a fit of crying.

On the whole, the apothecary had as comfortable a time as a man of his
years could expect. The air of the house and of the old graveyard seemed
to suit him. What so seldom happens in man's advancing age, his night's
rest did him good, whereas, generally, an old man wakes up ten times as
nervous and dispirited as he went to bed, just as if, during his sleep he
had been working harder than ever he did in the daytime. It had been so
with the Doctor himself till within a few months. To be sure, he had
latterly begun to practise various rules of diet and exercise, which
commended themselves to his approbation. He sawed some of his own fire-
wood, and fancied that, as was reasonable, it fatigued him less day by
day. He took walks with Pansie, and though, of course, her little
footsteps, treading on the elastic air of childhood, far outstripped his
own, still the old man knew that he was not beyond the recuperative period
of life, and that exercise out of doors and proper food can do somewhat
towards retarding the approach of age. He was inclined, also, to impute
much good effect to a daily dose of Santa Cruz rum (a liquor much in vogue
in that day), which he was now in the habit of quaffing at the meridian
hour. All through the Doctor's life he had eschewed strong spirits: "But
after seventy," quoth old Dr. Dolliver, "a man is all the better in head
and stomach for a little stimulus"; and it certainly seemed so in his
case. Likewise, I know not precisely how often, but complying
punctiliously with the recipe, as an apothecary naturally would, he took
his drop of the mysterious cordial.

He was inclined, however, to impute little or no efficacy to this, and to
laugh at himself for having ever thought otherwise. The dose was so very
minute! and he had never been sensible of any remarkable effect on taking
it, after all. A genial warmth, he sometimes fancied, diffused itself