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 further 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.