early to rest there, it is probable that an influence from her grave may
have prematurely calmed and depressed her widowed husband, taking away
much of the energy from what should have been the most active portion of
his life. Thus he never grew rich. His thrifty townsmen used to tell him,
that, in any other man's hands, Dr. Swinnerton's Brazen Serpent (meaning,
I presume, the inherited credit and good-will of that old worthy's trade)
would need but ten years' time to transmute its brass into gold. In Dr.
Dolliver's keeping, as we have seen, the inauspicious symbol lost the
greater part of what superficial gilding it originally had. Matters had
not mended with him in more advanced life, after he had deposited a
further and further portion of his heart and its affections in each
successive one of a long row of kindred graves; and as he stood over the
last of them, holding Pansie by the hand and looking down upon the coffin
of his grandson, it is no wonder that the old man wept, partly for those
gone before, but not so bitterly as for the little one that stayed behind.
Why had not God taken her with the rest? And then, so hopeless as he was,
so destitute of possibilities of good, his weary frame, his decrepit
bones, his dried-up heart, might have crumbled into dust at once, and have
been scattered by the next wind over all the heaps of earth that were akin
to him.

This intensity of desolation, however, was of too positive a character to
be long sustained by a person of Dr. Dolliver's original gentleness and
simplicity, and now so completely tamed by age and misfortune. Even before
he turned away from the grave, he grew conscious of a slightly cheering
and invigorating effect from the tight grasp of the child's warm little
hand. Feeble as he was, she seemed to adopt him willingly for her
protector. And the Doctor never afterwards shrank from his duty nor
quailed beneath it, but bore himself like a man, striving, amid the sloth
of age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency which he