floor. Nor was he absolutely disheartened by the idea of those tonsorial,
ablutionary, and personally decorative labors which are apt to become so
intolerably irksome to an old gentleman, after performing them daily and
daily for fifty, sixty, or seventy years, and finding them still as
immitigably recurrent as at first. Dr. Dolliver could nowise account for
this happy condition of his spirits and physical energies, until he
remembered taking an experimental sip of a certain cordial which was long
ago prepared by his grandson, and carefully sealed up in a bottle, and had
been reposited in a dark closet, among a parcel of effete medicines, ever
since that gifted young man's death.

"It may have wrought effect upon me," thought the doctor, shaking his head
as he lifted it again from the pillow. "It may be so; for poor Edward
oftentimes instilled a strange efficacy into his perilous drugs. But I
will rather believe it to be the operation of God's mercy, which may have
temporarily invigorated my feeble age for little Pansie's sake."

A twinge of his familiar rheumatism, as he put his foot out of bed, taught
him that he must not reckon too confidently upon even a day's respite from
the intrusive family of aches and infirmities, which, with their
proverbial fidelity to attachments once formed, had long been the closest
acquaintances that the poor old gentleman had in the world. Nevertheless,
he fancied the twinge a little less poignant than those of yesterday; and,
moreover, after stinging him pretty smartly, it passed gradually off with
a thrill, which, in its latter stages, grew to be almost agreeable. Pain
is but pleasure too strongly emphasized. With cautious movements, and only
a groan or two, the good Doctor transferred himself from the bed to the
floor, where he stood awhile, gazing from one piece of quaint furniture to
another (such as stiff-backed Mayflower chairs, an oaken chest-of-drawers
carved cunningly with shapes of animals and wreaths of foliage, a table