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The Dolliver Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
page 19 of 53 (35%)

The public, meanwhile, ceasing to regard Dr. Dolliver in his professional
aspect, had begun to take an interest in him as perhaps their oldest
fellow-citizen. It was he that remembered the Great Fire and the Great
Snow, and that had been a grown-up stripling at the terrible epoch of
Witch-Times, and a child just breeched at the breaking out of King
Philip's Indian War. He, too, in his school-boy days, had received a
benediction from the patriarchal Governor Bradstreet, and thus could boast
(somewhat as Bishops do of their unbroken succession from the Apostles) of
a transmitted blessing from the whole company of sainted Pilgrims, among
whom the venerable magistrate had been an honored companion. Viewing their
townsman in this aspect, the people revoked the courteous Doctorate with
which they had heretofore decorated him, and now knew him most familiarly
as Grandsir Dolliver. His white head, his Puritan band, his threadbare
garb (the fashion of which he had ceased to change, half a century ago),
his gold-headed staff, that had been Dr. Swinnerton's, his shrunken,
frosty figure, and its feeble movement,--all these characteristics had a
wholeness and permanence in the public recognition, like the meeting-house
steeple or the town-pump. All the younger portion of the inhabitants
unconsciously ascribed a sort of aged immortality to Grandsir Dolliver's
infirm and reverend presence. They fancied that he had been born old (at
least, I remember entertaining some such notions about age-stricken
people, when I myself was young), and that he could the better tolerate
his aches and incommodities, his dull ears and dim eyes, his remoteness
from human intercourse within the crust of indurated years, the cold
temperature that kept him always shivering and sad, the heavy burden that
invisibly bent down his shoulders,--that all these intolerable things
might bring a kind of enjoyment to Grandsir Dolliver, as the lifelong
conditions of his peculiar existence.

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