haracter, or out of
some keen thrill of affection in the parents, an unsought-for and
unconscious felicity, a kind of revelation, teaching them the true name
by which the child's guardian angel would know it,--a name with
playfulness and love in it, that we often observe to supersede, in the
practice of those who love the child best, the name that they carefully
selected, and caused the clergyman to plaster indelibly on the poor
little forehead at the font,--the love-name, whereby, if the child
lives, the parents know it in their hearts, or by which, if it dies, God
seems to have called it away, leaving the sound lingering faintly and
sweetly through the house. In Pansie's case, it may have been a certain
pensiveness which was sometimes seen under her childish frolic, and so
translated itself into French, (_pensee_,) her mother having been of
Acadian kin; or, quite as probably, it alluded merely to the color of
her eyes, which, in some lights, were very like the dark petals of a
tuft of pansies in the Doctor's garden. It might well be, indeed, on
account of the suggested pensiveness; for the child's gayety had example
to sustain it, no sympathy of other children or grown people,--and her
melancholy, had it been so dark a feeling, was but the shadow of the
house and of the old man. If brighter sunshine came, she would brighten
with it. This morning, surely, as the three companions, Pansie, puss,
and Grandsir Dolliver, emerged from the shadow of the house into the
small adjoining enclosure, they seemed all frolicsome alike.

The Doctor, however, was intent over something that had reference to
his life-long business of drugs. This little spot was the place where he
was wont to cultivate a variety of herbs supposed to be endowed with
medicinal virtue. Some of them had been long known in the
pharmacopoeia of the Old World; and others, in the early days of the
country, had been adopted by the first settlers from the Indian
medicine-men, though with fear and even contrition, because these wild
doctors were supposed to draw their pharmaceutic knowledge from no
gracious source, the Black Man himself being the principal professor in
their medical school. From his own experience, however, Dr. Dolliver had
long since doubted, though he was not bold enough quite to come to the
conclusion, that Indian shrubs, and the remedies prepared from them,
were much less perilous than those so freely used in European practice,
and singularly ap