orphans; they disappeared from the scene, and the tides of life in a
commercial community soon flowed over the place which the dead man had
occupied in the thoughts of his bustling townsfolk.

One person at L----, and only one, appeared to share and inherit the
rancour with which the poor physician had denounced me on his death-bed.
It was a gentleman named Vigors, distantly related to the deceased, and who
had been, in point of station, the most eminent of Dr. Lloyd's partisans
in the controversy with myself, a man of no great scholastic
acquirements, but of respectable abilities. He had that kind of power
which the world concedes to respectable abilities when accompanied
with a temper more than usually stern, and a moral character more than
usually austere. His ruling passion was to sit in judgment upon others;
and being a magistrate, he was the most active and the most rigid of all
the magistrates L---- had ever known.

Mr. Vigors at first spoke of me with great bitterness, as having
ruined, and in fact killed, his friend, by the uncharitable and unfair
acerbity which he declared I had brought into what ought to have been an
unprejudiced examination of simple matter of fact. But finding no
sympathy in these charges, he had the discretion to cease from making them,
contenting himself with a solemn shake of his head if he heard my
name mentioned in terms of praise, and an oracular sentence or two, such
as "Time will show," "All's well that ends well," etc. Mr. Vigors,
however, mixed very little in the more convivial intercourse of the
townspeople. He called himself domestic; but, in truth, he was
ungenial,--a stiff man, starched with self-esteem. He thought that his
dignity of station was not sufficiently acknowledged by the merchants of
Low Town, and his superiority of intellect not sufficiently recognized by
the exclusives of the Hill. His visits were, therefore, chiefly confined