d an unfrozen drop of youthfulness, somewhere
within him, to expand.

"Hem! ahem!" quoth the Doctor, hoping with one effort to clear his
throat of the dregs of a ten years' cough. "Matters are not so far gone
with me as I thought. I have known mighty sensible men, when only a
little age-stricken or otherwise out of sorts, to die of mere
faint-heartedness, a great deal sooner than they need."

He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass, as if
to impress the apophthegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and
for his part, he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he
possibly could, if it were only for the sake of little Pansie, who stood
as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the
other. This child of three years old occupied all the unfossilized
portion of good Dr. Dolliver's heart. Every other interest that he
formerly had, and the entire confraternity of persons whom he once
loved, had long ago departed, and the poor Doctor could not follow them,
because the grasp of Pansie's baby-fingers held him back.

So he crammed a great silver watch into his fob, and drew on a patchwork
morning-gown of an ancient fashion. Its original material was said to
have been the embroidered front of his own wedding-waistcoat and the
silken skirt of his wife's bridal attire, which his eldest granddaughter
had taken from the carved chest-of-drawers, after poor Bessie, the
beloved of his youth, had been half a century in the grave. Throughout
many of the intervening years, as the garment got ragged, the spinsters
of the old man's family had quilted their duty and affection into it in
the shape of patches upon patches, rose-color, crimson, blue, violet,
and green, and then (as their hopes faded, and their life kept growing
shadier, and their attire took a sombre hue) sober gray and great
fragments of funereal black, until the Doctor could revive the memory of
most things that had befallen him by looking at his patchwork-gown, as
it hung upon a chair. And now it was ragged again, and all the fingers
that should have mended it were cold. It had an Eastern fragrance, too,
a smell of drugs, strong-scented herbs, and spicy gums, gathered from
the many potent infusions that had from time to time been spilt over it;
so that, snuffing him afar off, you might have taken Dr. Dolliver for a
mummy, and could hardly have been undeceived by his shrunken and torpid
aspect, as he crept nea