which impregnated all his ideas and expressions, as well as his
person. Another well-remembered, though strangely altered, face
was that of Lawyer Giles, as people still called him in courtesy;
an elderly ragamuffin, in his soiled shirtsleeves and tow-cloth
trousers. This poor fellow had been an attorney, in what he
called his better days, a sharp practitioner, and in great vogue
among the village litigants; but flip, and sling, and toddy, and
cocktails, imbibed at all hours, morning, noon, and night, had
caused him to slide from intellectual to various kinds and
degrees of bodily labor, till at last, to adopt his own phrase,
he slid into a soap-vat. In other words, Giles was now a
soap-boiler, in a small way. He had come to be but the fragment
of a human being, a part of one foot having been chopped off by
an axe, and an entire hand torn away by the devilish grip of a
steam-engine. Yet, though the corporeal hand was gone, a
spiritual member remained; for, stretching forth the stump, Giles
steadfastly averred that he felt an invisible thumb and fingers
with as vivid a sensation as before the real ones were amputated.
A maimed and miserable wretch he was; but one, nevertheless, whom
the world could not trample on, and had no right to scorn, either
in this or any previous stage of his misfortunes, since he had
still kept up the courage and spirit of a man, asked nothing in
charity, and with his one hand--and that the left one--fought a
stern battle against want and hostile circumstances.

Among the throng, too, came another personage, who, with certain
points of similarity to Lawyer Giles, had many more of
difference. It was the village doctor; a man of some fifty years,
whom, at an earlier period of his life, we introduced as paying a
professional visit to Ethan Brand during the latter's supposed