rer.

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 womenfolk, 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