asy 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 cause