l of New England, putting some of them into pots
for the winter; but they had rather dwindled than flourished, and he had
reaped no harvests from them, nor observed them with any degree of
scientific interest.

His grandson, however, while yet a school-boy, had listened to the old
man's legend of the miraculous virtues of these plants; and it took so
firm a hold of his mind, that the row of outlandish vegetables seemed
rooted in it, and certainly flourished there with richer luxuriance than
in the soil where they actually grew. The story, acting thus early upon
his imagination, may be said to have influenced his brief career in
life, and, perchance, brought about its early close. The young man, in
the opinion of competent judges, was endowed with remarkable abilities,
and according to the rumor of the people had wonderful gifts, which
were proved by the cures he had wrought with remedies of his own
invention. His talents lay in the direction of scientific analysis and
inventive combination of chemical powers. While under the pupilage of
his grandfather, his progress had rapidly gone quite beyond his
instructor's hope,--leaving him even to tremble at the audacity with
which he overturned and invented theories, and to wonder at the depth at
which he wrought beneath the superficialness and mock-mystery of the
medical science of those days, like a miner sinking his shaft and
running a hideous peril of the earth caving in above him. Especially did
he devote himself to these plants; and under his care they had thriven
beyond all former precedent, bursting into luxuriance of bloom, and most
of them bearing beautiful flowers, which, however, in two or three
instances, had the sort of natural repulsiveness that the serpent has in
its beauty, compelled against its will, as it were, to warn the beholder
of an unrevealed danger. The young man had long ago, it must be added,
demanded of his grandfather the documents included in the legacy of
Professor Swinnerton, and had spent days and nights upon them, growing
pale over their mystic lore, which seemed the fruit not merely of the
Professor's own labors, but of those of more ancient sages than he; and
often a whole volume seemed to be compressed within the limits of a few
lines of crabbed manuscript, judging from the time which it cost even
the quick-minded student to decipher them.

Meantime these abstruse investigations had not wrought such disastrous
effects as might have been fe