or a whitlow on a
+seamstress's finger, or some such trifling malady) had he ever been even a
+practitioner of the awful science with which his popular designation
+connected him. Our old friend, in short, even at his highest social
+elevation, claimed to be nothing more than an apothecary, and, in these
+later and far less prosperous days, scarcely so much. Since the death of
+his last surviving grandson (Pansie's father, whom he had instructed in
+all the mysteries of his science, and who, being distinguished by an
+experimental and inventive tendency, was generally believed to have
+poisoned himself with an infallible panacea of his own distillation),--
+since that final bereavement, Dr. Dolliver's once pretty flourishing
+business had lamentably declined. After a few months of unavailing
+struggle, he found it expedient to take down the Brazen Serpent from the
+position to which Dr. Swinnerton had originally elevated it, in front of
+his shop in the main street, and to retire to his private dwelling,
+situated in a by-lane and on the edge of a burial-ground.
+
+This house, as well as the Brazen Serpent, some old medical books, and a
+drawer full of manuscripts, had come to him by the legacy of Dr.
+Swinnerton. The dreariness of the locality had been of small importance to
+our friend in his young manhood, when he first led his fair wife over the
+threshold, and so long as neither of them had any kinship with the human
+dust that rose into little hillocks, and still kept accumulating beneath
+their window. But, too soon afterwards, when poor Bessie herself had gone
+early to rest there, it is probable that an influence from her grave may
+have prematurely calmed and depressed her widowed husband, taking away
+much of the energy from what should have been the most active portion of
+his life. Thus he never grew rich. His thrifty townsmen used to tell him,
+that, in any other man's hands, Dr. Swinnerton's Brazen Serpent (meaning,
+I presume, the inherited credit and good-will of that old worthy's trade)
+would need but ten years' time to transmute its brass into gold. In Dr.
+Dolliver's keeping, as we have seen, the inauspicious symbol lost the
+greater part of what superficial gilding it originally had. Matters had
+not mended with him in more advanced life, after he had deposited a
+further and further portion of his heart and its affections in each
+successive one of a long row of kindred graves; and as he stood over the
+last of them, holding Pansie by the hand and looking down upon the coffin
+of his grandson, it is no wonder that the old man wept, partly for those
+gone before, but not so bitterly as for the little one that stayed behind.
+Why had not God taken her with the rest? And then, so hopeless as he was,
+so destitute of possibilities of good, his weary frame, his decrepit
+bones, his dried-up heart, might have crumbled into dust at once, and have
+been scattered by the next wind over all the heaps of earth that were akin
+to him.
+
+This intensity of desolation, however, was of too positive a character to
+be long sustained by a person of Dr. Dolliver's original gentleness and
+simplicity, and now so completely tamed by age and misfortune. Even before
+he turned away from the grave, he grew conscious of a slightly cheering
+and invigorating effect from the tight grasp of the child's warm little
+hand. Feeble as he was, she seemed to adopt him willingly for her
+protector. And the Doctor never afterwards shrank from his duty nor
+quailed beneath it, but bore himself like a man, striving, amid the sloth
+of age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency which he
+had failed to accumulate even in his most vigorous days.
+
+To the extent of securing a present subsistence for Pansie and himself, he
+was successful. After his son's death, when the Brazen Serpent fell into
+popular disrepute, a small share of tenacious patronage followed the old
+man into his retirement. In his prime, he had been allowed to possess more
+skill than usually fell to the share of a Colonial apothecary, having been
+regularly apprenticed to Dr. Swinnerton, who, throughout his long
+practice, was accustomed personally to concoct the medicines which he
+prescribed and dispensed. It was believed, indeed, that the ancient
+physician had learned the art at the world-famous drug-manufactory of
+Apothecary's Hall, in London, and, as some people half-malignly whispered,
+had perfected himself under masters more subtle than were to be found even
+there. Unquestionably, in many critical cases he was known to have
+employed remedies of mysterious composition and dangerous potency, which,
+in less skilful hands, would have been more likely to kill than cure. He
+would willingly, it is said, have taught his apprentice the secrets of
+these prescriptions, but the latter, being of a timid character and
+delicate conscience, had shrunk from acquaintance with them. It was
+probably as the result of the same scrupulosity that Dr. Dolliver had
+always declined to enter the medical profession, in which his old
+instructor had set him such heroic examples of adventurous dealing with
+matters of life and death. Nevertheless, the aromatic fragrance, so to
+speak, of the learned Swinnerton's reputation, had clung to our friend
+through life; and there were elaborate preparations in the pharmacopœia of
+that day, requiring such minute skill and conscientious fidelity in the
+concocter that the physicians were still glad to confide them to one in
+whom these qualities were so evident.
+
+Moreover, the grandmothers of the community were kind to him, and mindful
+of his perfumes, his rose-water, his cosmetics, tooth-powders, pomanders,
+and pomades, the scented memory of which lingered about their toilet-
+tables, or came faintly back from the days when they were beautiful. Among
+this class of customers there was still a demand for certain comfortable
+little nostrums (delicately sweet and pungent to the taste, cheering to
+the spirits, and fragrant in the breath), the proper distillation of which
+was the airiest secret that the mystic Swinnerton had left behind him.
+And, besides, these old ladies had always liked the manners of Dr.
+Dolliver, and used to speak of his gentle courtesy behind the counter as
+having positively been something to admire; though of later years, an
+unrefined, and almost rustic simplicity, such as belonged to his humble
+ancestors, appeared to have taken possession of him, as it often does of
+prettily mannered men in their late decay.
+
+But it resulted from all these favorable circumstances that the Doctor's
+marble mortar, though worn with long service and considerably damaged by a
+crack that pervaded it, continued to keep up an occasional intimacy with
+the pestle; and he still weighed drachms and scruples in his delicate
+scales, though it seemed impossible, dealing with such minute quantities,
+that his tremulous fingers should not put in too little or too much,
+leaving out life with the deficiency, or spilling in death with the
+surplus. To say the truth, his stanchest friends were beginning to think
+that Dr. Dolliver's fits of absence (when his mind appeared absolutely to
+depart from him, while his frail old body worked on mechanically) rendered
+him not quite trustworthy without a close supervision of his proceedings.
+It was impossible, however, to convince the aged apothecary of the
+necessity for such vigilance; and if anything could stir up his gentle
+temper to wrath, or, as oftener happened, to tears, it was the attempt
+(which he was marvellously quick to detect) thus to interfere with his
+long-familiar business.
+
+The public, meanwhile, ceasing to regard Dr. Dolliver in his professional
+aspect, had begun to take an interest in him as perhaps their oldest
+fellow-citizen. It was he that remembered the Great Fire and the Great
+Snow, and that had been a grown-up stripling at the terrible epoch of
+Witch-Times, and a child just breeched at the breaking out of King
+Philip's Indian War. He, too, in his school-boy days, had received a
+benediction from the patriarchal Governor Bradstreet, and thus could boast
+(somewhat as Bishops do of their unbroken succession from the Apostles) of
+a transmitted blessing from the whole company of sainted Pilgrims, among
+whom the venerable magistrate had been an honored companion. Viewing their
+townsman in this aspect, the people revoked the courteous Doctorate with
+which they had heretofore decorated him, and now knew him most familiarly
+as Grandsir Dolliver. His white head, his Puritan band, his threadbare
+garb (the fashion of which he had ceased to change, half a century ago),
+his gold-headed staff, that had been Dr. Swinnerton's, his shrunken,
+frosty figure, and its feeble movement,--all these characteristics had a
+wholeness and permanence in the public recognition, like the meeting-house
+steeple or the town-pump. All the younger portion of the inhabitants
+unconsciously ascribed a sort of aged immortality to Grandsir Dolliver's
+infirm and reverend presence. They fancied that he had been born old (at
+least, I remember entertaining some such notions about age-stricken
+people, when I myself was young), and that he could the better tolerate
+his aches and incommodities, his dull ears and dim eyes, his remoteness
+from human intercourse within the crust of indurated years, the cold
+temperature that kept him always shivering and sad, the heavy burden that
+invisibly bent down his shoulders,--that all these intolerable things
+might bring a kind of enjoyment to Grandsir Dolliver, as the lifelong
+conditions of his peculiar existence.
+
+But, alas! it was a terrible mistake. This weight of years had a perennial
+novelty for the poor sufferer. He never grew accustomed to it, but, long
+as he had now borne the fretful torpor of his waning life, and patient as
+he seemed, he still retained an inward consciousness that these stiffened
+shoulders, these quailing knees, this cloudiness of sight and brain, this
+confused forgetfulness of men and affairs, were troublesome accidents that
+did not really belong to him. He possibly cherished a half-recognized idea
+that they might pass away. Youth, however eclipsed for a season, is
+undoubtedly the proper, permanent, and genuine condition of man; and if we
+look closely into this dreary delusion of growing old, we shall find that
+it never absolutely succeeds in laying hold of our innermost convictions.
+A sombre garment, woven of life's unrealities, has muffled us from our
+true self, but within it smiles the young man whom we knew; the ashes of
+many perishable things have fallen upon our youthful fire, but beneath
+them lurk the seeds of inextinguishable flame. So powerful is this
+instinctive faith, that men of simple modes of character are prone to
+antedate its consummation. And thus it happened with poor Grandsir
+Dolliver, who often awoke from an old man's fitful sleep with a sense that
+his senile predicament was but a dream of the past night; and hobbling
+hastily across the cold floor to the looking-glass, he would be grievously
+disappointed at beholding the white hair, the wrinkles and furrows, the
+ashen visage and bent form, the melancholy mask of Age, in which, as he
+now remembered, some strange and sad enchantment had involved him for
+years gone by!
+
+To other eyes than his own, however, the shrivelled old gentleman looked
+as if there were little hope of his throwing off this too artfully wrought
+disguise, until, at no distant day, his stooping figure should be
+straightened out, his hoary locks be smoothed over his brows, and his
+much-enduring bones be laid safely away, with a green coverlet spread over
+them, beside his Bessie, who doubtless would recognize her youthful
+companion in spite of his ugly garniture of decay. He longed to be gazed
+at by the loving eyes now closed; he shrank from the hard stare of them
+that loved him not. Walking the streets seldom and reluctantly, he felt a
+dreary impulse to elude the people's observation, as if with a sense that
+he had gone irrevocably out of fashion, and broken his connecting links
+with the net-work of human life; or else it was that nightmare-feeling
+which we sometimes have in dreams, when we seem to find ourselves
+wandering through a crowded avenue, with the noonday sun upon us, in some
+wild extravagance of dress or nudity. He was conscious of estrangement
+from his towns-people, but did not always know how nor wherefore, nor why
+he should be thus groping through the twilight mist in solitude. If they
+spoke loudly to him, with cheery voices, the greeting translated itself
+faintly and mournfully to his ears; if they shook him by the hand, it was
+as if a thick, insensible glove absorbed the kindly pressure and the
+warmth. When little Pansie was the companion of his walk, her childish
+gayety and freedom did not avail to bring him into closer relationship
+with men, but seemed to follow him into that region of indefinable
+remoteness, that dismal Fairy-Land of aged fancy, into which old Grandsir
+Dolliver had so strangely crept away.
+
+Yet there were moments, as many persons had noticed, when the great-
+grandpapa would suddenly take stronger hues of life. It was as if his
+faded figure had been colored over anew, or at least, as he and Pansie
+moved along the street, as if a sunbeam had fallen across him, instead of
+the gray gloom of an instant before. His chilled sensibilities had
+probably been touched and quickened by the warm contiguity of his little
+companion through the medium of her hand, as it stirred within his own, or
+some inflection of her voice that set his memory ringing and chiming with
+forgotten sounds. While that music lasted, the old man was alive and
+happy. And there were seasons, it might be, happier than even these, when
+Pansie had been kissed and put to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sat by his
+fireside gazing in among the massive coals, and absorbing their glow into
+those cavernous abysses with which all men communicate. Hence come angels
+or fiends into our twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them
+in by-gone years. Over our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the fire-
+gleam, stole an expression of repose and perfect trust that made him as
+beautiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child Pansie on her
+pillow; and sometimes the spirits that were watching him beheld a calm
+surprise draw slowly over his features and brighten into joy, yet not so
+vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had been
+kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a glimpse
+within. All the night afterwards, he would be semi-conscious of an
+intangible bliss diffused through the fitful lapses of an old man's
+slumber, and would awake, at early dawn, with a faint thrilling of the
+heart-strings, as if there had been music just now wandering over them.
+
+
+
+
+ANOTHER SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
+
+
+[Footnote: This scene was not revised by the author, but is printed from
+his first draught.]
+
+We may now suppose Grandsir Dolliver to have finished his breakfast, with
+a better appetite and sharper perception of the qualities of his food than
+he has generally felt of late years, whether it were due to old Martha's
+cookery or to the cordial of the night before. Little Pansie had also made
+an end of her bread and milk with entire satisfaction, and afterwards
+nibbled a crust, greatly enjoying its resistance to her little white
+teeth.
+
+How this child came by the odd name of Pansie, and whether it was really
+her baptismal name, I have not ascertained. More probably it was one of
+those pet appellations that grow out of a child's character, or out of
+some keen thrill of affection in the parents, an unsought-for and
+unconscious felicity, a kind of revelation, teaching them the true name by
+which the child's guardian angel would know it,--a name with playfulness
+and love in it, that we often observe to supersede, in the practice of
+those who love the child best, the name that they carefully selected, and
+caused the clergyman to plaster indelibly on the poor little forehead at
+the font,--the love-name, whereby, if the child lives, the parents know
+it in their hearts, or by which, if it dies, God seems to have called it
+away, leaving the sound lingering faintly and sweetly through the house.
+In Pansie's case, it may have been a certain pensiveness which was
+sometimes seen under her childish frolic, and so translated itself into
+French (_pensée_), her mother having been of Acadian kin; or, quite
+as probably, it alluded merely to the color of her eyes, which, in some
+lights, were very like the dark petals of a tuft of pansies in the
+Doctor's garden. It might well be, indeed, on account of the suggested
+pensiveness; for the child's gayety had no example to sustain it, no
+sympathy of other children or grown people,--and her melancholy, had it
+been so dark a feeling, was but the shadow of the house, and of the old
+man. If brighter sunshine came, she would brighten with it. This morning,
+surely, as the three companions, Pansie, puss, and Grandsir Dolliver,
+emerged from the shadow of the house into the small adjoining enclosure,
+they seemed all frolicsome alike.
+
+The Doctor, however, was intent over something that had reference to his
+lifelong business of drugs. This little spot was the place where he was
+wont to cultivate a variety of herbs supposed to be endowed with medicinal
+virtue. Some of them had been long known in the pharmacopœia of the Old
+World; and others, in the early days of the country, had been adopted by
+the first settlers from the Indian medicine-men, though with fear and even
+contrition, because these wild doctors were supposed to draw their
+pharmaceutic knowledge from no gracious source, the Black Man himself
+being the principal professor in their medical school. From his own
+experience, however, Dr. Dolliver had long since doubted, though he was
+not bold enough quite to come to the conclusion, that Indian shrubs, and
+the remedies prepared from them, were much less perilous than those so
+freely used in European practice, and singularly apt to be followed by
+results quite as propitious. Into such heterodoxy our friend was the more
+liable to fall, because it had been taught him early in life by his old
+master, Dr. Swinnerton, who, at those not infrequent times when he
+indulged a certain unhappy predilection for strong waters, had been
+accustomed to inveigh in terms of the most cynical contempt and coarsest
+ridicule against the practice by which he lived, and, as he affirmed,
+inflicted death on his fellow-men. Our old apothecary, though too loyal to
+the learned profession with which he was connected fully to believe this
+bitter judgment, even when pronounced by his revered master, was still so
+far influenced that his conscience was possibly a little easier when
+making a preparation from forest herbs and roots than in the concoction of
+half a score of nauseous poisons into a single elaborate drug, as the
+fashion of that day was.
+
+But there were shrubs in the garden of which he had never ventured to make
+a medical use, nor, indeed, did he know their virtue, although from year
+to year he had tended and fertilized, weeded and pruned them, with
+something like religious care. They were of the rarest character, and had
+been planted by the learned and famous Dr. Swinnerton, who, on his death-
+bed, when he left his dwelling and all his abstruse manuscripts to his
+favorite pupil, had particularly directed his attention to this row of
+shrubs. They had been collected by himself from remote countries, and had
+the poignancy of torrid climes in them; and he told him, that, properly
+used, they would be worth all the rest of the legacy a hundred-fold. As
+the apothecary, however, found the manuscripts, in which he conjectured
+there was a treatise on the subject of these shrubs, mostly illegible, and
+quite beyond his comprehension in such passages as he succeeded in
+puzzling out (partly, perhaps, owing to his very imperfect knowledge of
+Latin, in which language they were written), he had never derived from
+them any of the promised benefit. And, to say the truth, remembering that
+Dr. Swinnerton himself never appeared to triturate or decoct or do
+anything else with the mysterious herbs, our old friend was inclined to
+imagine the weighty commendation of their virtues to have been the idly
+solemn utterance of mental aberration at the hour of death. So, with the
+integrity that belonged to his character, he had nurtured them as tenderly
+as was possible in the ungenial climate and soil of New England, putting
+some of them into pots for the winter; but they had rather dwindled than
+flourished, and he had reaped no harvests from them, nor observed them
+with any degree of scientific interest.
+
+His grandson, however, while yet a school-boy, had listened to the old
+man's legend of the miraculous virtues of these plants; and it took so
+firm a hold of his mind, that the row of outlandish vegetables seemed
+rooted in it, and certainly flourished there with richer luxuriance than
+in the soil where they actually grew. The story, acting thus early upon
+his imagination, may be said to have influenced his brief career in life,
+and, perchance, brought about its early close. The young man, in the
+opinion of competent judges, was endowed with remarkable abilities, and
+according to the rumor of the people had wonderful gifts, which were
+proved by the cures he had wrought with remedies of his own invention. His
+talents lay in the direction of scientific analysis and inventive
+combination of chemical powers. While under the pupilage of his
+grandfather, his progress had rapidly gone quite beyond his instructor's
+hope,--leaving him even to tremble at the audacity with which he
+overturned and invented theories, and to wonder at the depth at which he
+wrought beneath the superficialness and mock-mystery of the medical
+science of those days, like a miner sinking his shaft and running a
+hideous peril of the earth caving in above him. Especially did he devote
+himself to these plants; and under his care they had thriven beyond all
+former precedent, bursting into luxuriance of bloom, and most of them
+bearing beautiful flowers, which, however, in two or three instances, had
+the sort of natural repulsiveness that the serpent has in its beauty,
+compelled against its will, as it were, to warn the beholder of an
+unrevealed danger. The young man had long ago, it must be added, demanded
+of his grandfather the documents included in the legacy of Professor
+Swinnerton, and had spent days and nights upon them, growing pale over
+their mystic lore, which seemed the fruit not merely of the Professor's
+own labors, but of those of more ancient sages than he; and often a whole
+volume seemed to be compressed within the limits of a few lines of crabbed
+manuscript, judging from the time which it cost even the quick-minded
+student to decipher them.
+
+Meantime these abstruse investigations had not wrought such disastrous
+effects as might have been feared, in causing Edward Dolliver to neglect
+the humble trade, the conduct of which his grandfather had now
+relinquished almost entirely into his hands. On the contrary, with the
+mere side results of his study, or what may be called the chips and
+shavings of his real work, he created a prosperity quite beyond anything
+that his simple-minded predecessor had ever hoped for, even at the most
+sanguine epoch of his life. The young man's adventurous endowments were
+miraculously alive, and connecting themselves with his remarkable ability
+for solid research, and perhaps his conscience being as yet imperfectly
+developed (as it sometimes lies dormant in the young), he spared not to
+produce compounds which, if the names were anywise to be trusted, would
+supersede all other remedies, and speedily render any medicine a needless
+thing, making the trade of apothecary an untenable one, and the title of
+Doctor obsolete. Whether there was real efficacy in these nostrums, and
+whether their author himself had faith in them, is more than can safely be
+said; but, at all events, the public believed in them, and thronged to the
+old and dim sign of the Brazen Serpent, which, though hitherto familiar to
+them and their forefathers, now seemed to shine with auspicious lustre, as
+if its old Scriptural virtues were renewed. If any faith was to be put in
+human testimony, many marvellous cures were really performed, the fame of
+which spread far and wide, and caused demands for these medicines to come
+in from places far beyond the precincts of the little town. Our old
+apothecary, now degraded by the overshadowing influence of his grandson's
+character to a position not much above that of a shop-boy, stood behind
+the counter with a face sad and distrustful, and yet with an odd kind of
+fitful excitement in it, as if he would have liked to enjoy this new
+prosperity, had he dared. Then his venerable figure was to be seen
+dispensing these questionable compounds by the single bottle and by the
+dozen, wronging his simple conscience as he dealt out what he feared was
+trash or worse, shrinking from the reproachful eyes of every ancient
+physician who might chance to be passing by, but withal examining closely
+the silver, or the New England coarsely printed bills, which he took in
+payment, as if apprehensive that the delusive character of the commodity
+which he sold might be balanced by equal counterfeiting in the money
+received, or as if his faith in all things were shaken.
+
+Is it not possible that this gifted young man had indeed found out those
+remedies which Nature has provided and laid away for the cure of every
+ill?
+
+The disastrous termination of the most brilliant epoch that ever came to
+the Brazen Serpent must be told in a few words. One night, Edward
+Dolliver's young wife awoke, and, seeing the gray dawn creeping into the
+chamber, while her husband, it should seem, was still engaged in his
+laboratory, arose in her nightdress, and went to the door of the room to
+put in her gentle remonstrance against such labor. There she found him
+dead,--sunk down out of his chair upon the hearth, where were some ashes,
+apparently of burnt manuscripts, which appeared to comprise most of those
+included in Dr. Swinnerton's legacy, though one or two had fallen near the
+heap, and lay merely scorched beside it. It seemed as if he had thrown
+them into the fire, under a sudden impulse, in a great hurry and passion.
+It may be that he had come to the perception of something fatally false
+and deceptive in the successes which he had appeared to win, and was too
+proud and too conscientious to survive it. Doctors were called in, but had
+no power to revive him. An inquest was held, at which the jury, under the
+instruction, perhaps, of those same revengeful doctors, expressed the
+opinion that the poor young man, being given to strange contrivances with
+poisonous drugs, had died by incautiously tasting them himself. This
+verdict, and the terrible event itself, at once deprived the medicines of
+all their popularity; and the poor old apothecary was no longer under any
+necessity of disturbing his conscience by selling them. They at once lost
+their repute, and ceased to be in any demand. In the few instances in
+which they were tried the experiment was followed by no good results; and
+even those individuals who had fancied themselves cured, and had been
+loudest in spreading the praises of these beneficent compounds, now, as if
+for the utter demolition of the poor youth's credit, suffered under a
+recurrence of the worst symptoms, and, in more than one case, perished
+miserably: insomuch (for the days of witchcraft were still within the
+memory of living men and women) it was the general opinion that Satan had
+been personally concerned in this affliction, and that the Brazen Serpent,
+so long honored among them, was really the type of his subtle malevolence
+and perfect iniquity. It was rumored even that all preparations that came
+from the shop were harmful: that teeth decayed that had been made pearly
+white by the use of the young chemist's dentifrice; that cheeks were
+freckled that had been changed to damask roses by his cosmetics; that hair
+turned gray or fell off that had become black, glossy, and luxuriant from
+the application of his mixtures; that breath which his drugs had sweetened
+had now a sulphurous smell. Moreover, all the money heretofore amassed by
+the sale of them had been exhausted by Edward Dolliver in his lavish
+expenditure for the processes of his study; and nothing was left for
+Pansie, except a few valueless and unsalable bottles of medicine, and one
+or two others, perhaps more recondite than their inventor had seen fit to
+offer to the public.
+
+Little Pansie's mother lived but a short time after the shock of the
+terrible catastrophe; and, as we began our story with saying, she was left
+with no better guardianship or support than might be found in the efforts
+of a long superannuated man.
+
+Nothing short of the simplicity, integrity, and piety of Grandsir
+Dolliver's character, known and acknowledged as far back as the oldest
+inhabitants remembered anything, and inevitably discoverable by the
+dullest and most prejudiced observers, in all its natural manifestations,
+could have protected him in still creeping about the streets. So far as he
+was personally concerned, however, all bitterness and suspicion had
+speedily passed away; and there remained still the careless and neglectful
+good-will, and the prescriptive reverence, not altogether reverential,
+which the world heedlessly awards to the unfortunate individual who
+outlives his generation.
+
+And now that we have shown the reader sufficiently, or at least to the
+best of our knowledge, and perhaps at tedious length, what was the present
+position of Grandsir Dolliver, we may let our story pass onward, though at
+such a pace as suits the feeble gait of an old man.
+
+The peculiarly brisk sensation of this morning, to which we have more than
+once alluded, enabled the Doctor to toil pretty vigorously at his
+medicinal herbs,--his catnip, his vervain, and the like; but he did not
+turn his attention to the row of mystic plants, with which so much of
+trouble and sorrow either was, or appeared to be, connected. In truth, his
+old soul was sick of them, and their very fragrance, which the warm
+sunshine made strongly perceptible, was odious to his nostrils. But the
+spicy, homelike scent of his other herbs, the English simples, was
+grateful to him, and so was the earth-smell, as he turned up the soil
+about their roots, and eagerly snuffed it in. Little Pansie, on the other
+hand, perhaps scandalized at great-grandpapa's neglect of the prettiest
+plants in his garden, resolved to do her small utmost towards balancing
+his injustice; so with an old shingle, fallen from the roof, which she had
+appropriated as her agricultural tool, she began to dig about them,
+pulling up the weeds, as she saw grandpapa doing. The kitten, too, with a
+look of elfish sagacity, lent her assistance, plying her paws with vast
+haste and efficiency at the roots of one of the shrubs. This particular
+one was much smaller than the rest, perhaps because it was a native of the
+torrid zone, and required greater care than the others to make it
+flourish; so that, shrivelled, cankered, and scarcely showing a green
+leaf, both Pansie and the kitten probably mistook it for a weed. After
+their joint efforts had made a pretty big trench about it, the little girl
+seized the shrub with both hands, bestriding it with her plump little
+legs, and giving so vigorous a pull, that, long accustomed to be
+transplanted annually, it came up by the roots, and little Pansie came
+down in a sitting posture, making a broad impress on the soft earth. "See,
+see, Doctor!" cries Pansie, comically enough giving him his title of
+courtesy,--"look, grandpapa, the big, naughty weed!"
+
+Now the Doctor had at once a peculiar dread and a peculiar value for this
+identical shrub, both because his grandson's investigations had been
+applied more ardently to it than to all the rest, and because it was
+associated in his mind with an ancient and sad recollection. For he had
+never forgotten that his wife, the early lost, had once taken a fancy to
+wear its flowers, day after day, through the whole season of their bloom,
+in her bosom, where they glowed like a gem, and deepened her somewhat
+pallid beauty with a richness never before seen in it. At least such was
+the effect which this tropical flower imparted to the beloved form in his
+memory, and thus it somehow both brightened and wronged her. This had
+happened not long before her death; and whenever, in the subsequent years,
+this plant had brought its annual flower, it had proved a kind of talisman
+to bring up the image of Bessie, radiant with this glow that did not
+really belong to her naturally passive beauty, quickly interchanging with
+another image of her form, with the snow of death on cheek and forehead.
+This reminiscence had remained among the things of which the Doctor was
+always conscious, but had never breathed a word, through the whole of his
+long life,--a sprig of sensibility that perhaps helped to keep him
+tenderer and purer than other men, who entertain no such follies. And the
+sight of the shrub often brought back the faint, golden gleam of her hair,
+as if her spirit were in the sunlights of the garden, quivering into view
+and out of it. And therefore, when he saw what Pansie had done, he sent
+forth a strange, inarticulate, hoarse, tremulous exclamation, a sort of
+aged and decrepit cry of mingled emotion. "Naughty Pansie, to pull up
+grandpapa's flower!" said he, as soon as he could speak. "Poison, Pansie,
+poison! Fling it away, child!"
+
+And dropping his spade, the old gentleman scrambled towards the little
+girl as quickly as his rusty joints would let him,--while Pansie, as
+apprehensive and quick of motion as a fawn, started up with a shriek of
+mirth and fear to escape him. It so happened that the garden-gate was
+ajar; and a puff of wind blowing it wide open, she escaped through this
+fortuitous avenue, followed by great-grandpapa and the kitten.
+
+"Stop, naughty Pansie, stop!" shouted our old friend. "You will tumble
+into the grave!" The kitten, with the singular sensitiveness that seems to
+affect it at every kind of excitement, was now on her back.
+
+And, indeed, this portentous warning was better grounded and had a more
+literal meaning than might be supposed; for the swinging gate communicated
+with the burial-ground, and almost directly in little Pansie's track there
+was a newly dug grave, ready to receive its tenant that afternoon. Pansie,
+however, fled onward with outstretched arms, half in fear, half in fun,
+plying her round little legs with wonderful promptitude, as if to escape
+Time or Death, in the person of Grandsir Dolliver, and happily avoiding
+the ominous pitfall that lies in every person's path, till, hearing a
+groan from her pursuer, she looked over her shoulder, and saw that poor
+grandpapa had stumbled over one of the many hillocks. She then suddenly
+wrinkled up her little visage, and sent forth a full-breathed roar of
+sympathy and alarm.
+
+"Grandpapa has broken his neck now!" cried little Pansie, amid her sobs.
+
+"Kiss grandpapa, and make it well, then," said the old gentleman,
+recollecting her remedy, and scrambling up more readily than could be
+expected. "Well," he murmured to himself, "a hair's-breadth more, and I
+should have been tumbled into yonder grave. Poor little Pansie! what
+wouldst thou have done then?"
+
+"Make the grass grow over grandpapa," answered Pansie, laughing up in his
+face.
+
+"Poh, poh, child, that is not a pretty thing to say," said grandpapa,
+pettishly and disappointed, as people are apt to be when they try to
+calculate on the fitful sympathies of childhood. "Come, you must go in to
+old Martha now."
+
+The poor old gentleman was in the more haste to leave the spot because he
+found himself standing right in front of his own peculiar row of
+gravestones, consisting of eight or nine slabs of slate, adorned with
+carved borders rather rudely cut, and the earliest one, that of his
+Bessie, bending aslant, because the frost of so many winters had slowly
+undermined it. Over one grave of the row, that of his gifted grandson,
+there was no memorial. He felt a strange repugnance, stronger than he had
+ever felt before, to linger by these graves, and had none of the tender
+sorrow, mingled with high and tender hopes, that had sometimes made it
+seem good to him to be there. Such moods, perhaps, often come to the aged,
+when the hardened earth-crust over their souls shuts them out from
+spiritual influences.
+
+Taking the child by the hand,--her little effervescence of infantile fun
+having passed into a downcast humor, though not well knowing as yet what a
+dusky cloud of disheartening fancies arose from these green hillocks,--he
+went heavily toward the garden-gate. Close to its threshold, so that one
+who was issuing forth or entering must needs step upon it or over it, lay
+a small flat stone, deeply imbedded in the ground, and partly covered with
+grass, inscribed with the name of "Dr. John Swinnerton, Physician."
+
+"Ay," said the old man, as the well-remembered figure of his ancient
+instructor seemed to rise before him in his grave-apparel, with beard and
+gold-headed cane, black velvet doublet and cloak, "here lies a man who, as
+people have thought, had it in his power to avoid the grave! He had no
+little grandchild to tease him. He had the choice to die, and chose it."
+
+So the old gentleman led Pansie over the stone, and carefully closed the
+gate; and, as it happened, he forgot the uprooted shrub, which Pansie, as
+she ran, had flung away, and which had fallen into the open grave; and
+when the funeral came that afternoon, the coffin was let down upon it, so
+that its bright, inauspicious flower never bloomed again.
+
+
+
+
+ANOTHER FRAGMENT OF THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
+
+
+"Be secret!" and he kept his stern eye fixed upon him, as the coach began
+to move.
+
+"Be secret!" repeated the apothecary. "I know not any secret that he has
+confided to me thus far, and as for his nonsense (as I will be bold to
+style it now he is gone) about a medicine of long life, it is a thing I
+forget in spite of myself, so very empty and trashy it is. I wonder, by
+the by, that it never came into my head to give the Colonel a dose of the
+cordial whereof I partook last night. I have no faith that it is a
+valuable medicine--little or none--and yet there has been an unwonted
+briskness in me all the morning."
+
+Then a simple joy broke over his face--a flickering sunbeam among his
+wrinkles--as he heard the laughter of the little girl, who was running
+rampant with a kitten in the kitchen.
+
+"Pansie! Pansie!" cackled he, "grandpapa has sent away the ugly man now.
+Come, let us have a frolic in the garden."
+
+And he whispered to himself again, "That is a cordial yonder, and I will
+take it according to the prescription, knowing all the ingredients." Then,
+after a moment's thought, he added, "All, save one."
+
+So, as he had declared to himself his intention, that night, when little
+Pansie had long been asleep, and his small household was in bed, and most
+of the quiet, old-fashioned townsfolk likewise, this good apothecary went
+into his laboratory, and took out of a cupboard in the wall a certain
+ancient-looking bottle, which was cased over with a net-work of what
+seemed to be woven silver, like the wicker-woven bottles of our days. He
+had previously provided a goblet of pure water. Before opening the bottle,
+however, he seemed to hesitate, and pondered and babbled to himself;
+having long since come to that period of life when the bodily frame,
+having lost much of its value, is more tenderly cared for than when it was
+a perfect and inestimable machine.
+
+"I triturated, I infused, I distilled it myself in these very rooms, and
+know it--know it all--all the ingredients, save one. They are common
+things enough--comfortable things--some of them a little queer--one or two
+that folks have a prejudice against--and then there is that one thing
+that I don't know. It is foolish in me to be dallying with such a mess,
+which I thought was a piece of quackery, while that strange visitor bade
+me do it,--and yet, what a strength has come from it! He said it was a
+rare cordial, and, methinks, it has brightened up my weary life all day,
+so that Pansie has found me the fitter playmate. And then the dose--it is
+so absurdly small! I will try it again."
+
+He took the silver stopple from the bottle, and with a practised hand,
+tremulous as it was with age, so that one would have thought it must have
+shaken the liquor into a perfect shower of misapplied drops, he dropped--I
+have heard it said--only one single drop into the goblet of water. It fell
+into it with a dazzling brightness, like a spark of ruby flame, and subtly
+diffusing itself through the whole body of water, turned it to a rosy hue
+of great brilliancy. He held it up between his eyes and the light, and
+seemed to admire and wonder at it.
+
+"It is very odd," said he, "that such a pure, bright liquor should have
+come out of a parcel of weeds that mingled their juices here. The thing is
+a folly,--it is one of those compositions in which the chemists--the
+cabalists, perhaps--used to combine what they thought the virtues of many
+plants, thinking that something would result in the whole, which was not
+in either of them, and a new efficacy be created. Whereas, it has been the
+teaching of my experience that one virtue counteracts another, and is the
+enemy of it. I never believed the former theory, even when that strange
+madman bade me do it. And what a thick, turbid matter it was, until that
+last ingredient,--that powder which he put in with his own hand! Had he
+let me see it, I would first have analyzed it, and discovered its
+component parts. The man was mad, undoubtedly, and this may have been
+poison. But its effect is good. Poh! I will taste again, because of this
+weak, agued, miserable state of mine; though it is a shame in me, a man of
+decent skill in my way, to believe in a quack's nostrum. But it is a
+comfortable kind of thing."
+
+Meantime, that single drop (for good Dr. Dolliver had immediately put a
+stopper into the bottle) diffused a sweet odor through the chamber, so
+that the ordinary fragrances and scents of apothecaries' stuff seemed to
+be controlled and influenced by it, and its bright potency also dispelled
+a certain dimness of the antiquated room.
+
+The Doctor, at the pressure of a great need, had given incredible pains to
+the manufacture of this medicine; so that, reckoning the pains rather than
+the ingredients (all except one, of which he was not able to estimate the
+cost nor value), it was really worth its weight in gold. And, as it
+happened, he had bestowed upon it the hard labor of his poor life, and the
+time that was necessary for the support of his family, without return; for
+the customers, after playing off this cruel joke upon the old man, had
+never come back; and now, for seven years, the bottle had stood in a
+corner of the cupboard. To be sure, the silver-cased bottle was worth a
+trifle for its silver, and still more, perhaps, as an antiquarian knick-
+knack. But, all things considered, the honest and simple apothecary
+thought that he might make free with the liquid to such small extent as
+was necessary for himself. And there had been something in the concoction
+that had struck him; and he had been fast breaking lately; and so, in the
+dreary fantasy and lonely recklessness of his old age, he had suddenly
+bethought himself of this medicine (cordial,--as the strange man called
+it, which had come to him by long inheritance in his family) and he had
+determined to try it. And again, as the night before, he took out the
+receipt--a roll of antique parchment, out of which, provokingly, one fold
+had been lost--and put on his spectacles to puzzle out the passage.
+
+Guttam unicam in aquam puram, two gills. "If the Colonel should hear of
+this," said Dr. Dolliver, "he might fancy it his nostrum of long life, and
+insist on having the bottle for his own use. The foolish, fierce old
+gentleman! He has grown very earthly, of late, else he would not desire
+such a thing. And a strong desire it must be to make him feel it
+desirable. For my part, I only wish for something that, for a short time,
+may clear my eyes, so that I may see little Pansie's beauty, and quicken
+my ears, that I may hear her sweet voice, and give me nerve, while God
+keeps me here, that I may live longer to earn bread for dear Pansie. She
+provided for, I would gladly lie down yonder with Bessie and our children.
+Ah! the vanity of desiring lengthened days!--There!--I have drunk it,
+and methinks its final, subtle flavor hath strange potency in it."
+
+The old man shivered a little, as those shiver who have just swallowed
+good liquor, while it is permeating their vitals. Yet he seemed to be in a
+pleasant state of feeling, and, as was frequently the case with this
+simple soul, in a devout frame of mind. He read a chapter in the Bible,
+and said his prayers for Pansie and himself, before he went to bed, and
+had much better sleep than usually comes to people of his advanced age;
+for, at that period, sleep is diffused through their wakefulness, and a
+dim and tiresome half-perception through their sleep, so that the only
+result is weariness.
+
+Nothing very extraordinary happened to Dr. Dolliver or his small household
+for some time afterwards. He was favored with a comfortable winter, and
+thanked Heaven for it, and put it to a good use (at least he intended it
+so) by concocting drugs; which perhaps did a little towards peopling the
+graveyard, into which his windows looked; but that was neither his purpose
+nor his fault. None of the sleepers, at all events, interrupted their
+slumbers to upbraid him. He had done according to his own artless
+conscience and the recipes of licensed physicians, and he looked no
+further, but pounded, triturated, infused, made electuaries, boluses,
+juleps, or whatever he termed his productions, with skill and diligence,
+thanking Heaven that he was spared to do so, when his contemporaries
+generally were getting incapable of similar efforts. It struck him with
+some surprise, but much gratitude to Providence, that his sight seemed to
+be growing rather better than worse. He certainly could read the crabbed
+handwriting and hieroglyphics of the physicians with more readiness than
+he could a year earlier. But he had been originally near-sighted, with
+large, projecting eyes; and near-sighted eyes always seem to get a new
+lease of light as the years go on. One thing was perceptible about the
+Doctor's eyes, not only to himself in the glass, but to everybody else;
+namely, that they had an unaccustomed gleaming brightness in them; not so
+very bright either, but yet so much so, that little Pansie noticed it, and
+sometimes, in her playful, roguish way, climbed up into his lap, and put
+both her small palms over them; telling Grandpapa that he had stolen
+somebody else's eyes, and given away his own, and that she liked his old
+ones better. The poor old Doctor did his best to smile through his eyes,
+and so to reconcile Pansie to their brightness: but still she continually
+made the same silly remonstrance, so that he was fain to put on a pair of
+green spectacles when he was going to play with Pansie, or took her on his
+knee. Nay, if he looked at her, as had always been his custom, after she
+was asleep, in order to see that all was well with her, the little child
+would put up her hands, as if he held a light that was flashing on her
+eyeballs; and unless he turned away his gaze quickly, she would wake up in
+a fit of crying.
+
+On the whole, the apothecary had as comfortable a time as a man of his
+years could expect. The air of the house and of the old graveyard seemed
+to suit him. What so seldom happens in man's advancing age, his night's
+rest did him good, whereas, generally, an old man wakes up ten times as
+nervous and dispirited as he went to bed, just as if, during his sleep he
+had been working harder than ever he did in the daytime. It had been so
+with the Doctor himself till within a few months. To be sure, he had
+latterly begun to practise various rules of diet and exercise, which
+commended themselves to his approbation. He sawed some of his own fire-
+wood, and fancied that, as was reasonable, it fatigued him less day by
+day. He took walks with Pansie, and though, of course, her little
+footsteps, treading on the elastic air of childhood, far outstripped his
+own, still the old man knew that he was not beyond the recuperative period
+of life, and that exercise out of doors and proper food can do somewhat
+towards retarding the approach of age. He was inclined, also, to impute
+much good effect to a daily dose of Santa Cruz rum (a liquor much in vogue
+in that day), which he was now in the habit of quaffing at the meridian
+hour. All through the Doctor's life he had eschewed strong spirits: "But
+after seventy," quoth old Dr. Dolliver, "a man is all the better in head
+and stomach for a little stimulus"; and it certainly seemed so in his
+case. Likewise, I know not precisely how often, but complying
+punctiliously with the recipe, as an apothecary naturally would, he took
+his drop of the mysterious cordial.
+
+He was inclined, however, to impute little or no efficacy to this, and to
+laugh at himself for having ever thought otherwise. The dose was so very
+minute! and he had never been sensible of any remarkable effect on taking
+it, after all. A genial warmth, he sometimes fancied, diffused itself
+throughout him, and perhaps continued during the next day. A quiet and
+refreshing night's rest followed, and alacritous waking in the morning;
+but all this was far more probably owing, as has been already hinted, to
+excellent and well-considered habits of diet and exercise. Nevertheless he
+still continued the cordial with tolerable regularity,--the more, because
+on one or two occasions, happening to omit it, it so chanced that he slept
+wretchedly, and awoke in strange aches and pains, torpors, nervousness,
+shaking of the hands, bleared-ness of sight, lowness of spirits and other
+ills, as is the misfortune of some old men,--who are often threatened by a
+thousand evil symptoms that come to nothing, foreboding no particular
+disorder, and passing away as unsatisfactorily as they come. At another
+time, he took two or three drops at once, and was alarmingly feverish in
+consequence. Yet it was very true, that the feverish symptoms were pretty
+sure to disappear on his renewal of the medicine. "Still it could not be
+that," thought the old man, a hater of empiricism (in which, however, is
+contained all hope for man), and disinclined to believe in anything that
+was not according to rule and art. And then, as aforesaid, the dose was so
+ridiculously small!
+
+Sometimes, however, he took, half laughingly, another view of it, and felt
+disposed to think that chance might really have thrown in his way a very
+remarkable mixture, by which, if it had happened to him earlier in life,
+he might have amassed a larger fortune, and might even have raked together
+such a competency as would have prevented his feeling much uneasiness
+about the future of little Pansie. Feeling as strong as he did nowadays,
+he might reasonably count upon ten years more of life, and in that time
+the precious liquor might be exchanged for much gold. "Let us see!" quoth
+he, "by what attractive name shall it be advertised? 'The old man's
+cordial?' That promises too little. Poh, poh! I would stain my honesty, my
+fair reputation, the accumulation of a lifetime, and befool my neighbor
+and the public, by any name that would make them imagine I had found that
+ridiculous talisman that the alchemists have sought. The old man's
+cordial,--that is best. And five shillings sterling the bottle. That
+surely were not too costly, and would give the medicine a better
+reputation and higher vogue (so foolish is the world) than if I were to
+put it lower. I will think further of this. But pshaw, pshaw!"
+
+"What is the matter. Grandpapa," said little Pansie, who had stood by him,
+wishing to speak to him at least a minute, but had been deterred by his
+absorption; "why do you say 'Pshaw'?"
+
+"Pshaw!" repeated Grandpapa, "there is one ingredient that I don't know."
+
+So this very hopeful design was necessarily given up, but that it had
+occurred to Dr. Dolliver was perhaps a token that his mind was in a very
+vigorous state; for it had been noted of him through life, that he had
+little enterprise, little activity, and that, for the want of these
+things, his very considerable skill in his art had been almost thrown
+away, as regarded his private affairs, when it might easily have led him
+to fortune. Whereas, here in his extreme age, he had first bethought
+himself of a way to grow rich. Sometimes this latter spring causes--as
+blossoms come on the autumnal tree--a spurt of vigor, or untimely
+greenness, when Nature laughs at her old child, half in kindness and half
+in scorn. It is observable, however, I fancy, that after such a spurt, age
+comes on with redoubled speed, and that the old man has only run forward
+with a show of force, in order to fall into his grave the sooner.
+
+Sometimes, as he was walking briskly along the street, with little Pansie
+clasping his hand, and perhaps frisking rather more than became a person
+of his venerable years, he had met the grim old wreck of Colonel Dabney,
+moving goutily, and gathering wrath anew with every touch of his painful
+foot to the ground; or driving by in his carriage, showing an ashen,
+angry, wrinkled face at the window, and frowning at him--the apothecary
+thought--with a peculiar fury, as if he took umbrage at his audacity in
+being less broken by age than a gentleman like himself. The apothecary
+could not help feeling as if there were some unsettled quarrel or dispute
+between himself and the Colonel, he could not tell what or why. The
+Colonel always gave him a haughty nod of half-recognition; and the people
+in the street, to whom he was a familiar object, would say, "The
+worshipful Colonel begins to find himself mortal like the rest of us. He
+feels his years." "He'd be glad, I warrant," said one, "to change with
+you, Doctor. It shows what difference a good life makes in men, to look at
+him and you. You are half a score of years his elder, me-thinks, and yet
+look what temperance can do for a man. By my credit, neighbor, seeing how
+brisk you have been lately, I told my wife you seemed to be growing
+younger. It does me good to see it. We are about of an age, I think, and I
+like to notice how we old men keep young and keep one another in heart. I
+myself--ahem--ahem--feel younger this season than for these five years
+past."
+
+"It rejoices me that you feel so," quoth the apothecary, who had just been
+thinking that this neighbor of his had lost a great deal, both in mind and
+body, within a short period, and rather scorned him for it. "Indeed, I
+find old age less uncomfortable than I supposed. Little Pansie and I make
+excellent companions for one another."
+
+And then, dragged along by Pansie's little hand, and also impelled by a
+certain alacrity that rose with him in the morning, and lasted till his
+healthy rest at night, he bade farewell to his contemporary, and hastened
+on; while the latter, left behind, was somewhat irritated as he looked at
+the vigorous movement of the apothecary's legs.
+
+"He need not make such a show of briskness neither," muttered he to
+himself. "This touch of rheumatism troubles me a bit just now, but try it
+on a good day, and I'd walk with him for a shilling. Pshaw! I'll walk to
+his funeral yet."
+
+One day, while the Doctor, with the activity that bestirred itself in him
+nowadays, was mixing and manufacturing certain medicaments that came in
+frequent demand, a carriage stopped at his door, and he recognized the
+voice of Colonel Dabney, talking in his customary stern tone to the woman
+who served him. And, a moment afterwards, the coach drove away, and he
+actually heard the old dignitary lumbering up stairs, and bestowing a
+curse upon each particular step, as if that were the method to make them
+soften and become easier when he should come down again. "Pray, your
+worship," said the Doctor from above, "let me attend you below stairs."
+
+"No," growled the Colonel, "I'll meet you on your own ground. I can climb
+a stair yet, and be hanged to you."
+
+So saying, he painfully finished the ascent, and came into the laboratory,
+where he let himself fall into the Doctor's easy-chair, with an anathema
+on the chair, the Doctor, and himself; and, staring round through the
+dusk, he met the wide-open, startled eyes of little Pansie, who had been
+reading a gilt picture-book in the corner.
+
+"Send away that child, Dolliver," cried the Colonel, angrily. "Confound
+her, she makes my bones ache. I hate everything young."
+
+"Lord, Colonel," the poor apothecary ventured to say, "there must be young
+people in the world as well as old ones. 'T is my mind, a man's
+grandchildren keep him warm round about him."
+
+"I have none, and want none," sharply responded the Colonel; "and as for
+young people, let me be one of them, and they may exist, otherwise not. It
+is a cursed bad arrangement of the world, that there are young and old
+here together."
+
+When Pansie had gone away, which she did with anything but reluctance,
+having a natural antipathy to this monster of a Colonel, the latter
+personage tapped with his crutch-handled cane on a chair that stood near,
+and nodded in an authoritative way to the apothecary to sit down in it.
+Dr. Dolliver complied submissively, and the Colonel, with dull, unkindly
+eyes, looked at him sternly, and with a kind of intelligence amid the aged
+stolidity of his aspect, that somewhat puzzled the Doctor. In this way he
+surveyed him all over, like a judge, when he means to hang a man, and for
+some reason or none, the apothecary felt his nerves shake, beneath this
+steadfast look.
+
+"Aha! Doctor!" said the Colonel at last, with a doltish sneer, "you bear
+your years well."
+
+"Decently well, Colonel; I thank Providence for it," answered the meek
+apothecary.
+
+"I should say," quoth the Colonel, "you are younger at this moment than
+when we spoke together two or three years ago. I noted then that your
+eyebrows were a handsome snow-white, such as befits a man who has passed
+beyond his threescore years and ten, and five years more. Why, they are
+getting dark again, Mr. Apothecary."
+
+"Nay, your worship must needs be mistaken there," said the Doctor, with a
+timorous chuckle. "It is many a year since I have taken a deliberate note
+of my wretched old visage in a glass, but I remember they were white when
+I looked last."
+
+"Come, Doctor, I know a thing or two," said the Colonel, with a bitter
+scoff; "and what's this, you old rogue? Why, you've rubbed away a wrinkle
+since we met. Take off those infernal spectacles, and look me in the face.
+Ha! I see the devil in your eye. How dare you let it shine upon me so?"
+
+"On my conscience, Colonel," said the apothecary, strangely struck with
+the coincidence of this accusation with little Pansie's complaint, "I know
+not what you mean. My sight is pretty well for a man of my age. We near-
+sighted people begin to know our best eyesight, when other people have
+lost theirs."
+
+"Ah! ah! old rogue," repeated the insufferable Colonel, gnashing his
+ruined teeth at him, as if, for some incomprehensible reason, he wished to
+tear him to pieces and devour him. "I know you. You are taking the life
+away from me, villain! and I told you it was my inheritance. And I told
+you there was a Bloody Footstep, bearing its track down through my race.
+
+"I remember nothing of it," said the Doctor, in a quake, sure that the
+Colonel was in one of his mad fits. "And on the word of an honest man, I
+never wronged you in my life, Colonel."
+
+"We shall see," said the Colonel, whose wrinkled visage grew absolutely
+terrible with its hardness; and his dull eyes, without losing their
+dulness, seemed to look through him.
+
+"Listen to me, sir. Some ten years ago, there came to you a man on a
+secret business. He had an old musty bit of parchment, on which were
+written some words, hardly legible, in an antique hand,--an old deed, it
+might have been,--some family document, and here and there the letters
+were faded away. But this man had spent his life over it, and he had made
+out the meaning, and he interpreted it to you, and left it with you, only
+there was one gap,--one torn or obliterated place. Well, sir,--and he bade
+you, with your poor little skill at the mortar, and for a certain sum,--
+ample repayment for such a service,--to manufacture this medicine,--this
+cordial. It was an affair of months. And just when you thought it
+finished, the man came again, and stood over your cursed beverage, and
+shook a powder, or dropped a lump into it, or put in some ingredient, in
+which was all the hidden virtue,--or, at least, it drew out all the hidden
+virtue of the mean and common herbs, and married them into a wondrous
+efficacy. This done, the man bade you do certain other things with the
+potation, and went away"--the Colonel hesitated a moment--"and never came
+back again."
+
+"Surely, Colonel, you are correct," said the apothecary; much startled,
+however, at the Colonel's showing himself so well acquainted with an
+incident which he had supposed a secret with himself alone. Yet he had a
+little reluctance in owning it, although he did not exactly understand
+why, since the Colonel had, apparently, no rightful claim to it, at all
+events.
+
+"That medicine, that receipt," continued his visitor, "is my hereditary
+property, and I challenge you, on your peril, to give it up."
+
+"But what if the original owner should call upon me for it," objected Dr.
+Dolliver.
+
+"I'll warrant you against that," said the Colonel; and the apothecary
+thought there was something ghastly in his look and tone. "Why, 't is ten
+year, you old fool; and do you think a man with a treasure like that in
+his possession would have waited so long?"
+
+"Seven years it was ago," said the apothecary. "Septem annis passatis: so
+says the Latin."
+
+"Curse your Latin," answers the Colonel. "Produce the stuff. You have been
+violating the first rule of your trade,--taking your own drugs,--your own,
+in one sense; mine by the right of three hundred years. Bring it forth, I
+say!"
+
+"Pray excuse me, worthy Colonel," pleaded the apothecary; for though
+convinced that the old gentleman was only in one of his insane fits, when
+he talked of the value of this concoction, yet he really did not like to
+give up the cordial, which perhaps had wrought him some benefit. Besides,
+he had at least a claim upon it for much trouble and skill expended in its
+composition. This he suggested to the Colonel, who scornfully took out of
+his pocket a net-work purse, with more golden guineas in it than the
+apothecary had seen in the whole seven years, and was rude enough to fling
+it in his face. "Take that," thundered he, "and give up the thing, or I
+will have you in prison before you are an hour older. Nay," he continued,
+growing pale, which was his mode of showing terrible wrath; since all
+through life, till extreme age quenched it, his ordinary face had been a
+blazing-red, "I'll put you to death, you villain, as I've a right!" And
+thrusting his hand into his waistcoat pocket, lo! the madman took a small
+pistol from it, which he cocked, and presented at the poor apothecary. The
+old fellow, quaked and cowered in his chair, and would indeed have given
+his whole shopful of better concocted medicines than this, to be out of
+this danger. Besides, there were the guineas; the Colonel had paid him a
+princely sum for what was probably worth nothing.
+
+"Hold! hold!" cried he as the Colonel, with stern eye pointed the pistol
+at his head. "You shall have it."
+
+So he rose all trembling, and crept to that secret cupboard, where the
+precious bottle--since precious it seemed to be--was reposited. In all his
+life, long as it had been, the apothecary had never before been threatened
+by a deadly weapon; though many as deadly a thing had he seen poured into
+a glass, without winking. And so it seemed to take his heart and life
+away, and he brought the cordial forth feebly, and stood tremulously
+before the Colonel, ashy pale, and looking ten years older than his real
+age, instead of five years younger, as he had seemed just before this
+disastrous interview with the Colonel.
+
+"You look as if you needed a drop of it yourself," said Colonel Dabney,
+with great scorn. "But not a drop shall you have. Already have you stolen
+too much," said he, lifting up the bottle, and marking the space to which
+the liquor had subsided in it in consequence of the minute doses with
+which the apothecary had made free. "Fool, had you taken your glass like a
+man, you might have been young again. Now, creep on, the few months you
+have left, poor, torpid knave, and die! Come--a goblet! quick!"
+
+He clutched the bottle meanwhile voraciously, miserly, eagerly, furiously,
+as if it were his life that he held in his grasp; angry, impatient, as if
+something long sought were within his reach, and not yet secure,--with
+longing thirst and desire; suspicious of the world and of fate; feeling as
+if an iron hand were over him, and a crowd of violent robbers round about
+him, struggling for it. At last, unable to wait longer, just as the
+apothecary was tottering away in quest of a drinking-glass, the Colonel
+took out the stopple, and lifted the flask itself to his lips.
+
+"For Heaven's sake, no!" cried the Doctor. "The dose is one single drop!--
+one drop, Colonel, one drop!"
+
+"Not a drop to save your wretched old soul," responded the Colonel;
+probably thinking that the apothecary was pleading for a small share of
+the precious liquor. He put it to his lips, and, as if quenching a
+lifelong thirst, swallowed deep draughts, sucking it in with desperation,
+till, void of breath, he set it down upon the table. The rich, poignant
+perfume spread itself through the air.
+
+The apothecary, with an instinctive carefulness that was rather ludicrous
+under the circumstances, caught up the stopper, which the Colonel had let
+fall, and forced it into the bottle to prevent any farther escape of
+virtue. He then fearfully watched the result of the madman's potation.
+
+The Colonel sat a moment in his chair, panting for breath; then started to
+his feet with a prompt vigor that contrasted widely with the infirm and
+rheumatic movements that had heretofore characterized him. He struck his
+forehead violently with one hand, and smote his chest with the other: he
+stamped his foot thunderously on the ground; then he leaped up to the
+ceiling, and came down with an elastic bound. Then he laughed, a wild,
+exulting ha! ha! with a strange triumphant roar that filled the house and
+reechoed through it; a sound full of fierce, animal rapture,--enjoyment of
+sensual life mixed up with a sort of horror. After all, real as it was, it
+was like the sounds a man makes in a dream. And this, while the potent
+draught seemed still to be making its way through his system; and the
+frightened apothecary thought that he intended a revengeful onslaught upon
+himself. Finally, he uttered a loud unearthly screech, in the midst of
+which his voice broke, as if some unseen hand were throttling him, and,
+starting forward, he fought frantically, as if he would clutch the life
+that was being rent away,--and fell forward with a dead thump upon the
+floor.
+
+"Colonel! Colonel!" cried the terrified Doctor.
+
+The feeble old man, with difficulty, turned over the heavy frame, and saw
+at once, with practised eye, that he was dead. He set him up, and the
+corpse looked at him with angry reproach. He was so startled, that his
+subsequent recollections of the moment were neither distinct nor
+steadfast; but he fancied, though he told the strange impression to no
+one, that on his first glimpse of the face, with a dark flush of what
+looked like rage still upon it, it was a young man's face that he saw,--a
+face with all the passionate energy of early manhood,--the capacity for
+furious anger which the man had lost half a century ago, crammed to the
+brim with vigor till it became agony. But the next moment, if it were so
+(which it could not have been), the face grew ashen, withered, shrunken,
+more aged than in life, though still the murderous fierceness remained,
+and seemed to be petrified forever upon it.
+
+After a moment's bewilderment, Dolliver ran to the window looking to the
+street, threw it open, and called loudly for assistance. He opened also
+another window, for the air to blow through, for he was almost stifled
+with the rich odor of the cordial which filled the room, and was now
+exuded from the corpse.
+
+He heard the voice of Pansie, crying at the door, which was locked, and,
+turning the key, he caught her in his arms, and hastened with her below
+stairs, to give her into the charge of Martha, who seemed half stupefied
+with a sense of something awful that had occurred.
+
+Meanwhile there was a rattling and a banging at the street portal, to
+which several people had been attracted both by the Doctor's outcry from
+the window, and by the awful screech in which the Colonel's spirit (if,
+indeed, he had that divine part) had just previously taken its flight.
+
+He let them in, and, pale and shivering, ushered them up to the death-
+chamber, where one or two, with a more delicate sense of smelling than the
+rest, snuffed the atmosphere, as if sensible of an unknown fragrance, yet
+appeared afraid to breathe, when they saw the terrific countenance leaning
+back against the chair, and eying them so truculently.
+
+I would fain quit the scene and have done with the Colonel, who, I am
+glad, has happened to die at so early a period of the narrative. I
+therefore hasten to say that a coroner's inquest was held on the spot,
+though everybody felt that it was merely ceremonial, and that the
+testimony of their good and ancient townsman, Dr. Dolliver, was amply
+sufficient to settle the matter. The verdict was, "Death by the visitation
+of God."
+
+The apothecary gave evidence that the Colonel, without asking leave, and
+positively against his advice, had drunk a quantity of distilled spirits;
+and one or two servants, or members of the Colonel's family, testified
+that he had been in a very uncomfortable state of mind for some days past,
+so that they fancied he was insane. Therefore nobody thought of blaming
+Dr. Dolliver for what had happened; and, if the plain truth must be told,
+everybody who saw the wretch was too well content to be rid of him, to
+trouble themselves more than was quite necessary about the way in which
+the incumbrance had been removed.
+
+The corpse was taken to the mansion in order to receive a magnificent
+funeral; and Dr. Dolliver was left outwardly in quiet, but much disturbed,
+and indeed almost overwhelmed inwardly, by what had happened.
+
+Yet it is to be observed, that he had accounted for the death with a
+singular dexterity of expression, when he attributed it to a dose of
+distilled spirits. What kind of distilled spirits were those, Doctor? and
+will you venture to take any more of them?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Dolliver Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE ***
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