e chose to withdraw
his name from the roll of mankind, and, as regarded his former ties
and interests, to vanish out of life as completely as if he indeed lay
at the bottom of the ocean, whither rumor had long ago consigned him.
This purpose once effected, new interests would immediately spring up,
and likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of
force enough to engage the full strength of his faculties.

In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan
town, as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the
learning and intelligence of which he possessed more than a common
measure. As his studies, at a previous period of his life, had made
him extensively acquainted with the medical science of the day, it was
as a physician that he presented himself, and as such was cordially
received. Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical profession, were
of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear,
partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the
Atlantic. In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the
higher and more subtile faculties of such men were materialized, and
that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of
that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to
comprise all of life within itself. At all events, the health of the
good town of Boston, so far as medicine had aught to do with it, had
hitherto lain in the guardianship of an aged deacon and apothecary,
whose piety and godly deportment were stronger testimonials in his
favor than any that he could have produced in the shape of a diploma.
The only surgeon was one who combined the occasional exercise of that
noble art with the daily and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a
professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He
soon manifested his familiarity with the ponderous and imposing
machinery of antique physic; in which every remedy contained a
multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately
compounded as if the proposed result had been the Elixir of Life. In
his Indian captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the
properties of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his
patients, that these simple medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored
savage, had quite as large a share of his own confidence as the
European pharmacopoeia, which so many learned doctors had s