_ Dr. Dolliver, a worthy personage of extreme antiquity, was aroused rather
prematurely, one summer morning, by the shouts of the child Pansie, in an
adjoining chamber, summoning old Martha (who performed the duties of
nurse, housekeeper, and kitchen-maid, in the Doctor's establishment) to
take up her little ladyship and dress her. The old gentleman woke with
more than his customary alacrity, and, after taking a moment to gather his
wits about him, pulled aside the faded moreen curtains of his ancient bed,
and thrust his head into a beam of sunshine that caused him to wink and
withdraw it again. This transitory glimpse of good Dr. Dolliver showed a
flannel night-cap, fringed round with stray locks of silvery white hair,
and surmounting a meagre and duskily yellow visage, which was crossed and
criss-crossed with a record of his long life in wrinkles, faithfully
written, no doubt, but with such cramped chirography of Father Time that
the purport was illegible. It seemed hardly worth while for the patriarch
to get out of bed any more, and bring his forlorn shadow into the summer
day that was made for younger folks. The Doctor, however, was by no means
of that opinion, being considerably encouraged towards the toil of living
twenty-four hours longer by the comparative ease with which he found
himself going through the usually painful process of bestirring his rusty
joints (stiffened by the very rest and sleep that should have made them
pliable) and putting them in a condition to bear his weight upon the
floor. Nor was he absolutely disheartened by the idea of those tonsorial,
ablutionary, and personally decorative labors which are apt to become so
intolerably irksome to an old gentleman, after performing them daily and
daily for fifty, sixty, or seventy years, and finding them still as
immitigably recurrent as at first. Dr. Dolliver could nowise account for
this happy condition of his spirits and physical energies, until he
remembered taking an experimental sip of a certain cordial which was long
ago prepared by his grandson, and carefully sealed up in a bottle, and had
been reposited in a dark closet, among a parcel of effete medicines, ever
since that gifted young man's death.
"It may have wrought effect upon me," thought the doctor, shaking his head
as he lifted it again from the pillow. "It may be so; for poor Edward
oftentimes instilled a strange efficacy into his perilous drugs. But I
will rather believe it to be the operation of God's mercy, which may have
temporarily invigorated my feeble age for little Pansie's sake."
A twinge of his familiar rheumatism, as he put his foot out of bed, taught
him that he must not reckon too confidently upon even a day's respite from
the intrusive family of aches and infirmities, which, with their
proverbial fidelity to attachments once formed, had long been the closest
acquaintances that the poor old gentleman had in the world. Nevertheless,
he fancied the twinge a little less poignant than those of yesterday; and,
moreover, after stinging him pretty smartly, it passed gradually off with
a thrill, which, in its latter stages, grew to be almost agreeable. Pain
is but pleasure too strongly emphasized. With cautious movements, and only
a groan or two, the good Doctor transferred himself from the bed to the
floor, where he stood awhile, gazing from one piece of quaint furniture to
another (such as stiff-backed Mayflower chairs, an oaken chest-of-drawers
carved cunningly with shapes of animals and wreaths of foliage, a table
with multitudinous legs, a family record in faded embroidery, a shelf of
black-bound books, a dirty heap of gallipots and phials in a dim
corner),--gazing at these things, and steadying himself by the bedpost,
while his inert brain, still partially benumbed with sleep, came slowly
into accordance with the realities about him. The object which most helped
to bring Dr. Dolliver completely to his waking perceptions was one that
common observers might suppose to have been snatched bodily out of his
dreams. The same sunbeam that had dazzled the doctor between the bed-
curtains gleamed on the weather-beaten gilding which had once adorned this
mysterious symbol, and showed it to be an enormous serpent, twining round
a wooden post, and reaching quite from the floor of the chamber to its
ceiling.
It was evidently a thing that could boast of considerable antiquity, the
dry-rot having eaten out its eyes and gnawed away the tip of its tail; and
it must have stood long exposed to the atmosphere, for a kind of gray moss
had partially overspread its tarnished gilt surface, and a swallow, or
other familiar little bird in some by-gone summer, seemed to have built
its nest in the yawning and exaggerated mouth. It looked like a kind of
Manichean idol, which might have been elevated on a pedestal for a century
or so, enjoying the worship of its votaries in the open air, until the
impious sect perished from among men,--all save old Dr. Dolliver, who had
set up the monster in his bedchamber for the convenience of private
devotion. But we are unpardonable in suggesting such a fantasy to the
prejudice of our venerable friend, knowing him to have been as pious and
upright a Christian, and with as little of the serpent in his character,
as ever came of Puritan lineage. Not to make a further mystery about a
very simple matter, this bedimmed and rotten reptile was once the medical
emblem or apothecary's sign of the famous Dr. Swinnerton, who practised
physic in the earlier days of New England, when a head of Aesculapius or
Hippocrates would have vexed the souls of the righteous as savoring of
heathendom. The ancient dispenser of drugs had therefore set up an image
of the Brazen Serpent, and followed his business for many years with great
credit, under this Scriptural device; and Dr. Dolliver, being the
apprentice, pupil, and humble friend of the learned Swinnerton's old age,
had inherited the symbolic snake, and much other valuable property by his
bequest.
While the patriarch was putting on his small-clothes, he took care to
stand in the parallelogram of bright sunshine that fell upon the
uncarpeted floor. The summer warmth was very genial to his system, and yet
made him shiver; his wintry veins rejoiced at it, though the reviving
blood tingled through them with a half-painful and only half-pleasurable
titillation. For the first few moments after creeping out of bed, he kept
his back to the sunny window, and seemed mysteriously shy of glancing
thitherward; but, as the June fervor pervaded him more and more
thoroughly, he turned bravely about, and looked forth at a burial-ground
on the corner of which he dwelt. There lay many an old acquaintance, who
had gone to sleep with the flavor of Dr. Dolliver's tinctures and powders
upon his tongue; it was the patient's final bitter taste of this world,
and perhaps doomed to be a recollected nauseousness in the next.
Yesterday, in the chill of his forlorn old age, the Doctor expected soon
to stretch out his weary bones among that quiet community, and might
scarcely have shrunk from the prospect on his own account, except, indeed,
that he dreamily mixed up the infirmities of his present condition with
the repose of the approaching one, being haunted by a notion that the damp
earth, under the grass and dandelions, must needs be pernicious for his
cough and his rheumatism. But, this morning, the cheerful sunbeams, or the
mere taste of his grandson's cordial that he had taken at bedtime, or the
fitful vigor that often sports irreverently with aged people, had caused
an unfrozen drop of youthfulness, somewhere within him, to expand.
"Hem! ahem!" quoth the Doctor, hoping with one effort to clear his throat
of the dregs of a ten-years' cough. "Matters are not so far gone with me
as I thought. I have known mighty sensible men, when only a little age-
stricken or otherwise out of sorts, to die of mere faint-heartedness, a
great deal sooner than they need."
He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass, as if to
impress the apothegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and, for
his part, he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he
possibly could, if it were only for the sake of little Pansie, who stood
as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the
other. This child of three years old occupied all the unfossilized portion
of Dr. Dolliver's heart. Every other interest that he formerly had, and
the entire confraternity of persons whom he once loved, had long ago
departed; and the poor Doctor could not follow them, because the grasp of
Pansie's baby-fingers held him back.
So he crammed a great silver watch into his fob, and drew on a patchwork
morning-gown of an ancient fashion. Its original material was said to have
been the embroidered front of his own wedding-waistcoat and the silken
skirt of his wife's bridal attire, which his eldest granddaughter had
taken from the carved chest-of-drawers, after poor Bessie, the beloved of
his youth, had been half a century in the grave. Throughout many of the
intervening years, as the garment got ragged, the spinsters of the old
man's family had quilted their duty and affection into it in the shape of
patches upon patches, rose-color, crimson, blue, violet, and green, and
then (as their hopes faded, and their life kept growing shadier, and their
attire took a sombre hue) sober gray and great fragments of funereal
black, until the Doctor could revive the memory of most things that had
befallen him by looking at his patchwork-gown, as it hung upon a chair.
And now it was ragged again, and all the fingers that should have mended
it were cold. It had an Eastern fragrance, too, a smell of drugs, strong-
scented herbs, and spicy gums, gathered from the many potent infusions
that had from time to time been spilt over it; so that, snuffing him afar
off, you might have taken Dr. Dolliver for a mummy, and could hardly have
been undeceived by his shrunken and torpid aspect, as he crept nearer.
Wrapt in his odorous and many-colored robe, he took staff in hand, and
moved pretty vigorously to the head of the staircase. As it was somewhat
steep, and but dimly lighted, he began cautiously to descend, putting his
left hand on the banister, and poking down his long stick to assist him in
making sure of the successive steps; and thus he became a living
illustration of the accuracy of Scripture, where it describes the aged as
being "afraid of that which is high,"--a truth that is often found to have
a sadder purport than its external one. Half-way to the bottom, however,
the Doctor heard the impatient and authoritative tones of little Pansie,--
Queen Pansie, as she might fairly have been styled, in reference to her
position in the household,--calling amain for grandpapa and breakfast. He
was startled into such perilous activity by the summons, that his heels
slid on the stairs, the slippers were shuffled off his feet, and he saved
himself from a tumble only by quickening his pace, and coming down at
almost a run.
"Mercy on my poor old bones!" mentally exclaimed the Doctor, fancying
himself fractured in fifty places. "Some of them are broken, surely, and,
methinks, my heart has leaped out of my mouth! What! all right? Well,
well! but Providence is kinder to me than I deserve, prancing down this
steep staircase like a kid of three months old!"
He bent stiffly to gather up his slippers and fallen staff; and meanwhile
Pansie had heard the tumult of her great-grandfather's descent, and was
pounding against the door of the breakfast-room in her haste to come at
him. The Doctor opened it, and there she stood, a rather pale and large-
eyed little thing, quaint in her aspect, as might well be the case with a
motherless child, dwelling in an uncheerful house, with no other playmates
than a decrepit old man and a kitten, and no better atmosphere within-
doors than the odor of decayed apothecary's stuff, nor gayer neighborhood
than that of the adjacent burial-ground, where all her relatives, from her
great-grandmother downward, lay calling to her, "Pansie, Pansie, it is
bedtime!" even in the prime of the summer morning. For those dead women-
folk, especially her mother and the whole row of maiden aunts and grand-
aunts, could not but be anxious about the child, knowing that little
Pansie would be far safer under a tuft of dandelions than if left alone,
as she soon must be, in this difficult and deceitful world.
Yet, in spite of the lack of damask roses in her cheeks, she seemed a
healthy child, and certainly showed great capacity of energetic movement
in the impulsive capers with which she welcomed her venerable progenitor.
She shouted out her satisfaction, moreover (as her custom was, having
never had any oversensitive auditors about her to tame down her voice),
till even the Doctor's dull ears were full of the clamor.
"Pansie, darling," said Dr. Dolliver, cheerily, patting her brown hair
with his tremulous fingers, "thou hast put some of thine own friskiness
into poor old grandfather, this fine morning! Dost know, child, that he
came near breaking his neck down-stairs at the sound of thy voice? What
wouldst thou have done then, little Pansie?"
"Kiss poor grandpapa and make him well!" answered the child, remembering
the Doctor's own mode of cure in similar mishaps to herself. "It shall do
poor grandpapa good!" she added, putting up her mouth to apply the remedy.
"Ah, little one, thou hast greater faith in thy medicines than ever I had
in my drugs," replied the patriarch, with a giggle, surprised and
delighted at his own readiness of response. "But the kiss is good for my
feeble old heart, Pansie, though it might do little to mend a broken neck;
so give grandpapa another dose, and let us to breakfast."
In this merry humor they sat down to the table, great-grandpapa and Pansie
side by side, and the kitten, as soon appeared, making a third in the
party. First, she showed her mottled head out of Pansie's lap, delicately
sipping milk from the child's basin without rebuke: then she took post on
the old gentleman's shoulder, purring like a spinning-wheel, trying her
claws in the wadding of his dressing-gown, and still more impressively
reminding him of her presence by putting out a paw to intercept a warmed-
over morsel of yesterday's chicken on its way to the Doctor's mouth. After
skilfully achieving this feat, she scrambled down upon the breakfast-table
and began to wash her face and hands. Evidently, these companions were all
three on intimate terms, as was natural enough, since a great many
childish impulses were softly creeping back on the simple-minded old man;
insomuch that, if no worldly necessities nor painful infirmity had
disturbed him, his remnant of life might have been as cheaply and cheerily
enjoyed as the early playtime of the kitten and the child. Old Dr.
Dolliver and his great-granddaughter (a ponderous title, which seemed
quite to overwhelm the tiny figure of Pansie) had met one another at the
two extremities of the life-circle: her sunrise served him for a sunset,
illuminating his locks of silver and hers of golden brown with a
homogeneous shimmer of twinkling light.
Little Pansie was the one earthly creature that inherited a drop of the
Dolliver blood. The Doctor's only child, poor Bessie's offspring, had died
the better part of a hundred years before, and his grandchildren, a
numerous and dimly remembered brood, had vanished along his weary track in
their youth, maturity, or incipient age, till, hardly knowing, how it had
all happened, he found himself tottering onward with an infant's small
fingers in his nerveless grasp. So mistily did his dead progeny come and
go in the patriarch's decayed recollection, that this solitary child
represented for him the successive babyhoods of the many that had gone
before. The emotions of his early paternity came back to him. She seemed
the baby of a past age oftener than she seemed Pansie. A whole family of
grand-aunts (one of whom had perished in her cradle, never so mature as
Pansie now, another in her virgin bloom, another in autumnal maidenhood,
yellow and shrivelled, with vinegar in her blood, and still another, a
forlorn widow, whose grief outlasted even its vitality, and grew to be
merely a torpid habit, and was saddest then),--all their hitherto
forgotten features peeped through the face of the great-grandchild, and
their long-inaudible voices sobbed, shouted, or laughed, in her familiar
tones. But it often happened to Dr. Dolliver, while frolicking amid this
throng of ghosts, where the one reality looked no more vivid than its
shadowy sisters,--it often happened that his eyes filled with tears at a
sudden perception of what a sad and poverty-stricken old man he was,
already remote from his own generation, and bound to stray further onward
as the sole playmate and protector of a child!
As Dr. Dolliver, in spite of his advanced epoch of life, is likely to
remain a considerable time longer upon our hands, we deem it expedient to
give a brief sketch of his position, in order that the story may get
onward with the greater freedom when he rises from the breakfast-table.
Deeming it a matter of courtesy, we have allowed him the honorary title of
Doctor, as did all his towns-people and contemporaries, except, perhaps,
one or two formal old physicians, stingy of civil phrases and over-jealous
of their own professional dignity. Nevertheless, these crusty graduates
were technically right in excluding Dr. Dolliver from their fraternity. He
had never received the degree of any medical school, nor (save it might be
for the cure of a toothache, or a child's rash, or a whitlow on a
seamstress's finger, or some such trifling malady) had he ever been even a
practitioner of the awful science with which his popular designation
connected him. Our old friend, in short, even at his highest social
elevation, claimed to be nothing more than an apothecary, and, in these
later and far less prosperous days, scarcely so much. Since the death of
his last surviving grandson (Pansie's father, whom he had instructed in
all the mysteries of his science, and who, being distinguished by an
experimental and inventive tendency, was generally believed to have
poisoned himself with an infallible panacea of his own distillation),--
since that final bereavement, Dr. Dolliver's once pretty flourishing
business had lamentably declined. After a few months of unavailing
struggle, he found it expedient to take down the Brazen Serpent from the
position to which Dr. Swinnerton had originally elevated it, in front of
his shop in the main street, and to retire to his private dwelling,
situated in a by-lane and on the edge of a burial-ground.
This house, as well as the Brazen Serpent, some old medical books, and a
drawer full of manuscripts, had come to him by the legacy of Dr.
Swinnerton. The dreariness of the locality had been of small importance to
our friend in his young manhood, when he first led his fair wife over the
threshold, and so long as neither of them had any kinship with the human
dust that rose into little hillocks, and still kept accumulating beneath
their window. But, too soon afterwards, when poor Bessie herself had gone
early to rest there, it is probable that an influence from her grave may
have prematurely calmed and depressed her widowed husband, taking away
much of the energy from what should have been the most active portion of
his life. Thus he never grew rich. His thrifty townsmen used to tell him,
that, in any other man's hands, Dr. Swinnerton's Brazen Serpent (meaning,
I presume, the inherited credit and good-will of that old worthy's trade)
would need but ten years' time to transmute its brass into gold. In Dr.
Dolliver's keeping, as we have seen, the inauspicious symbol lost the
greater part of what superficial gilding it originally had. Matters had
not mended with him in more advanced life, after he had deposited a
further and further portion of his heart and its affections in each
successive one of a long row of kindred graves; and as he stood over the
last of them, holding Pansie by the hand and looking down upon the coffin
of his grandson, it is no wonder that the old man wept, partly for those
gone before, but not so bitterly as for the little one that stayed behind.
Why had not God taken her with the rest? And then, so hopeless as he was,
so destitute of possibilities of good, his weary frame, his decrepit
bones, his dried-up heart, might have crumbled into dust at once, and have
been scattered by the next wind over all the heaps of earth that were akin
to him.
This intensity of desolation, however, was of too positive a character to
be long sustained by a person of Dr. Dolliver's original gentleness and
simplicity, and now so completely tamed by age and misfortune. Even before
he turned away from the grave, he grew conscious of a slightly cheering
and invigorating effect from the tight grasp of the child's warm little
hand. Feeble as he was, she seemed to adopt him willingly for her
protector. And the Doctor never afterwards shrank from his duty nor
quailed beneath it, but bore himself like a man, striving, amid the sloth
of age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency which he
had failed to accumulate even in his most vigorous days.
To the extent of securing a present subsistence for Pansie and himself, he
was successful. After his son's death, when the Brazen Serpent fell into
popular disrepute, a small share of tenacious patronage followed the old
man into his retirement. In his prime, he had been allowed to possess more
skill than usually fell to the share of a Colonial apothecary, having been
regularly apprenticed to Dr. Swinnerton, who, throughout his long
practice, was accustomed personally to concoct the medicines which he
prescribed and dispensed. It was believed, indeed, that the ancient
physician had learned the art at the world-famous drug-manufactory of
Apothecary's Hall, in London, and, as some people half-malignly whispered,
had perfected himself under masters more subtle than were to be found even
there. Unquestionably, in many critical cases he was known to have
employed remedies of mysterious composition and dangerous potency, which,
in less skilful hands, would have been more likely to kill than cure. He
would willingly, it is said, have taught his apprentice the secrets of
these prescriptions, but the latter, being of a timid character and
delicate conscience, had shrunk from acquaintance with them. It was
probably as the result of the same scrupulosity that Dr. Dolliver had
always declined to enter the medical profession, in which his old
instructor had set him such heroic examples of adventurous dealing with
matters of life and death. Nevertheless, the aromatic fragrance, so to
speak, of the learned Swinnerton's reputation, had clung to our friend
through life; and there were elaborate preparations in the pharmacopoia of
that day, requiring such minute skill and conscientious fidelity in the
concocter that the physicians were still glad to confide them to one in
whom these qualities were so evident.
Moreover, the grandmothers of the community were kind to him, and mindful
of his perfumes, his rose-water, his cosmetics, tooth-powders, pomanders,
and pomades, the scented memory of which lingered about their toilet-
tables, or came faintly back from the days when they were beautiful. Among
this class of customers there was still a demand for certain comfortable
little nostrums (delicately sweet and pungent to the taste, cheering to
the spirits, and fragrant in the breath), the proper distillation of which
was the airiest secret that the mystic Swinnerton had left behind him.
And, besides, these old ladies had always liked the manners of Dr.
Dolliver, and used to speak of his gentle courtesy behind the counter as
having positively been something to admire; though of later years, an
unrefined, and almost rustic simplicity, such as belonged to his humble
ancestors, appeared to have taken possession of him, as it often does of
prettily mannered men in their late decay.
But it resulted from all these favorable circumstances that the Doctor's
marble mortar, though worn with long service and considerably damaged by a
crack that pervaded it, continued to keep up an occasional intimacy with
the pestle; and he still weighed drachms and scruples in his delicate
scales, though it seemed impossible, dealing with such minute quantities,
that his tremulous fingers should not put in too little or too much,
leaving out life with the deficiency, or spilling in death with the
surplus. To say the truth, his stanchest friends were beginning to think
that Dr. Dolliver's fits of absence (when his mind appeared absolutely to
depart from him, while his frail old body worked on mechanically) rendered
him not quite trustworthy without a close supervision of his proceedings.
It was impossible, however, to convince the aged apothecary of the
necessity for such vigilance; and if anything could stir up his gentle
temper to wrath, or, as oftener happened, to tears, it was the attempt
(which he was marvellously quick to detect) thus to interfere with his
long-familiar business.
The public, meanwhile, ceasing to regard Dr. Dolliver in his professional
aspect, had begun to take an interest in him as perhaps their oldest
fellow-citizen. It was he that remembered the Great Fire and the Great
Snow, and that had been a grown-up stripling at the terrible epoch of
Witch-Times, and a child just breeched at the breaking out of King
Philip's Indian War. He, too, in his school-boy days, had received a
benediction from the patriarchal Governor Bradstreet, and thus could boast
(somewhat as Bishops do of their unbroken succession from the Apostles) of
a transmitted blessing from the whole company of sainted Pilgrims, among
whom the venerable magistrate had been an honored companion. Viewing their
townsman in this aspect, the people revoked the courteous Doctorate with
which they had heretofore decorated him, and now knew him most familiarly
as Grandsir Dolliver. His white head, his Puritan band, his threadbare
garb (the fashion of which he had ceased to change, half a century ago),
his gold-headed staff, that had been Dr. Swinnerton's, his shrunken,
frosty figure, and its feeble movement,--all these characteristics had a
wholeness and permanence in the public recognition, like the meeting-house
steeple or the town-pump. All the younger portion of the inhabitants
unconsciously ascribed a sort of aged immortality to Grandsir Dolliver's
infirm and reverend presence. They fancied that he had been born old (at
least, I remember entertaining some such notions about age-stricken
people, when I myself was young), and that he could the better tolerate
his aches and incommodities, his dull ears and dim eyes, his remoteness
from human intercourse within the crust of indurated years, the cold
temperature that kept him always shivering and sad, the heavy burden that
invisibly bent down his shoulders,--that all these intolerable things
might bring a kind of enjoyment to Grandsir Dolliver, as the lifelong
conditions of his peculiar existence.
But, alas! it was a terrible mistake. This weight of years had a perennial
novelty for the poor sufferer. He never grew accustomed to it, but, long
as he had now borne the fretful torpor of his waning life, and patient as
he seemed, he still retained an inward consciousness that these stiffened
shoulders, these quailing knees, this cloudiness of sight and brain, this
confused forgetfulness of men and affairs, were troublesome accidents that
did not really belong to him. He possibly cherished a half-recognized idea
that they might pass away. Youth, however eclipsed for a season, is
undoubtedly the proper, permanent, and genuine condition of man; and if we
look closely into this dreary delusion of growing old, we shall find that
it never absolutely succeeds in laying hold of our innermost convictions.
A sombre garment, woven of life's unrealities, has muffled us from our
true self, but within it smiles the young man whom we knew; the ashes of
many perishable things have fallen upon our youthful fire, but beneath
them lurk the seeds of inextinguishable flame. So powerful is this
instinctive faith, that men of simple modes of character are prone to
antedate its consummation. And thus it happened with poor Grandsir
Dolliver, who often awoke from an old man's fitful sleep with a sense that
his senile predicament was but a dream of the past night; and hobbling
hastily across the cold floor to the looking-glass, he would be grievously
disappointed at beholding the white hair, the wrinkles and furrows, the
ashen visage and bent form, the melancholy mask of Age, in which, as he
now remembered, some strange and sad enchantment had involved him for
years gone by!
To other eyes than his own, however, the shrivelled old gentleman looked
as if there were little hope of his throwing off this too artfully wrought
disguise, until, at no distant day, his stooping figure should be
straightened out, his hoary locks be smoothed over his brows, and his
much-enduring bones be laid safely away, with a green coverlet spread over
them, beside his Bessie, who doubtless would recognize her youthful
companion in spite of his ugly garniture of decay. He longed to be gazed
at by the loving eyes now closed; he shrank from the hard stare of them
that loved him not. Walking the streets seldom and reluctantly, he felt a
dreary impulse to elude the people's observation, as if with a sense that
he had gone irrevocably out of fashion, and broken his connecting links
with the net-work of human life; or else it was that nightmare-feeling
which we sometimes have in dreams, when we seem to find ourselves
wandering through a crowded avenue, with the noonday sun upon us, in some
wild extravagance of dress or nudity. He was conscious of estrangement
from his towns-people, but did not always know how nor wherefore, nor why
he should be thus groping through the twilight mist in solitude. If they
spoke loudly to him, with cheery voices, the greeting translated itself
faintly and mournfully to his ears; if they shook him by the hand, it was
as if a thick, insensible glove absorbed the kindly pressure and the
warmth. When little Pansie was the companion of his walk, her childish
gayety and freedom did not avail to bring him into closer relationship
with men, but seemed to follow him into that region of indefinable
remoteness, that dismal Fairy-Land of aged fancy, into which old Grandsir
Dolliver had so strangely crept away.
Yet there were moments, as many persons had noticed, when the great-
grandpapa would suddenly take stronger hues of life. It was as if his
faded figure had been colored over anew, or at least, as he and Pansie
moved along the street, as if a sunbeam had fallen across him, instead of
the gray gloom of an instant before. His chilled sensibilities had
probably been touched and quickened by the warm contiguity of his little
companion through the medium of her hand, as it stirred within his own, or
some inflection of her voice that set his memory ringing and chiming with
forgotten sounds. While that music lasted, the old man was alive and
happy. And there were seasons, it might be, happier than even these, when
Pansie had been kissed and put to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sat by his
fireside gazing in among the massive coals, and absorbing their glow into
those cavernous abysses with which all men communicate. Hence come angels
or fiends into our twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them
in by-gone years. Over our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the fire-
gleam, stole an expression of repose and perfect trust that made him as
beautiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child Pansie on her
pillow; and sometimes the spirits that were watching him beheld a calm
surprise draw slowly over his features and brighten into joy, yet not so
vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had been
kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a glimpse
within. All the night afterwards, he would be semi-conscious of an
intangible bliss diffused through the fitful lapses of an old man's
slumber, and would awake, at early dawn, with a faint thrilling of the
heart-strings, as if there had been music just now wandering over them. _