an unfrozen drop of youthfulness, somewhere within him, to expand.

"Hem! ahem!" quoth the Doctor, hoping with one effort to clear his throat
of the dregs of a ten-years' cough. "Matters are not so far gone with me
as I thought. I have known mighty sensible men, when only a little age-
stricken or otherwise out of sorts, to die of mere faint-heartedness, a
great deal sooner than they need."

He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass, as if to
impress the apothegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and, for
his part, he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he
possibly could, if it were only for the sake of little Pansie, who stood
as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the
other. This child of three years old occupied all the unfossilized portion
of Dr. Dolliver's heart. Every other interest that he formerly had, and
the entire confraternity of persons whom he once loved, had long ago
departed; and the poor Doctor could not follow them, because the grasp of
Pansie's baby-fingers held him back.

So he crammed a great silver watch into his fob, and drew on a patchwork
morning-gown of an ancient fashion. Its original material was said to have
been the embroidered front of his own wedding-waistcoat and the silken
skirt of his wife's bridal attire, which his eldest granddaughter had
taken from the carved chest-of-drawers, after poor Bessie, the beloved of
his youth, had been half a century in the grave. Throughout many of the
intervening years, as the garment got ragged, the spinsters of the old
man's family had quilted their duty and affection into it in the shape of
patches upon patches, rose-color, crimson, blue, violet, and green, and
then (as their hopes faded, and their life kept growing shadier, and their
attire took a sombre hue) sober gray and great fragments of funereal