Hippocrates would have vexed the souls of the righteous as savoring of
heathendom. The ancient dispenser of drugs had therefore set up an image
of the Brazen Serpent, and followed his business for many years with great
credit, under this Scriptural device; and Dr. Dolliver, being the
apprentice, pupil, and humble friend of the learned Swinnerton's old age,
had inherited the symbolic snake, and much other valuable property by his
bequest.

While the patriarch was putting on his small-clothes, he took care to
stand in the parallelogram of bright sunshine that fell upon the
uncarpeted floor. The summer warmth was very genial to his system, and yet
made him shiver; his wintry veins rejoiced at it, though the reviving
blood tingled through them with a half-painful and only half-pleasurable
titillation. For the first few moments after creeping out of bed, he kept
his back to the sunny window, and seemed mysteriously shy of glancing
thitherward; but, as the June fervor pervaded him more and more
thoroughly, he turned bravely about, and looked forth at a burial-ground
on the corner of which he dwelt. There lay many an old acquaintance, who
had gone to sleep with the flavor of Dr. Dolliver's tinctures and powders
upon his tongue; it was the patient's final bitter taste of this world,
and perhaps doomed to be a recollected nauseousness in the next.
Yesterday, in the chill of his forlorn old age, the Doctor expected soon
to stretch out his weary bones among that quiet community, and might
scarcely have shrunk from the prospect on his own account, except, indeed,
that he dreamily mixed up the infirmities of his present condition with
the repose of the approaching one, being haunted by a notion that the damp
earth, under the grass and dandelions, must needs be pernicious for his
cough and his rheumatism. But, this morning, the cheerful sunbeams, or the
mere taste of his grandson's cordial that he had taken at bedtime, or the
fitful vigor that often sports irreverently with aged people, had caused