artha (who performed the
duties of nurse, housekeeper, and kitchen-maid, in the Doctor's
establishment) to take up her little ladyship and dress her. The old
gentleman woke with more than his customary alacrity, and, after taking
a moment to gather his wits about him, pulled aside the faded moreen
curtains of his ancient bed, and thrust his head into a beam of sunshine
that caused him to wink and withdraw it again. This transitory glimpse
of good Dr. Dolliver showed a flannel nightcap, fringed round with stray
locks of silvery white hair, and surmounting a meagre and duskily yellow
visage, which was crossed and criss-crossed with a record of his long
life in wrinkles, faithfully written, no doubt, but with such cramped
chirography of Father Time that the purport was illegible. It seemed
hardly worth while for the patriarch to get out of bed any more, and
bring his forlorn shadow into the summer day that was made for younger
folks. The Doctor, however, was by no means of that opinion, being
considerably encouraged towards the toil of living twenty-four hours
longer by the comparative ease with which he found himself going through
the usually painful process of bestirring his rusty joints, (stiffened
by the very rest and sleep that should have made them pliable,) and
putting them in a condition to bear his weight upon the 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 scaled 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
Cornelius 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,
taugh