 | Good company for every day in the year |  |
LITTLE PANSIE.
A FRAGMENT.
By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
DOCTOR DOLLIVER, a worthy personage of extreme
antiquity, was aroused rather prematurely, one
summer morning, by the shouts of the child Pansie, in an
adjoining chamber, summoning Old Martha (who performed
the duties of nurse, housekeeper, and kitchen-maid, in the
Doctor's establishment) to take up her little ladyship and
dress her. The old gentleman woke with more than his customary
alacrity, and, after taking a moment to gather his
wits about him, pulled aside the faded moreen curtains of
his ancient bed, and thurst his head into a beam of sunshine
that caused him to wink and withdraw it again. This transitory
glimpse of good Dr. Dolliver showed a flannel night-cap,
fringed round with stray locks of silvery white hair,
and surmounting a meagre and duskily yellow visage, which
was crossed and criss-crossed with a record of his long life
in wrinkles, faithfully written, no doubt, but with such
cramped chirography of Father Time that the purport was
illegible. It seemed hardly worth while for the patriarch
to get out of bed any more, and bring his forlorn shadow
into the summer day that was made for younger folks. The
Doctor, however, was by no means of that opinion, being considerably
encouraged towards the toil of living twenty-four
hours longer by the comparative ease with which he found
his rusty joints, (stiffened by the very rest and sleep that
should have made them pliable,) and putting them in a
condition to bear his weight upon the floor. Nor was he
absolutely disheartened by the idea of those tonsorial, ablutionary,
and personally decorative labors which are apt to
become so intolerably irksome to an old gentleman, after
performing them daily and daily for fifty, sixty, or seventy
years, and finding them still as immitigably recurrent as at
first. Dr. Dolliver could nowise account for this happy
condition of his spirits and physical energies, until he
remembered taking an experimental sip of a certain cordial
which was long ago prepared by his grandson and carefully
sealed up in a bottle, and had been reposited in a dark closet
among a parcel of effete medicines ever since that gifted
young man's death.
“It may have wrought effect upon me,” thought the Doctor,
shaking his head as he lifted it again from the pillow.
“It may be so; for poor Cornelius oftentimes instilled a
strange efficacy into his perilous drugs. But I will rather
believe it to be the operation of God's mercy, which may
have temporarily invigorated my feeble age for little Pansie's
sake.”
A twinge of his familiar rheumatism, as he put his foot
out of bed, taught him that he must not reckon too confidently
upon even a day's respite from the intrusive family
of aches and infirmities which, with their proverbial fidelity
to attachments once formed, had long been the closest acquaintances
that the poor old gentleman had in the world.
Nevertheless, he fancied the twinge a little less poignant
than those of yesterday; and, moreover, after stinging him
pretty smartly, it passed gradually off with a thrill, which,
in its latter stages, grew to be almost agreeable. Pain is
but pleasure too strongly emphasized. With cautious movements,
and only a groan or two, the good Doctor transferred
gazing from one piece of quaint furniture to another, (such
as stiff-backed Mayflower chairs, an oaken chest-of-drawers
carved cunningly with shapes of animals and wreaths of
foliage, a table with multitudinous legs, a family-record in
faded embroidery, a shelf of black-bound books, a dirty
heap of gallipots and phials in a dim corner,) — gazing at
these things and steadying himself by the bedpost, while
his inert brain, still partially benumbed with sleep, came
slowly into accordance with the realities about him. The
object which most helped to bring Dr. Dolliver completely
to his waking perceptions was one that common observers
might suppose to have been snatched bodily out of his
dreams. The same sunbeam that had dazzled the Doctor
between the bed-curtains gleamed on the weather-beaten
gilding which had once adorned this mysterious symbol, and
showed it to be an enormous serpent, twining round a wooden
post, and reaching quite from the floor of the chamber to
its ceiling.
It was evidently a thing that could boast of considerable
antiquity, the dry-rot having eaten out its eyes and gnawed
away the tip of its tail; and it must have stood long exposed
to the atmosphere, for a kind of gray moss had partially
overspread its tarnished gilt surface, and a swallow, or
other familiar little bird, in some by-gone summer, seemed
to have built its nest in the yawning and exaggerated
mouth. It looked like a kind of Manichean idol, which
might have been elevated on a pedestal for a century or so,
enjoying the worship of its votaries in the open air, until
the impious sect perished from among men, — all save old
Dr. Dolliver, who had set up the monster in his bedchamber
for the convenience of private devotion. But we are unpardonable
in suggesting such a fantasy to the prejudice of
our venerable friend, knowing him to have been as pious
and upright a Christian, and with as little of the serpent in
make a further mystery about a very simple matter, this
bedimmed and rotten reptile was once the medical emblem
or apothecary's sign of the famous Dr. Swinnerton, who
practised physic in the earlier days of New England, when a
head of Æsculapius or Hippocrates would have vexed the
souls of the righteous as savoring of heathendom. The
ancient dispenser of drugs had therefore set up an image of
the Brazen Serpent, and followed his business for many
years, with great credit under this Scriptural device; and
Dr. Dolliver, being the apprentice, pupil, and humble friend
of the learned Swinnerton's old age, had inherited the symbolic
snake, and much other valuable property, by his bequest.
While the patriarch was putting on his small-clothes, he
took care to stand in the parallelogram of bright sunshine
that fell upon the uncarpeted floor. The summer warmth
was very genial to his system, and yet made him shiver;
his wintry veins rejoiced at it, though the reviving blood
tingled through them with a half painful and only half
pleasurable titillation. For the first few moments after
creeping out of bed, he kept his back to the sunny window
and seemed mysteriously shy of glancing thitherward; but
as the June fervor pervaded him more and more thoroughly,
he turned bravely about, and looked forth at a burial-ground
on the corner of which he dwelt. There lay many an old
acquaintance, who had gone to sleep with the flavor of Dr.
Dolliver's tinctures and powders upon his tongue; it was
the patient's final bitter taste of this world, and perhaps
doomed to be a recollected nauseousness in the next. Yesterday,
in the chill of his forlorn old age, the Doctor expected
soon to stretch out his weary bones among that quiet
community, and might scarcely have shrunk from the prospect
on his own account, except, indeed, that he dreamily
mixed up the infirmities of his present condition with the
that the damp earth, under the grass and dandelions, must
needs be pernicious for his cough and his rheumatism. But,
this morning, the cheerful sunbeams, or the mere taste of
his grandson's cordial that he had taken at bedtime, or the
fitful vigor that often sports irreverently with aged people,
had caused 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 faintheartedness,
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
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 nearer.
Wrapt in his odorous and many-colored robe, he took
staff in hand and moved pretty vigorously to the head of
the staircase. As it was somewhat steep, and but dimly
lighted, he began cautiously to descend, putting his left hand
on the banister, and poking down his long stick to assist him
in making sure of the successive steps; and thus he became
a living illustration of the accuracy of Scripture, where it
describes the aged as being “afraid of that which is high,”
— a truth that is often found to have a sadder purport than
its external one. Half-way to the bottom, however, the
Doctor heard the impatient and authoritative tones of little
Pansie, — Queen Pansie, as she might fairly have been
styled, in reference to her position in the household, — calling
amain for grandpapa and breakfast. He was startled
into such perilous activity by the summons, that his heels
slid on the stairs, the slippers were shuffled off his feet, and
he saved himself from a tumble only by quickening his
pace, and coming down at almost a run.
“Mercy on my poor old bones!” mentally exclaimed the
Doctor, fancying himself fractured in fifty places. “Some
leaped out of my mouth! What! all right? Well, well!
but Providence is kinder to me than I deserve, prancing
down this steep staircase like a kid of three months old!”
He bent stiffly to gather up his slippers and fallen staff;
and meanwhile Pansie had heard the tumult of her great-grandfather's
descent, and was pounding against the door
of the breakfast-room in her haste to come at him. The
Doctor opened it, and there she stood, a rather pale and
large-eyed little thing, quaint in her aspect, as might well
be the case with a motherless child, dwelling in an uncheerful
house, with no other playmates than a decrepit old man
and a kitten, and no better atmosphere within-doors than
the odor of decayed apothecary's stuff, nor gayer neighborhood
than that of the adjacent burial-ground, where all her
relatives, from her great-grandmother downward, lay calling
to her, “Pansie, Pansie, it is bedtime!” even in the prime of
the summer morning. For those dead women-folk, especially
her mother and the whole row of maiden aunts and
grand-aunts, could not but be anxious about the child, knowing
that little Pansie would be far safer under a tuft of
dandelions than if left alone, as she soon must be, in this
difficult and deceitful world.
Yet, in spite of the lack of damask roses in her cheeks,
she seemed a healthy child, and certainly showed great capacity
of energetic movement in the impulsive capers with
which she welcomed her venerable progenitor. She shouted
out her satisfaction, moreover, (as her custom was, having
never had any over-sensitive auditors about her to tame
down her voice,) till even the Doctor's dull ears were full
of the clamor.
“Pansie, darling,” said Dr. Dolliver cheerily, patting her
brown hair with his tremulous fingers, “thou hast put some
of thine own friskiness into poor old grandfather, this fine
morning! Dost know, child, that he came near breaking his
thou have done then, little Pansie?”
“Kiss poor grandpapa and make him well!” answered
the child, remembering the Doctor's own mode of cure in
similar mishaps to herself. “It shall do poor grandpapa
good!” she added, putting up her mouth to apply the
remedy.
“Ah, little one, thou hast greater faith in thy medicines
than ever I had in my drugs,” replied the patriarch with a
giggle, surprised and delighted at his own readiness of
response. “But the kiss is good for my feeble old heart,
Pansie, though it might do little to mend a broken neck; so
give grandpapa another dose, and let us to breakfast.”
In this merry humor they sat down to the table, great-grandpapa
and Pansie side by side, and the kitten, as soon
appeared, making a third in the party. First, she showed
her mottled head out of Pansie's lap, delicately sipping milk
from the child's basin without rebuke; then she took post
on the old gentleman's shoulder, purring like a spinning-wheel,
trying her claws in the wadding of his dressing-gown,
and still more impressively reminding him of her
presence by putting out a paw to intercept a warmed-over
morsel of yesterday's chicken on its way to the Doctor's
mouth. After skilfully achieving this feat, she scrambled
down upon the breakfast-table and began to wash her face
and hands. Evidently, these companions were all three on
intimate terms, as was natural enough, since a great many
childish impulses were softly creeping back on the simpleminded
old man; insomuch that, if no worldly necessities
nor painful infirmity had disturbed him, his remnant of life
might have been as cheaply and cheerily enjoyed as the
early playtime of the kitten and the child. Old Dr. Dolliver
and his great-granddaughter (a ponderous title, which
seemed quite to overwhelm the tiny figure of Pansie) had
met one another at the two extremities of the life-circle:
of silver and hers of golden brown with a homogeneous
shimmer of twinkling light.
Little Pansie was the one earthly creature that inherited
a drop of the Dolliver blood. The Doctor's only child, poor
Bessie's offspring, had died the better part of a hundred
years before, and his grandchildren, a numerous and dimly
remembered brood, had vanished along his weary track in
their youth, maturity, or incipient age, till, hardly knowing
how it had all happened, he found himself tottering onward
with an infant's small fingers in his nerveless grasp. So
mistily did his dead progeny come and go in the patriarch's
decayed recollection, that this solitary child represented for
him the successive babyhoods of the many that had gone
before. The emotions of his early paternity came back to
him. She seemed the baby of a past age oftener than she
seemed Pansie. A whole family of grand-aunts, (one of
whom had perished in her cradle, never so mature as Pansie
now, another in her virgin bloom, another in autumnal maidenhood,
yellow and shrivelled, with vinegar in her blood,
and still another, a forlorn widow, whose grief outlasted
even its vitality, and grew to be merely a torpid habit, and
was saddest then,) — all their hitherto forgotten features
peeped through the face of the great-grandchild, and their
long inaudible voices sobbed, shouted, or laughed, in her
familiar tones. But it often happened to Dr. Dolliver, while
frolicking amid this throng of ghosts, where the one reality
looked no more vivid than its shadowy sisters, — it often
happened that his eyes filled with tears at a sudden perception
of what a sad and poverty-stricken old man he was,
already remote from his own generation, and bound to
stray farther onward as the sole playmate and protector of a
child!
As Dr. Dolliver, in spite of his advanced epoch of life, is
likely to remain a considerable time longer upon our hands,
in order that the story may get onward with the greater
freedom when he rises from the breakfast-table. Deeming
it a matter of courtesy, we have allowed him the honorary
title of Doctor, as did all his townspeople and contemporaries,
except, perhaps, one or two formal old physicians,
stingy of civil phrases and over-jealous of their own professional
dignity. Nevertheless, these crusty graduates were
technically right in excluding Dr. Dolliver from their fraternity.
He had never received the degree of any medical
school, nor (save it might be for the cure of a toothache, or
a child's rash, or a whitlow on a seamstress's finger, or some
such trifling malady) had he ever been even a practitioner
of the awful science with which his popular designation connected
him. Our old friend, in short, even at his highest
social elevation, claimed to be nothing more than an apothecary,
and, in these later and far less prosperous days, scarcely
so much. Since the death of his last surviving grandson,
(Pansie's father, whom he had instructed in all the mysteries
of his science, and who, being distinguished by an experimental
and inventive tendency, was generally believed to
have poisoned himself with an infallible panacea of his own
distillation,) — since that final bereavement, Dr. Dolliver's
once pretty flourishing business had lamentably declined.
After a few months of unavailing struggle, he found it expedient
to take down the Brazen Serpent from the position
to which Dr. Swinnerton had originally elevated it, in front
of his shop in the main street, and to retire to his private
dwelling, situated in a by-lane and on the edge of a burial-ground.
This house, as well as the Brazen Serpent, some old medical
books, and a drawer full of manuscripts, had come to
him by the legacy of Dr. Swinnerton. The dreariness of the
locality had been of small importance to our friend in his
young manhood, when he first led his fair wife over the
with the human dust that rose into little hillocks, and still
kept accumulating beneath their window. But, too soon
afterwards, when poor Bessie herself had gone early to rest
there, it is probable that an influence from her grave may
have prematurely calmed and depressed her widowed husband,
taking away much of the energy from what should
have been the most active portion of his life. Thus he
never grew rich. His thrifty townsmen used to tell him,
that, in any other man's hands, Dr. Swinnerton's Brazen
Serpent (meaning, I presume, the inherited credit and good-will
of that old worthy's trade) would need but ten years'
time to transmute its brass into gold. In Dr. Dolliver's
keeping, as we have seen, the inauspicious symbol lost the
greater part of what superficial gilding it originally had.
Matters had not mended with him in more advanced life,
after he had deposited a further and further portion of his
heart and its affections in each successive one of a long row
of kindred graves; and as he stood over the last of them,
holding Pansie by the hand and looking down upon the
coffin of his grandson, it is no wonder that the old man
wept, partly for those gone before, but not so bitterly as for
the little one that stayed behind. Why had not God taken
her with the rest? And then, so hopeless as he was, so
destitute of possibilities of good, his weary frame, his decrepit
bones, his dried-up heart, might have crumbled into
dust at once, and have been scattered by the next wind over
all the heaps of earth that were akin to him.
This intensity of desolation, however, was of too positive
a character to be long sustained by a person of Dr. Dolliver's
original gentleness and simplicity, and now so completely
tamed by age and misfortune. Even before he
turned away from the grave, he grew conscious of a slightly
cheering and invigorating effect from the tight grasp of the
child's warm little hand. Feeble as he was, she seemed to
never afterwards shrank from his duty nor quailed beneath
it, but bore himself like a man, striving, amid the sloth of
age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency
which he had failed to accumulate even in his most vigorous
days.
To the extent of securing a present subsistence for Pansie
and himself, he was successful. After his son's death, when
the Brazen Serpent fell into popular disrepute, a small share
of tenacious patronage followed the old man into his retirement.
In his prime, he had been allowed to possess more
skill than usually fell to the share of a Colonial apothecary,
having been regularly apprenticed to Dr. Swinnerton, who,
throughout his long practice, was accustomed personally to
concoct the medicines which he prescribed and dispensed.
It was believed, indeed, that the ancient physician had
learned the art at the world-famous drug-manufactory of
Apothecary's Hall, in London, and, as some people half-malignly
whispered, had perfected himself under masters
more subtle than were to be found even there. Unquestionably,
in many critical cases he was known to have employed
remedies of mysterious composition and dangerous
potency, which in less skilful hands would have been more
likely to kill than cure. He would willingly, it is said, have
taught his apprentice the secrets of these prescriptions, but
the latter, being of a timid character and delicate conscience,
had shrunk from acquaintance with them. It was probably
as the result of the same scrupulosity that Dr. Dolliver had
always declined to enter the medical profession, in which
his old instructor had set him such heroic examples of
adventurous dealing with matters of life and death. Nevertheless,
the aromatic fragrance, so to speak, of the learned
Swinnerton's reputation had clung to our friend through
life; and there were elaborate preparations in the pharmacopœia
of that day, requiring such minute skill and conscientious
glad to confide them to one in whom these qualities were so
evident.
Moreover, the grandmothers of the community were kind
to him, and mindful of his perfumes, his rose-water, his
cosmetics, tooth-powders, pomanders, and pomades, the scented
memory of which lingered about their toilet-tables, or
came faintly back from the days when they were beautiful.
Among this class of customers there was still a demand for
certain comfortable little nostrums, (delicately sweet and
pungent to the taste, cheering to the spirits, and fragrant in
the breath.) the proper distillation of which was the airiest
secret that the mystic Swinnerton had left behind him.
And, besides, these old ladies had always liked the manners
of Dr. Dolliver, and used to speak of his gentle courtesy behind
the counter as having positively been something to admire;
though, of later years, an unrefined, an almost rustic
simplicity, such as belonged to his humble ancestors, appeared
to have taken possession of him, as it often does of prettily
mannered men in their late decay.
But it resulted from all these favorable circumstances that
the Doctor's marble mortar, though worn with long service
and considerably damaged by a crack that pervaded it, continued
to keep up an occasional intimacy with the pestle;
and he still weighed drachms and scruples in his delicate
scales, though it seemed impossible, dealing with such minute
quantities, that his tremulous fingers should not put in
too little or too much, leaving out life with the deficiency or
spilling in death with the surplus. To say the truth, his
stanchest friends were beginning to think that Dr. Dolliver's
fits of absence (when his mind appeared absolutely to depart
from him, while his frail old body worked on mechanically)
rendered him not quite trustworthy without a close supervision
of his proceedings. It was impossible, however, to
convince the aged apothecary of the necessity for such vigilance;
wrath, or, as oftener happened, to tears, it was the attempt
(which he was marvellously quick to detect) thus to interfere
with his long-familiar business.
The public, meanwhile, ceasing to regard Dr. Dolliver in
his professional aspect, had begun to take an interest in him
as perhaps their oldest fellow-citizen. It was he that remembered
the Great Fire and the Great Snow, and that had
been a grown-up stripling at the terrible epoch of Witch-Times,
and a child just breeched at the breaking-out of King
Philip's Indian War. He, too, in his school-boy days, had
received a benediction from the patriarchal Governor Bradstreet,
and thus could boast (somewhat as Bishops do of
their unbroken succession from the Apostles) of a transmitted
blessing from the whole company of sainted Pilgrims,
among whom the venerable magistrate had been an honored
companion. Viewing their townsman in this aspect, the
people revoked the courteous Doctorate with which they
had heretofore decorated him, and now knew him most
familiarly as Grandsir Dolliver. His white head, his Puritan
band, his threadbare garb, (the fashion of which he had
ceased to change, half a century ago,) his gold-headed staff,
that had been Dr. Swinnerton's, his shrunken, frosty figure,
and its feeble movement, — all these characteristics had a
wholeness and permanence in the public recognition, like
the meeting-house steeple or the town-pump. All the
younger portion of the inhabitants unconsciously ascribed
a sort of aged immortality to Grandsir Dolliver's infirm and
reverend presence. They fancied that he had been born
old, (at least, I remember entertaining some such notions
about age-stricken people, when I myself was young.) and
that he could the better tolerate his aches and incommodities,
his dull ears and dim eyes, his remoteness from human intercourse
within the crust of indurated years, the cold temperature
that kept him always shivering and sad, the heavy
these intolerable things might bring a kind of enjoyment to
Grandsir Dolliver, as the life-long conditions of his peculiar
existence.
But, alas! it was a terrible mistake. This weight of
years had a perennial novelty for the poor sufferer. He
never grew accustomed to it, but, long as he had now borne
the fretful torpor of his waning life, and patient as he
seemed, he still retained an inward consciousness that these
stiffened shoulders, these quailing knees, this cloudiness of
sight and brain, this confused forgetfulness of men and
affairs, were troublesome accidents that did not really belong
to him. He possibly cherished a half-recognized idea that
they might pass away. Youth, however eclipsed for a
season, is undoubtedly the proper, permanent, and genuine
condition of man; and if we look closely into this dreary
delusion of growing old, we shall find that it never absolutely
succeeds in laying hold of our innermost convictions.
A sombre garment, woven of life's unrealities, has muffled
us from our true self, but within it smiles the young man
whom we knew; the ashes of many perishable things have
fallen upon our youthful fire, but beneath them lurk the
seeds of inextinguishable flame. So powerful is this instinctive
faith that men of simple modes of character are
prone to antedate its consummation. And thus it happened
with poor Grandsir Dolliver, who often awoke from an old
man's fitful sleep with a sense that his senile predicament
was but a dream of the past night; and hobbling hastily
across the cold floor to the looking-glass, he would be grievously
disappointed at beholding the white hair, the wrinkles
and furrows, the ashen visage and bent form, the melancholy
mask of Age, in which, as he now remembered, some strange
and sad enchantment had involved him for years gone by!
To other eyes than his own, however, the shrivelled old
gentleman looked as if there were little hope of his throwing
day, his stooping figure should be straightened out, his hoary
locks be smoothed over his brows, and his much enduring
bones be laid safely away, with a green coverlet spread over
them, beside his Bessie, who doubtless would recognize her
youthful companion in spite of his ugly garniture of decay.
He longed to be gazed at by the loving eyes now closed;
he shrank from the hard stare of them that loved him not.
Walking the streets seldom and reluctantly, he felt a dreary
impulse to elude the people's observation, as if with a sense
that he had gone irrevocably out of fashion, and broken his
connecting links with the network of human life; or else it
was that nightmare-feeling which we sometimes have in
dreams, when we seem to find ourselves wandering through
a crowded avenue, with the noonday sun upon us, in some
wild extravagance of dress or nudity. He was conscious of
estrangement from his towns-people, but did not always
know how nor wherefore, nor why he should be thus groping
through the twilight mist in solitude. If they spoke
loudly to him, with cheery voices, the greeting translated
itself faintly and mournfully to his ears; if they shook him
by the hand, it was as if a thick, insensible glove absorbed
the kindly pressure and the warmth. When little Pansie
was the companion of his walk, her childish gayety and
freedom did not avail to bring him into closer relationship
with men, but seemed to follow him into that region of indefinable
remoteness, that dismal Fairy-Land of aged fancy,
into which old Grandsir Dolliver had so strangely crept
away.
Yet there were moments, as many persons had noticed,
when the great-grandpapa would suddenly take stronger
hues of life. It was as if his faded figure had been colored
over anew, or at least, as he and Pansie moved along
the street, as if a sunbeam had fallen across him, instead
of the gray gloom of an instant before. His chilled sensibilities
warm contiguity of his little companion through the medium
of her hand, as it stirred within his own, or some inflection
of her voice that set his memory ringing and chiming with
forgotten sounds. While that music lasted, the old man
was alive and happy. And there were seasons, it might be,
happier than even these, when Pansie had been kissed and put
to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sat by his fireside gazing in
among the massive coals, and absorbing their glow into those
cavernous abysses with which all men communicate. Hence
come angels or fiends into our twilight musings, according
as we may have peopled them in by-gone years. Over
our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the fire-gleam, stole
an expression of repose and perfect trust that made him as
beautiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child
Pansie on her pillow; and sometimes the spirits that were
watching him beheld a calm surprise draw slowly over his
features and brighten into joy, yet not so vividly as to break
his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had been kindly
left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a glimpse
within. All the night afterwards, he would be semi-conscious
of an intangible bliss diffused through the fitful lapses
of an old man's slumber, and would awake, at early dawn,
with a faint thrilling of the heartstrings, as if there had
been music just now wandering over them.
| Good company for every day in the year | |