Deeming it a matter of courtesy, we have allowed him the honorary title of
Doctor, as did all his towns-people and contemporaries, except, perhaps,
one or two formal old physicians, stingy of civil phrases and over-jealous
of 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