t to be followed by results quite as propitious. Into
such heterodoxy our friend was the more liable to fall because it had
been taught him early in life by his old master, Dr. Swinnerton, who, at
those not infrequent times when he indulged a certain unhappy
predilection for strong waters, had been accustomed to inveigh in terms
of the most cynical contempt and coarsest ridicule against the practice
by which he lived, and, as he affirmed, inflicted death on his
fellow-men. Our old apothecary, though too loyal to the learned
profession with which he was connected fully to believe this bitter
judgment, even when pronounced by his revered master, was still so far
influenced that his conscience was possibly a little easier when making
a preparation from forest herbs and roots than in the concoction of half
a score of nauseous poisons into a single elaborate drug, as the fashion
of that day was.

But there were shrubs in the garden of which he had never ventured to
make a medical use, nor, indeed, did he know their virtue, although from
year to year he had tended and fertilized, weeded and pruned them, with
something like religious care. They were of the rarest character, and
had been planted by the learned and famous Dr. Swinnerton, who on his
death-bed, when he left his dwelling and all his abstruse manuscripts to
his favorite pupil, had particularly directed his attention to this row
of shrubs. They had been collected by himself from remote countries, and
had the poignancy of torrid climes in them; and he told him, that,
properly used, they would be worth all the rest of the legacy a
hundred-fold. As the apothecary, however, found the manuscripts, in
which he conjectured there was a treatise on the subject of these
shrubs, mostly illegible, and quite beyond his comprehension in such
passages as he succeeded in puzzling out, (partly, perhaps, owing to his
very imperfect knowledge of Latin, in which language they were written,)
he had never derived from them any of the promised benefit. And to say
the truth, remembering that Dr. Swinnerton himself never appeared to
triturate or decoct or do anything else with the mysterious herbs, our
old friend was inclined to imagine the weighty commendation of their
virtues to have been the idly solemn utterance of mental aberration at
the hour of death. So, with the integrity that belonged to his
character, he had nurtured them as tenderly as was possible in the
ungenial climate and soi