opinion of competent judges, was endowed with remarkable abilities, and
according to the rumor of the people had wonderful gifts, which were
proved by the cures he had wrought with remedies of his own invention. His
talents lay in the direction of scientific analysis and inventive
combination of chemical powers. While under the pupilage of his
grandfather, his progress had rapidly gone quite beyond his instructor's
hope,--leaving him even to tremble at the audacity with which he
overturned and invented theories, and to wonder at the depth at which he
wrought beneath the superficialness and mock-mystery of the medical
science of those days, like a miner sinking his shaft and running a
hideous peril of the earth caving in above him. Especially did he devote
himself to these plants; and under his care they had thriven beyond all
former precedent, bursting into luxuriance of bloom, and most of them
bearing beautiful flowers, which, however, in two or three instances, had
the sort of natural repulsiveness that the serpent has in its beauty,
compelled against its will, as it were, to warn the beholder of an
unrevealed danger. The young man had long ago, it must be added, demanded
of his grandfather the documents included in the legacy of Professor
Swinnerton, and had spent days and nights upon them, growing pale over
their mystic lore, which seemed the fruit not merely of the Professor's
own labors, but of those of more ancient sages than he; and often a whole
volume seemed to be compressed within the limits of a few lines of crabbed
manuscript, judging from the time which it cost even the quick-minded
student to decipher them.

Meantime these abstruse investigations had not wrought such disastrous
effects as might have been feared, in causing Edward Dolliver to neglect
the humble trade, the conduct of which his grandfather had now
relinquished almost entirely into his hands. On the contrary, with the
mere side results of his study, or what may be called the chips and