f 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