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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dolliver Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: The Dolliver Romance
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Posting Date: September 14, 2014 [EBook #7119]
+Release Date: December, 2004
+First Posted: March 12, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 pharmacopoeia 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 pharmacopoeia
+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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