d 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 farther 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 o