art 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 life-long conditions of his peculiar existence.

But, alas! it was a terrible mist