The Doctor, however, was intent over something that had reference to his
lifelong business of drugs. This little spot was the place where he was
wont to cultivate a variety of herbs supposed to be endowed with medicinal
virtue. Some of them had been long known in the pharmacopoia of the Old
World; and others, in the early days of the country, had been adopted by
the first settlers from the Indian medicine-men, though with fear and even
contrition, because these wild doctors were supposed to draw their
pharmaceutic knowledge from no gracious source, the Black Man himself
being the principal professor in their medical school. From his own
experience, however, Dr. Dolliver had long since doubted, though he was
not bold enough quite to come to the conclusion, that Indian shrubs, and
the remedies prepared from them, were much less perilous than those so
freely used in European practice, and singularly apt to be followed by
results quite as propitious. Into such heterodoxy our friend was the more
liable to fall, because it had been taught him early in life by his old
master, Dr. Swinnerton, who, at those not infrequent times when he
indulged a certain unhappy predilection for strong waters, had been
accustomed to inveigh in terms of the most cynical contempt and coarsest
ridicule against the practice by which he lived, and, as he affirmed,
inflicted death on his fellow-men. Our old apothecary, though too loyal to
the learned profession with which he was connected fully to believe this
bitter judgment, even when pronounced by his revered master, was still so
far influenced that his conscience was possibly a little easier when
making a preparation from forest herbs and roots than in the concoction of
half a score of nauseous poisons into a single elaborate drug, as the
fashion of that day was.

But there were shrubs in the garden of which he had never ventured to make
a medical use, nor, indeed, did he know their virtue, although from year
to year he had tended and fertilized, weeded and pruned them, with