something like religious care. They were of the rarest character, and had
been planted by the learned and famous Dr. Swinnerton, who, on his death-
bed, when he left his dwelling and all his abstruse manuscripts to his
favorite pupil, had particularly directed his attention to this row of
shrubs. They had been collected by himself from remote countries, and had
the poignancy of torrid climes in them; and he told him, that, properly
used, they would be worth all the rest of the legacy a hundred-fold. As
the apothecary, however, found the manuscripts, in which he conjectured
there was a treatise on the subject of these shrubs, mostly illegible, and
quite beyond his comprehension in such passages as he succeeded in
puzzling out (partly, perhaps, owing to his very imperfect knowledge of
Latin, in which language they were written), he had never derived from
them any of the promised benefit. And, to say the truth, remembering that
Dr. Swinnerton himself never appeared to triturate or decoct or do
anything else with the mysterious herbs, our old friend was inclined to
imagine the weighty commendation of their virtues to have been the idly
solemn utterance of mental aberration at the hour of death. So, with the
integrity that belonged to his character, he had nurtured them as tenderly
as was possible in the ungenial climate and soil of New England, putting
some of them into pots for the winter; but they had rather dwindled than
flourished, and he had reaped no harvests from them, nor observed them
with any degree of scientific interest.

His grandson, however, while yet a school-boy, had listened to the old
man's legend of the miraculous virtues of these plants; and it took so
firm a hold of his mind, that the row of outlandish vegetables seemed
rooted in it, and certainly flourished there with richer luxuriance than
in the soil where they actually grew. The story, acting thus early upon
his imagination, may be said to have influenced his brief career in life,
and, perchance, brought about its early close. The young man, in the